GroundTruth

Our Maggie was a truly international dog, a canine diplomat of sorts who had lived all over the world.

A big, old yellow Labrador who lived to eat, Maggie begged on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide when I was based as a journalist in Jerusalem with my wife and family. In fact, she was well known for sauntering down the ancient, cobbled streets and picking up scraps from the Palestinian shwarma shops and then making her way across the street to the Israeli falafel vendors. In a culture where dogs are feared and often loathed, Maggie had made good friends on both sides of the conflict.

Later when I was assigned to London, Maggie dined on left over Shepherd’s Pie from one of the great old pubs of Hampstead which was right next to my office.

She quaffed buttery croissants in France when she lived briefly with a retired French military officer on the coast of Brittany. He was an in-law who offered to take her for 90 days so she could get her European Union citizenship and avoid the officiousness of the British laws for quarantining pets.

She traveled in and out of many ports of call and across international borders with her own small blue, pet passport in which was recorded her many journeys and the attendant inoculations and paper work required for her passage.

I gave Maggie to my wife as a present for our first wedding anniversary 14 years ago. And she lived with us all over the world since then. She was at our side as we had four boys born in Boston, Jerusalem, Bethlehem and London. They loved her and never knew life without her tail thumping the floor in the early morning and her steady breathing putting us all to sleep at night. My wife showered her with affection and treated her as if she was our only girl, which of course she was.

The constant plane travel and the plastic air crates grew more and more difficult for Maggie as she got older. After so many years of parachuting in and out of stories all over the Middle East, I knew how she felt. We’d both begun to lose our traveling legs a bit.

In the last few years, she was happy to have retired with us to a small New England town West of Boston where she had a pond to swim in and lots of grass to roll around in.

But sometimes she’d sit on the porch and look out on the road and I’d wonder if she, like me, didn’t long to get back to traveling.
In the end, Maggie had one last lesson for us.

We thought for sure she was gone when we took her to the vet last week. She was struggling all summer with her breathing due to laryngeal paralysis, a degenerative condition that restricts the air passage and is quite common in Labs. Her condition worsened dramatically while we were on a lakeside vacation in Maine.

A local vet said there wasn’t much we could do to prevent her from dying, but as a last resort he gave her steroids that reduced some of the swelling of her larynx and she rallied for a few more good days. Our boys joked that the steroids would mean that her life would have an asterisk just like the Red Sox players David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez who had been exposed for using steroids. But the drugs worked just as they did for Big Papi.

Suddenly, Maggie was swimming and doing what our boys called “the happy dance,” which was rolling on her back in the grass with her paws in the air and a wide smile.

She taught us at the very end to just live every day as if it’s your last.

We fed her lamb and hugged her and told her we loved her. We cherished every minute with her and quietly wondered why we didn’t treat every day with her like that, and every day with each other like that. For sure, that was what she was telling us in her own quiet way. And sometimes it takes an old dog to remind you of the simplest truths.
We said “goodbye.” Then after a few days, her breathing got very heavy again. She was lethargic and clearly unable to get air. Her tongue was turning blue. She was rushed to the emergency room at an animal hospital and the vet quietly told us what we already knew, that Maggie was not going to live. But like everyone who has been through the extraordinary ordeal of euthanizing a pet, we denied the obvious until we couldn’t any longer.

When the vet finally put her down on Sunday morning, Maggie heaved her last breath and set out on the final journey.