All-Nighters is an exploration of insomnia, sleep and the nocturnal life.
Chief was my insomnia buddy. As far as late-night companions go, you could do worse than a dog. We humans fill the sleepless void with mental anguish, constructing indexes of recriminations and future-forward panic. Dogs, anchored in the present, know no such travail. The sum total of their fixations are food, belly rubs and alerting to possible intruders. Chief and I, the worrier and the worry-free, formed a yin and yang of preoccupation. We were perfect partners.
Ever anxious in my sleeplessness, I cherished the uplift that came from the familiar circle, circle, plonk of my 100-pound, unusually tall yellow Lab throwing himself onto the checkerboard rug by my side. Devoted in the extreme, he was so determined to be near me that someone once exclaimed, “He’d crawl into the corner of your eye if he could.” I’d put aside my cares for a moment and pick up one of his great webbed paws, sniff the tough, street-blackened pads and exclaim, “Your feet smell like Fritos!”
I’d tickle the divot of his belly button, or rub his velvety cutlet ears. He’d shift position, leaving behind an aureole of hair so thick it looked as if all his follicles had sneezed at once.
On New Year’s Day, 2009, Chief started to cough. His normal deep breathing became a rapid pant. A trip to the animal emergency room yielded a chest X-ray so cloudy, the vet couldn’t see the dog’s heart. “I think it’s fluid,” she said. “I can’t help him here. There’s a hospital in Yonkers where they can treat him. If I were you, I wouldn’t wait.” We raced him 90 minutes down the Taconic Parkway, where they drained two liters of fluid from his chest and performed a biopsy.
Our poor Chief was a statistical rarity — one of the 4 percent of dogs each year who develop lung cancer. The tumor was the size of a cantaloupe. We did our research: after cancer surgery, the average canine life expectancy is nine months. Chief was only seven years old, and otherwise healthy — nay, robust. We opted for the surgery. It was expensive, but for once in my writer’s life, I was flush. It would be worth it. It would be worth it if he had a long and otherwise healthy life.
While the dog was in the veterinary I.C.U., yoked to tubes and beeping machines, I scarcely slept a wink. Rather than thumbing through a varied index of anxieties, I was focused on one specific dog-shaped worry. I lay on my back next to my husband, tears leaking from my eyes to collect in my ears.
“I miss him,” my husband whispered into the dark.
“Me, too.”
“The great pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself, too.”
— Samuel Butler
Four days later, we brought him home from the Yonkers animal hospital, a Fentanyl-doped Frankendog with a row of glimmering staples down his side. He healed quickly, was given a hopeful prognosis, and returned to his normal, uncomplicated life. He swam in the Hudson River, he chased deer through the woods. He kept me company each night. It was a very good summer. We opted for six rounds of monthly chemotherapy, hoping to improve his odds. He trotted happily from each session, unfazed. I never thought about the money. Between the surgery and the chemo, my husband and I laid out close to $15,000. What I didn’t know — couldn’t have known — was that we were whistling past the graveyard, writing checks as we went.
Nine months to the day after his surgery, we noticed Chief once again straining to breathe. We thought in vain that it might be kennel cough but an X-ray exposed our delusion. The cancer was back, his lungs percolating with fluid. Our beloved, handsome dog was drowning from the inside out.
We had no more money, no more options. No more time. In the vet’s office, an assistant led us to a stark room. I leaned on the stainless steel exam table and signed away my dog’s fading life. I checked a box, declining the chance to take home Chief’s ashes — too costly, too sad. The staff wanted to be assured I was lucid in my cloud of grief. “So, group cremation?” they asked over and over. Ashes to ashes, dogs into dust.
Under sedation, Chief wobbled and drooled, stumbling as his vision blurred. My husband, who in battle had seen the light dim in too many people’s eyes, sat sobbing and despondent. I loved him more for that. The dog, in drugged stupor, looped around, jumped up on my husband, paws on his lap and licked the tears from his face. Around and over again.
A second shot of sedative brought Chief to the floor at last. I knelt beside him and stroked those velvety ears. When the young vet took up a syringe of opaque pink fluid, I whispered into the dog’s forehead. “God will take care of you.” Within seconds of the plunger easing down, he was gone, and the room went perfectly still. My loyal insomnia buddy had met his final rest. After a few minutes, the assistant asked, “Would you like a paw print to take with you?” At first I thought it morbid, then I knew it would be all I’d have left. I nodded. She disappeared in search of the inkpad, leaving me alone to weep over my dog’s sweet face, kissing his still-warm muzzle.
That first night without Chief, I found myself straining to hear him coming up the stairs, his arrival heralded by toenails on the hardwood, followed by the crash of the spare bedroom door opening as he strolled in to take his place on the rug. Circle, circle, plonk. But throughout the house, no sound, just the branches groaning in the wind and the aggressive plink of wind chimes outside the window. I was alone. Chief was gone for good.
Now, months later, I’m awake and alone yet again, and, as in years past, worried about money. I pass the infernal deep blue hours haunted by memories of my dog, haunted by regret. When I ask myself, “Was it worth it?” and come up short, I then ask, is it so bad that my wildest indulgence was trying to keep someone I adored alive and happy just that much longer?
Samuel Butler once wrote: “The great pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself, too.” We owners fling cash like idiots for no other reason than we are crazy about our pets, and because they, in their blasted, heartbreaking, loving ways, are crazy for us.
In the absence of belly scrubs to distract me, or floppy ears to beguile me, I console myself at night with that thought — man and dog can be fools for each other, and folly knows no higher calling than to be a fool for love. It’s what I have left, along with the memory of a gentle, galumphing companion, and an ink print on the refrigerator in the place of paw treads on the stairs.
