Goodbye, Daisy

May 27, 2020

 “You need to understand, if something happens, if the worst happens, we cannot let you inside,” Dr. Waters says through her mask, looking up into my face. Her eyes are beautifully made up, achieving a doe-eye effect. I wonder, momentarily, if she is in love with someone in her office. Her gloved hand reaches towards my dog. “With COVID, no one but staff is allowed inside the clinic.”

I nod as tears stream down my face. “We’ve said our goodbyes. Just in case,” I say, turning to Daisy, my thirteen-year-old golden retriever, who lies panting in the cargo section of my hatchback. I bend and rub noses with her. “I love you. Please get better.” I step out of the way so Dr. Waters and her assistant can move Daisy onto the gurney. As they work, Dr. Waters tells me to go home and have dinner. She will call after they assess the situation. 

Surrounded by the fog of spring rain on hot asphalt, I watch them wheel my big dog through the side door of the vet hospital at Virginia Tech. Daisy will be anxious without me by her side, with this doctor she’s never met, in a building she’s never entered. As I drive away, I imagine holding Daisy on the floor through the examination. A light rain patters the windshield. “Focus, you,” I say aloud. “Focus on driving. She’s been around the block a time or two; she’ll be okay.”

I’d spent the last ten years with Daisy, learning dogs are exceptionally hardy. I was not prepared. I kept waiting for her to get better, with little intervention on my own part, like she always did. But these were different times. And nothing about this year would be typical.

March 12, 2020

The pandemic comes to Virginia. Governor Northam declares a state of emergency. In the days that follow, businesses close, schools move to remote operations, and everyone begins the mental gymnastics of defining “essential.” 

March 27, 2020

Following recommendations from the relevant professional organizations, our vet’s office announces they will continue to see patients, but owners are not allowed inside. They say, “When you arrive at the building, call the office and a vet tech will come to the vehicle. The vet will call you and discuss care.” It’s a great system, efficient. No one knows for sure if pets get COVID.

May 10

Mother’s Day. In the afternoon my two young sons and I bake a cake. From the kitchen, I notice Daisy panting. It is warm out. She is still shedding her winter coat—a coat built for playing in the snow and long, drizzly days outdoors. After everyone has supper, I coax Daisy onto the porch for a grooming session. She breathes calmly once I start brushing and rests the weight of her head in my lap. I get the excess hair off and then rinse her to the shower stall in the master bath. After the shower, she moves through our toweling-off routine. But at the end, instead of throwing herself on the living room rug, she lies beside my bed filling the room with her panting. “I think something is wrong with Daisy,” I say to my husband. 

May 11, 2020

Daisy’s breathing is raspy and rattly. I call my mom. She says it sounds like congestive heart failure, something treatable. I hesitate to call the vet. Back in February, Daisy went roaming around the woodland property our house sits on and ate some deer poop. It made her sick. After vomiting two times, she was too weak to walk properly. I rushed her in to see the doctor, but she recovered the next day without incident or medication. I felt foolish for not waiting.

But as the day wears on, Daisy’s breathing worsens. I call the vet’s office “We can see you in an hour,” they say.

Julie, a vet tech I’d met before, takes Daisy. I wait in the car until Dr. Kaden calls. She did an ultrasound and x-ray; there is an infection in Daisy’s left lung. But Dr. Kaden can’t determine the cause. Daisy’s bloodwork doesn’t suggest cancer, but it’s possible. In her soft-spoken voice, Dr. Kaden explains how she’d ruled out this and that. I imagine her looking at Daisy’s chart while she talks. She says the vet hospital at Virginia Tech has more sophisticated equipment. She can do a referral for an emergency visit. Because of COVID, the vet hospital saw patients only on an emergency basis. 

I pause. I say, “I don’t know…” Is it an emergency? It’s so hard to get a sense of what’s happening. I wish I could read Dr. Kaden’s face. Then I’d know how bad it is.

Dr. Kaden says she can start Daisy on antibiotics while I think about the emergency visit. “Just give me a call and I’ll do the paperwork,” she says.  

May 20, 2020

I just finished up a telephone interview for work when Dr. Kaden calls. “How’s our girl doing?” she asks.

I close my laptop, look over at Daisy, and say, “Her breathing is much better, no more panting and rattling. But she’s still very weak and finicky about eating. We have to help her outside to go to the bathroom. But when I had pneumonia, I remember feeling that way for a while afterwards. That’s normal right?” 

Dr. Kaden agrees, but asks me to bring Daisy in for another exam. I say I will but wonder if it’s necessary. Was this essential?

Daisy will get over this. This is the fearless dog who’d had many adventures. She’d enjoyed rough housing with countless young children from our big family in West Virginia. She’d jumped in the swollen Ouachita River when we lived in Monroe, Louisiana. She’d braved rough ocean waters fishing with my husband in Texas. And she’d gone camping in all kinds of weather in Vermont. She once jumped off a cliff into a river where she spied a family of swimming ducks. She caught none but lost a toenail that never grew back. And then there was that episode with a porcupine. 

