Monday began with waking up to an uneasy dread and sadness. I know a lot of people start Mondays this way but this was much different. This Monday was the day I had to take the oldest of our three dachshunds to the vets to be put down.
Spunky was 15 years old, very frail, blind and deaf. Since winter, it seems that he deteriorated at lightening speed. With each passing day, he became weaker and less responsive to the world around him, withdrawn into a dark and silent world that my wife and I could not comprehend or reach through to the spirit that was once a very active, loving dog.
We watched, day by day, as his vacant carcass would stumble and fall. He would walk his silent dark as midnight pathway from bedroom to kitchen and back to bed again by trial and error. His nose paid a high price for his limited adventures, bumping into walls, chairs and cabinets. Driven by instinct, he would find his way to the kitchen to be fed, twice a day, like clock work, 6:30am and 7:00pm. With nails clicking on the linoleum, he would slowly circle our small kitchen, banging his nose into the cabinets, kitchen stool, our legs and his brother and sister. Once his bowl was placed in its normal location, we would still have to pick him up and take him to its location. Even his remaining sense of smell failed him.
The last two weeks of his slow motion death march brought bloody diarrhea. We thought that it was colitis but when medicine didn’t quiet the symptoms, we realized this was another step toward the inevitable.
The vet said we would know when it was time and he was right. We knew. Monday was the day and I had time in the morning before work. I found myself very uneasy about the whole process, especially the concept of making an appointment with death. We had hoped that Spunky would die in his sleep but his systems’ shutdown had another idea, a longer, more painful process that broke our hearts. It was time.
I had also hoped my last few hours with Spunky would be peaceful and dignified but that wasn’t to be either. I placed him on the front seat that was covered with towels and pee pads and a box of tissues on the console, just in case. Well, just in case happened a block down the street. I had just called the vets office to let them know I was on the way and had them on the phone when I heard an odd noise coming from my left. Oh, crap! Diarrhea was spreading toward the edge of seat and back under Spunky. As I reached to pull him away from the puddle of toxic waste, I stuck my finger into something that felt like warm rice pudding. Oh, crap!
Do you know how hard it is to drive a car with a cell phone in one hand and your finger of the other hand in shit? Luckily, we were still in the neighborhood, no traffic and with time to attempt to cleanup the mess, at least enough to continue the journey. However, the brown, red puddle would visit us one more time before reaching the vet’s parking lot. So much for that idyllic peaceful and dignified end I had hoped for. Oh, crap!
I parked the car near a grassy area that separated the vet’s parking lot from a national health club’s lot next door. I carefully removed Spunky from the front seat mess and sat him in the grass. I felt he was safe there while I cleaned the mess and took the debris to a nearby dumpster. He had rarely walked in the last two weeks and if he tried, he didn’t get very far. He was safe or so I thought. Oh, I forgot to mention that the grassy area was higher than the health club parking lot and a small hill slopped down away from where Spunky sat. When I turned back away from the dumpster, I was shocked to see my dog staggering down the short rise, heading toward health club and a foot high curb. I ran to stop him from falling off the curb and got to him with a foot to spare.
I picked him up and this time I sat him down further from the drop off in a wider space in the grassy area. There was more work to do in the car and more debris to take to the dumpster. You guessed it. Gravity had once again captured Spunky and like an asteroid passing a large planet, the health club was drawing him near. Running back to save Spunky was starting to feel like sprint intervals. With just inches from the curb, my right hand slid under his chest and my left under his butt (this time, without shit, so I hoped). His escape attempt was ended. It was now time. The appointment was waiting. Both of us, still slightly shit stained, walked into the vets’ office. Spunky, rage into that dark night!
Since this is a fitness website, you may be asking what does this have to do with fitness.
Good question. Let’s explore the image.
It has been stated that dogs mature very quickly. They are able to mate within the first year of life. Humans require twelve or more years unless it is some remote and forgotten culture without video games, cell phones and TVs where it might happen sooner. The life quality of dogs remain relatively flat for years but when the end comes, it comes quickly. The last few weeks of a dog’s life equates to perhaps several human years. Deterioration is unexpectedly rapid. So here is Spunky, sitting in the grass at the very end of his life with perhaps only minutes left, being pulled toward a health club in what seemed to be a desperate attempt to run away from certain death.
In the decades that I have been involved with fitness, I have seen thousands of people “run” to fitness in response to a personal crisis. This is not your “I want to look better naked crowd”, although, most would accept the result. These individuals have something serious chasing them, a heart attack, cancer, diabetes, MS, death of a parent or spouse, a divorce or perhaps the realization that they are falling out of the aging tree and hitting every limb on the way down. And the additional sense of the sand passing through the hour glass joins the chase to intensify the motivation. Many of these people have ever given fitness much of a thought. Exercise is a strange activity done by an even stranger narcissistic human subspecies or overpaid athletes with superhuman skills. Neither of which they can relate. They have heard the rumors of the magical healing powers of exercise but they ignored them because it seemed too impossible to invest any energy or belief only to be disappointed if it failed. No, it was easier for them to grab the remote control and hunker down with some serious comfort food until the thought of exercise faded back to a distant corner of their minds where they also stashed the concept of a healthy diet.
Fitness takes on a new meaning when life hits you in the head with a crisis two by four. Spunky’s attempted dash to the health club to escape the appointment with the vet, as sad and yet comical as it was, symbolizes the human attempt to run from another two by four whack and to bring about change before their appointment calendar announces their time is up. Spunky, with his shit stained, boney ass staggering in the grass in a beeline from the vet, is silently screaming, “Rage into that dark night! Do something now before someone is driving you to vets.”
Spunky, goodnight and goodby! Keep running, boy, keep running! Where you are now, no one can catch you and there are no appointments you don’t want to keep.
