beginning of aftermath

kara and i and max, and yellow and eliot, are still alive. and sagan is not.

i ended up taking her to the vet yesterday, a place she knows, where she gets a lot of treats. initially there was some administrative complication, in that sagan had bitten kara and drawn blood, so the city requires 10 days of quarantine prior to euthanasia. the techs at the clinic called all over town, trying to find a place for sagan to stay for those 10 days, and i imagined kara's reaction if i ended up returning home with an alive and well sagan. it would not have been good; kara's really gone through the wringer on this one. this took a long time to sort through, and i hung out with sagan in the exam room. happy, clueless sagan, enjoying the attention i was giving her.

eventually the vet said that if i signed a piece of paper to the effect that i would not hold her liable, she would perform the euthanasia anyway. i sighed and signed it, and she did it. i was with sagan all the way to the end. she was happy and accepting treats and loving from me the whole time. the first shot put her gradually to sleep, and she snored loudly, the way she always did. i stayed with her, talking to her and petting her. the second shot was to stop her heart, and that one took a while to take effect too. she was a strong dog at 74 pounds, all muscle, and the vet said she had injected enough for a 100-pound dog. i stroked sagan's face as the vet listened to her heart. then it was over. sagan died yesterday at about 5:45 pm, pacific time.

it seemed very peaceful. sagan seemed at peace. of course i don't know what went through her mind in those last minutes, what kind of fear or confusion or disturbance or pain, but i hope that my presence made things as easy as they could possibly have been under such awful circumstances.

we gave her 4-1/2 good years, we hope. we chose her from the pound back in 2002 when she was only days from being euthanized. we think she was about a year old then. the evening after we chose her, while she was still at the pound, she attacked someone or did something to make people frightened, and we almost didn't get her. she was evaluated at the pound for maybe another week before they let us take her home. so i suppose it could be said that we gave her 4-plus years she wouldn't have had otherwise.

so our family is reduced again. there is indeed a distinct hole. i was shaky all day yesterday, and i'm still shaky today.

max is a little more creaky than usual, with his head wounds and his drains. he does look like something from a horror film, a dog clumsily stitched together from parts. kara's finger hurts when she bumps it but otherwise it seems stable. we changed the dressing last night. she's on her percocet and she sees a specialist tomorrow. she is definitely shattered by these last 36 hours.

she thinks the whole thing is her fault, because she was playing with max when sagan attacked him. it's not her fault, i keep telling her; sagan had a thing about her giving attention to max, and that's not kara's fault. she thinks she should have trained sagan more, worked with her, but i think sagan had those highly aggressive tendencies deep in her, and they weren't something kara could have trained out of her. it's the way sagan was, that's all. sometimes kara sees it this way and sometimes she doesn't.

the cats seem all right, but then, it's hard to tell with cats.