We woke up to some sort of weird commotion in the middle of the night, coming from the dog bed that was pushed up against the wall.
Sproing, sproing, sproing. And a rustling, almost like the sound of papers being shuffled around.
At first, we thought maybe one of our three dogs was having a bad dream, as they sometimes do. But it quickly became clear that this was something different, and when my wife sprang up to throw on the light, there she was:
Darcy, our oldest and largest — an Australian cattle dog mix we rescued 121/2 years ago but who the family feels like has been with us our entire life — convulsing on her side, with gooey, gummy foam oozing from her mouth onto the floor.
The sproing sound we’d heard was from her head jerking against the door stop spring.
It took a minute to realize she probably wasn’t dying and probably was having a seizure; another minute later, the seizure started to subside. Once the initial shock wore off, and once Darcy was capable of getting up without falling down, my wife took her outside, brought her back in, watched her lap up mouthfuls of water, then got her settled back into bed. We hoped she would be OK till morning, and she was.
In some ways, Darcy seemed unbreakable.
We adopted her from the Humane Society in 2011 when she was roughly 2. In all that time since, I’m not sure we ever took her to the vet for anything other than annual checkups, vaccinations and preventive care.
In old age, she had gone 90 percent deaf and maybe 50 percent blind. But she otherwise seemed to have made it through life without debilitating health conditions or illnesses.
In December, we did notice she started literally putting herself to bed earlier. We’d be up in our bonus room watching TV, and where she’d almost always join us, she’d taken to sneaking off to our bedroom to be by herself.
And a couple of times, we had a fair amount of trouble waking her up from what seemed like extraordinarily deep slumbers.
We now are confident they were small seizures.
Then on Sunday afternoon, just over 12 hours after the middle-of-the-night incident, Darcy had a very big one. She was sleeping on a chair in front of the fireplace when she began to thrash uncontrollably. Within seconds, her mouth was yawning open and snapping violently shut. She must of bitten a gum or a cheek, because there was blood.
Our 22-year-old daughter had seen Darcy seizing from the upstairs balcony and rushed down to try to help. My wife was there again, too. There was drool and pee on the chair, there was convulsing, and after it was over, there was unsteadiness and disorientation.
There were also lots of tears. Because there was also little doubt, that it was probably time.
But on Sunday afternoon, we found ourselves wrestling — as so many dog owners eventually do — with the fleeting, nagging, heart-wrenching doubts about whether it was time to send her there for real.
We wrestled with those doubts even after the veterinary nurse brought that big jar of mini-chocolates into the room and pointed out that “every dog should get to try them.” Even after Darcy snacked on one, then two, then three, then another four more after that. Especially after Darcy surprised us by climbing to her feet, despite the sedative flowing through her bloodstream, so she could beg for yet more chocolate. As we gave her another, then another, laughing through tears at her piggishness, before she finally collapsed into our daughter’s arms and settled back into the blanket on the floor.
Not until Darcy started seizing again while drifting off to sleep did we feel 100 percent certain that we were doing the right thing by letting her go now.
My daughter stroked her back, my wife stroked her head, I stroked her paw. We said as many soothing words as we could.
And so it was that in the final moments before her passing, Darcy was able to enjoy — one last time — two of the things she’d grown to love most during her full, healthy, wonderful life: gleefully eating stuff she wasn’t supposed to, and blissfully feeling showered with our affection.
We will miss her terribly.
