#65: Goodbye, Milo

The Most Painful Part of Having A Pet

Anyone who has shared their lives with pets will tell you that the worst part is the end.

We said goodbye to Milo on Sunday. Our big lug of a black lab, 11 years old and steadily graying around his muzzle and eyes, seemed perfectly normal yesterday morning.

After his breakfast, Milo slyly shuffled from family member to family member, seeking a momentary lack of judgment that would result in yet another treat.

Milo, the day before he died. He was perfectly fine, then he was gone.

We went out to lunch at 11:30 a.m. and returned to find Milo almost immobile on the couch. He could barely lift his head, and for the first time in our 10 years since adopting him, showed no interest in food.

Two hours later, the vet said he had a tumor, possibly in his spleen, that was bleeding into his stomach. He was anemic and could go into cardiac arrest at any moment. Surgery was a possibility, but not for at least a day and the surgery would be invasive and guaranteed nothing – at best up to 10 months, including many weeks of first healing and then chemo.

So we made the crushing decision that I have had to face too many times as an adult: We let him go, surrounded and loved by our family.

It has been that way, eventually, with all our adopted animals … Scooter, Nellie, Granger, Luke, Libby, Sydney, and now Milo.

I’ve pondered grief and animals many times in my life. It’s a strange kind of torture to choose to adopt animal after animal, knowing from that first joyful homecoming that you will eventually face one of the worst days in your shared lives.

And yet, the weeks and months before that moment are such a wonderful experience that you do it, anyway.

More than two decades ago, my wife and I learned on our wedding night that we had been approved to adopt our first dog together, an older, three-legged golden retriever we soon renamed Granger. We both remember being as excited about the news we were approved for Granger as we were about being married.

Granger was a joy, and led to adding Libby. Libby led to Luke, then Sydney and Milo. Our cats, Scooter and Nellie, started the whole thing back in 1993. They grudgingly accepted their canine roommates.

We have experienced more than three decades of pets as beloved members of our family, most of them adopted as “senior” dogs because they had a harder time finding homes.

Granger the tripod (right) was our first adoption. He was so sweet, our son took him to school for show and tell in elementary school. Libby joined him soon after, beginning our pattern of adopting two dogs (and, eventually, three).

Even so, making that last, terrible decision at the end takes a toll. In fact, there was a time when my wife and I swore off more dogs.

At the end of 2012 we lost both of our adopted canine companions, Luke (cancer) and Libby (kidney failure). The experience affected us so much that we decided we would go a year without a dog. Travel would be easier. Maybe we would save a little money.

We lasted a month.

I swear to you, there were moments in those 30 days we were dogless that I would be making a sandwich in our kitchen and would hear phantom “click, click, click” sounds of dog toenails on our floor, approaching for a bite of cheese.

I knew there were no dogs, and yet I turned around, every time, hopeful.

Within a matter of weeks, we found Sydney, our first black lab.

We so missed sharing our lives with a dog that when we went to see Sydney at her foster home on Lookout Mountain in Colorado, we took her on a walk through swaying pine trees on the property, sat on the floor with her to play for a bit and immediately took her home in our new Jeep Wrangler, shocking our kids who until then had been told to keep the Jeep clean by its overzealous owner (me).

Not long after that, the same adoption group who matched us with Sydney said they had another black lab and wondered if we were interested.

That was Milo. When he came over and met Sydney for a test visit in our backyard, the two hit it off. They ran around together, playfully barking, twisting and turning, clearly meant for each other.

Milo stayed.

A few years ago, Sydney and Milo traveled with my son and I when we drove from Colorado to Georgia. They handled the two-day trip like champs, dutifully jumping out of our SUV for potty breaks even when we were surrounded by loud trucks and cars whizzing by on a nearby interstate.

They loved their Georgia yard - especially the fact that there is no deck and stairs from our backdoor to the flat backyard. They got their own dog door after an overexuberant Sydney blasted through a back porch screen the first time we let her out – a moment we still talk about today, laughing.

Humans don’t deserve dogs, really. Actually, we don’t deserve most animals. Whether they are dogs, or horses, or anything in between, their love and playfulness and sense of humor make our lives better every day.

At Save the Horses, our founder, Cheryl Flanagan, likes to say that sometimes we save the horses, and sometimes the horses save us. Isn’t that the truth - for all animals.

There is a wall at in our barn at STH where we post the names of our animal rescues that have been adopted, and the much smaller (thankfully) number of rescues who have passed away while with us.

The beginning of our memory wall at Save the Horses.

I look at that wall every time I volunteer, and think about some of the animals listed there and the fact that all they wanted was a safe place to live with people who loved them (and maybe some occasional treats).

It’s certainly what Milo wanted, and boy, did he get it. He had just finished his favorite kind of week – one where all sorts of contractors and estimators and new people had come over to talk with us about a potential project.

Gentle Milo greeted each one, sometimes howling happily (he was part hound) as he loped up to them, sniffing and wanting to be pet. He would pick out his favorites and follow them around like, well, a puppy dog, sometimes sitting next to them and nudging their hands with his head.

This weekend our daughter had just talked about looking into whether Milo could be a therapy dog with senior citizens.

Sydney (left) took to little Nova, our first puppy, almost immediately. Milo needed more time. Three dogs were a challenge, but we couldn’t have asked for a better trio.

It would have been glorious. Then we ran out of time.

Goodbye, Milo. You were a very good boy, and we will never forget you.

I would say that we will stick with having just one dog now, our energetic pit bull mix, Nova. She is only three, and hopefully many, many days away from that awful decision.

I don’t want to go through this again.

But I almost certainly will, for Nova and others.

There are more dogs who need homes, and Nova likes company, too.