put to sleep

- the euphemism. of course there's nothing sleepy about it. it's a white lie murder. when i was a kid we put dogs down, a lot of them, for doing bad things. for killing sheep. for chasing a child around the block. for being old. 'the Kinscherfs always kill their dogs' said a friend. what we did not do was be there when it happened. we drove, crying, with the dog in the back, unaware of his fate. just another ride in the car. we huddled, terrified, in the waiting room while Boo or Caesar or Fawny got euthanized. animals live in the guru present, right? if pain is what they have, so be it. but do their doggy brains wonder about the end of everything? about being put to sleep? i doubt it. but on a bus ride to New York City i saw a dead dog on a cement island in the middle of the highway, a hit and run. a revolving parade of dog pals, 20 or 30 strong, circled the body in the late afternoon, remembering their friend from woo hoo haunts around town, the garbage dumps they pigged out, the flower beds they shat in, the cats they treed. they came to say good bye, to honor a fallen comrade. but this is not a story about them, it's about Ralph, my cat, a second-hander who poked his paw out of a cage in a shelter in Philadelphia to touch my boyfriend's hand. 'this is the guy', he smiled. we were gonna give him to my mom who had, only weeks before, put Sydney, her overweight longhair, to sleep. but she didn't want him. she didn't want to suffer another gruesome loss. the vets in Philly decided that we'd make good parents for the guy so they spent their money to fly Ralph up to Boston. we met him at airport, drove to Jamaica Plain and cut him loose in the apartment. it turns out he hated us on sight. the paw through the cage was a ruse. we told him he had 48 hours to chill or we'd send him back to Philly or put him to sleep and that's when i prayed, a fool's mumbo jumbo involving light with a capital 'L', The Force and a mental picture of Mickey, the cat we'd had on life support at an all-dyke animal hospital, until, as they say in the obits, 'following a long battle with cancer' she was, you got it, put to sleep. i prayed to Mickey to fix Ralph, to correct his character and turn him into a cool cat and oh my god, in seconds, i swear, he shape-shifted into a fabulous kitty-witty. a smarty pants who could jump from floor to bureau, poke at a quarter, a watch, a picture frame until it clattered to the floor and woke us up. who could climb a drain pipe from yard to second story, tip toe the gutter and scratch at the screen until we let him in. and he was funny. he corrugated his whiskers into a TV antennae by sunning under a 150 watt lamp. he snuck into the fridge and choked on a turkey carcass until we found him in the cold, shivering his face off. he had those i-love-you-but-watch-it eyes that owned your heart and he stayed healthy until he hit 17. that's when he got it, the cat curse, kidney damage. we infused him with fluid from a saline sack hung from a coat hanger. he hated it. he hated being caught under the bed, wrapped in a straight jacket towel, crushed onto the kitchen table and taking the jab into his lower neck. when it was over he looked like he'd sprouted a fanny pack of fur jello. the infusions added a couple of years, same as chemo gives a cancer patient remission, but doesn't save a life. Ralphie slowed down. he couldn't leap onto the bed, let alone floor to bureau and he got the shits. black goo squirted out of his ass as he dragged it across the rug, a Jackson Pollack of hot tar in his wake. the stench was unimaginable. we had to put him down. we had to put our dear Ralphie to sleep, but this time it would be different. this time we would face reality head on. we would not hide outside the execution room. we would suffer, like Truman Capote watching Perry Smith hang from the neck until dead, we would suffer the truth of the euphemism. Ralphie was not being put to sleep, he was being put to death. the vet was a large lady with a nice face who assured us a) we were doing the right thing because Ralphie's quality of life was nil and b) that it wouldn't hurt. the room was small with a shiny metal table, a basin and a bright over head neon tube. we nuzzled his neck while the doc filled the syringe and stuck it into the exact spot where we'd prolonged his life. his mouth was a silent shriek, his eyes narrow, his back arched in a grotesque reverse curve until he collapsed, asleep forever. it did not look painless. no sir. it looked like it hurt a lot. we found out later that the proper method includes not one but two injections. one to induce sleep, the second, to kill. we were so out of our minds viewing the spectacle we couldn't remember if he'd been given one or two. it sure looked like he hadn't. it looked to us like he went through hell. they stuck his ashes in a styrofoam box, a hamburger put to sleep.