May 22, 2020

My family celebrates Memorial Day by visiting hillside cemeteries and decorating the graves of our ancestors. I pack a bag for the holiday to rural West Virginia. I toy with the idea of taking Daisy who is no better and no worse. She doesn’t eat her kibble but enjoys chicken and rice from my hand. Sometimes she’s able to walk outside on her own; sometimes we help her with a rear support harness. She loved visits to West Virginia, but I worry a four-hour car ride will be too hard on her. Plus, she is not well enough to walk the hills to the graveyards. I give myself a break from constant vigilance and leave her at home. Next time. My husband promises to take good care of her.

May 25, 2020

I check in on Daisy throughout the weekend—it’s the same: no better, no worse. My mom keeps saying, “I know you love that dog, but she’s probably dying. You need to prepare yourself.” I don’t know. In the evening, my husband calls and says, “I think she’s getting weaker, and I can’t get her to eat much. She’s having trouble breathing again. You need to come home.” 

May 26, 2020

I leave West Virginia first thing. I hear about George Floyd on the car radio. “I can’t breathe.” Breathing. First-hand accounts of COVID. No one can breathe. I struggle, not wanting to break down crying while driving. I’m sad enough thinking Daisy is slipping away. Her struggle to breathe becomes a carrier for all the heartbreak in the world.  

When I get home, I think my husband is mistaken. Daisy doesn’t seem any worse. Later, I realize she perked up because she was happy to see me. Ever the loyal girl. I spend the afternoon sitting outside and rubbing her belly. For supper, I hand-feed her bits of rice, beef, and egg yellow. 

Dr. Kaden calls again. I promise to bring Daisy in on Thursday. 

May 27, 2020

Around lunchtime, I notice Daisy panting. I get up and sit with her. She looks at me the way she always does when she wants a particular thing. I offer her water and treats, but she doesn’t want them. It dawns on me, much too slow, that I cannot give her what she really wants. Air. She wants oxygen. I call Dr. Kaden’s office. “Bring her in as soon as you can,” they say. 

When my husband and I arrive, we help two vets load Daisy onto a stretcher. I wait for Dr. Kaden’s call in my car. After ten minutes, the phone rings. Daisy isn’t getting oxygen. I need to take her to the vet hospital. “I’m sorry, but we don’t have the equipment to treat her here. She needs to be on oxygen.” “Is that the only thing we can do?” I ask. Dr. Kaden pauses and clears her throat, “Unless you want to talk about euthanasia.” She pauses again. “I’m so sorry, but there’s nothing more we can do for her here.” I ask Dr. Kaden to arrange the emergency visit at the vet hospital. “Okay,” she says. “They’re bringing Daisy out now. When you hang up, drive directly to campus. They’ll be expecting you.”

The Vet School is near the building where I worked when I worked in a office. I’m a researcher, a gerontologist. I do research on human aging. Although I accept death as a fact of life, I reject the notion of late life as only a time of decline. I educate others to check their ageism and ableism—to question their association between disability, age, and death.

Daisy is an old dog. Thirteen. But I had harbored the belief she would live long, exceedingly long. I imagined she would become the magical twenty-year-old golden. Daisy. She’d been an extraordinary dog, why not have an extraordinary life span?

After I drop Daisy off at the vet hospital, I go home to await Dr. Waters’ call. A part of me waits for hopeful news, but reality sets in. Death is coming. When the phone rings, Dr. Waters tells me Daisy is sleeping inside an oxygen tent.  However, even with their state-of-the-art machines, Daisy’s lung is too badly infected for them to determine the cause. Nothing fits the data. Dr. Waters asks for permission to test Daisy for COVID. A half hour later she calls back to say she can’t get permission from her supervisor to do the test because there is a possibility Daisy has cancer. They only test for COVID when all other disease is ruled out. Are tests really so scarce? 

Dr. Waters says they will watch her overnight. I fall asleep late after assuring myself that Daisy is resting. Maybe with rest comes healing.

May 28, 2020

A doctor whose name I cannot remember, but whose memory I cherish, calls to say she’s been on Daisy’s case since Dr. Waters’ shift ended. Daisy has not improved. I need to make a decision: a ventilator or goodbye. I hold my breath and choose goodbye. The doctor says, “I would do the same in your shoes. You’re making the right choice.” 

I breathe, really breathe, for the first time in two weeks. “What next? How does this work?” I ask. The doctor says, “If you want, we can meet you outside with Daisy, in the garden near our office, and do the euthanasia there. That way you can be with her. Only if you and your family want to be there.” 

“Yes,” I say. “We want to be there.” It is an awful, unbearably painful gift. Yet I am conscious that it is a gift denied to so many during the pandemic.

May 29, 2020

Everyone says it’s a normal part of grieving, to second guess yourself, to ruminate on the woulda, shoulda, couldas. But I can’t shake the feeling that everyone else would have made better decisions. They would have taken Daisy to the vet hospital on campus the first time their regular doctor recommended it. They would have deferred her death, at least until they learned to manage the pandemic. Then maybe Daisy could have died at home.

In the dawn after Daisy’s death, the seventeen-year-old cicada brood emerges on our mountain. With eyes swollen from a night of crying, I walk out on my back porch. The morning sunlight hits the cicadas’ iridescent wings. And as they sing their mourning song, we learn how to live in this same old, new world.

-Brandy Renee McCann

Brandy Renee McCann writes about intimacy, aging, and Appalachia. Find her creative work in AvantAppalachia, Change Seven, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, and The Dead Mule; Brandy's scholarly work on aging and Appalachia can be found in various social scientific journals. Brandy lives in the mountains of western Virginia.