Saying Goodbye to My Asshole Dog

Some of you may recall that, back in 2017, we adopted this asshole dog. We named him Gilfoyle because, like his namesake, he had amazing hair and a shit attitude.

He was estimated to be about 9 at the time, and I said if I could have 5 good years with him, I’d be happy. When I started typing this, it had been a couple of months over 7 years.

When I started typing this, it was the day after we had him put to sleep. It’s been almost 6 months now. 6 months of saying goodbye in a thousand tiny ways before I could sit down and say it this way.

Gilfoyle was my One True Dog. A lot of others have lived in my heart and a lot more will before I’m gone, but he and I shared a connection that went beyond love.

We’ll never know Gil’s history, but something in it left him with PTSD. He bonded with me immediately, tolerated our other dog, and attacked my husband repeatedly for the first 3 days after we brought him home. I genuinely wasn’t sure if he’d be able to stay. Even after we learned to recognize when he’d been triggered, there were incidents, and times he would disconnect so completely that he forgot who even I was.

When we adopted Gil, I was 5 years into what turned out to be an 8 year journey through perimenopause, and the last 2 years were the worst. There were times I wasn’t sure I would survive it because the hormonal depression was making me suicidal again for the first time in decades. Even on my “good” days the mood swings could be brutal. That was on top of the physical shit. In short, I was a mess.

And while I can’t promote “trauma bond with your pets” as a legitimate therapy for managing symptoms of perimenopause, in my case it did a lot of good.

Because Gil was a mess, too. He could be sweet and loving and adorable one minute, and literally in the space of seconds be out for blood fighting some menace only he could see. He had extremely loud separation anxiety that could set in while he was sitting in the same room looking me in the eye, if I were a couple of feet further away than he wanted. In his later years, he became a very picky eater. At one point, I think he was on 12 different medications.

It was a lot. He was a lot. But through all of it, I always loved him. And that truth became a mirror. Because if he could be that be that much and need that much and drive everyone around him that crazy and I could still fall asleep every night knowing how much I loved him, I started to understand that the people who loved me probably felt the same way.

That was the bond that Gil and I had. I was his safe place in a world where he hadn’t always had one, and he was my reminder that I was more than the sum of my worst parts.

The downside to falling in love with a senior dog is, from the first day, you know you’re living on borrowed time. We were lucky with Gil in so many ways. He had a well-managed heart condition and chronic gut issues and there were months I saw his vet more often than I saw members of my own family, but at the end, he didn’t die of anything other than being an old dog who was ready to go.

Our job was to recognize that time when it came. It turned out the end happened fast.

On Oct 30, we took a family walk and Gil broke his personal record by covering a mile in 29 minutes. He’d had some issues over the summer and been up most the previous two nights, so to see him have a really great day was cause for celebration.

It was his last really great day, and by the end of the first week of November we were pretty sure it was time to start saying our goodbyes. We’d thought that before, but this time felt different.

On Nov 16, we took him to the vet for a quality of life assessment. She agreed the dog we brought in was no longer the Gil she knew, didn’t think we were quite to the end but close, and gave us an appetite stimulant to see if we could at least get him eating again.

It worked, and for the next two days of Gil eating full meals and taking all his meds and sleeping through the night, we thought maybe we’d been wrong again. It certainly wouldn’t have been the first time I thought he was at death’s door with a paw over the threshold, only to be fine a week later.

Until the night of the 19th, when a shell of the dog I loved was standing unsteadily in the middle of the backyard, staring blankly into space after having just projectile vomited chicken & rice across the turf, and I cried as I held him for what I knew would be one of the last times.

His last day was Nov 21, and we tried to make it the best it could be for him. We took a family walk that proved more carry than walk

but the little bits he was able to manage, he seemed to enjoy

and he got to say goodbye to his chicken friends.

After dropping off our other dog at home, we took Gil to say goodbye to family who lived nearby, and then to McDonald’s, where he ate an entire cheeseburger patty and a chicken nugget, more than he’d wanted to eat in the previous two days combined.

He really wanted to walk through the drive-thru and I really wanted to let him because it was literally his last hour on Earth, but I didn’t want one of his last experiences to be strangers mad at him for holding up the line.

Then it was time. We both held him right up until the end.

Because dogs absolutely understand death and absolutely do not understand abandonment, we made sure our other dog had a chance to view Gil’s body, to process his death and not be waiting for him to come home.

Our other dog was adopted young, we’re pretty sure was a street dog for her entire life prior to that, never met a calorie she wouldn’t chase, and has a particular fondness for coffee.

So we brought Gil’s body home, set it on his blanket on the living room floor, and let her approach in her own time. I was sitting a few feet away with a cup of coffee.

In the space of about 20 seconds, she walked over, sniffed, circled, sniffed again, stared at him for a few seconds as an expression of understanding crossed her face, and then started sniffing in my direction.

At my coffee.

For her, Gil was gone and that was that and it was on to the next thing. She looked for him for a minute the next morning, then seemed to remember and went on with her day. Other mammals are so much better at death. Or maybe she’s just really cold. Gil always loved her more than she loved him.

For me, it’s been almost 6 months and I still look for him sometimes, still think I see him out of the corner of my eye. I still cry, still miss him, still what-if. I still haven’t finished making memorial ornaments because it feels so final, like once we have those, they’ll exist as irrefutable proof that’s really all I have left of Gil.

Which will never be true. Even if I weren’t a changed human because of my time with him, that little asshole was a weapons-grade collagen factory and I genuinely don’t think I can ever get all his fur out of this house.

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