Three Hours or Thirty Seconds

On friendship

I’m pretty sure the vet thought Justin and I were a gay couple. She asked where “we” were from after I told her I didn’t live in Texas and would need Duke’s ashes to be shipped out of state.

The vet was quite kind throughout the whole process, as was the rest of the staff at Sunset Canyon Vet Clinic. I can’t imagine it’s easy to handle a guy you’ve never seen before showing up at your door carrying a 60-pound black lab mix who can’t breathe, let alone to examine that dog to find that his lungs are filled with fluid and then have to tactfully tell this stranger that he needs to put his dog down.

But she did. She walked out of the back room, past all of the other clients in for routine exams with their puppies who had arrived well before me, shook my hand firmly, and looked me in the eye as she told me there was nothing they could do. She then asked if I was prepared to make this decision—in my view, a very thoughtful way of asking whether I was ready for my dog’s life to end. I wondered how many times she had delivered that speech.

The grace of the vet and her staff made the whole enterprise more bearable, to be sure, but Justin was the one who kept me tethered to something near sanity that day. Duke and I were staying with Justin and his wife, Ellen, during my Texas trip. I was at the gym when Ellen told me that Duke’s breathing problems seemed to be getting worse. When I rushed home and saw him using every accessory muscle in his body to breathe while making little gasping motions, I asked Ellen for her vet’s information and called to tell them I was bringing in an emergent patient. Justin pulled up to the driveway as I was loading Duke into the car and insisted on coming with me. I told him that this might be the end. “I know,” he said. “That’s why I’m here.”

After a thirty minute drive during which Justin did his best to distract me with superfluous conversation about sports or something, we arrived at what looked like a sprawling ranch and entered the country house that was the vet clinic. The folks at the front desk admitted Duke immediately without asking for payment or my address or any other clerical bullshit. It was only a few minutes before the vet came out and gave her compassionate and concise insinuation.

She led us into a room off in the corner of the country house, one that seemed designated for such a situation. It had a window that looked out onto the sun-baked ranch with its bluestem and Indian grass and tall Live Oaks and prickly pear cacti. The vet and her assistant then left the room to give us some time to say goodbye to Duke. I sat on the floor next to him as he panted, rubbing his back while Justin and I cried our eyes out. After a few minutes they came back in. We watched as the assistant held Duke and exposed the vein on his front right leg so that the vet could give him the overdose of anesthetic that would end his suffering. He took a few deep breaths and was gone.

They again left to give us some space. Again I rubbed his back while we sobbed. Justin gave me a long hug, then left me alone with Duke. I sat there for three hours or thirty seconds. After trying to leave the room, failing, and walking back in to sit next to Duke’s body for a while longer, I finally closed the door and dragged myself outside into the scorching Texas heat where Justin was waiting. He told me that he would drive, then bought me coffee and breakfast on the way home.

Our hyperconnected world beguiles us with the promise of unlimited ‘friends’, a dopaminergic siren song that seduces us to always seek more. But what we really need is one or two friends—real friends—who will sit with us in a fluorescent room while we cry together and endure the gut-wrenching events that come with this life, then buy us breakfast on the way home.