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I've had to wait this long just to be able to think when writing.
On October 27, two weeks and three days after his fifteenth birthday, I took Bammer in to the vet to give him his final rest. He'd been losing weight and getting weaker even though his blood work showed all his organs were working fine and I was feeding him as much as he could eat; the vet said it looked like he had a non-malignant tumor that was sort of sucking the nutrition away. When one evening he fell over turning around and couldn't get back up, I knew I had to end it for him. He was getting pain meds but many evenings he lay in his big recliner and cried, so I knew he was hurting despite the meds and the vitamins and mineral nutrient pills.
Bammer with Knox, both know I'm up to something:
That's in the "terminal room" at the vet. I took Knox along hoping it would help him through losing Bammer, and for support.
Bammer's final nap:
They'd just removed the IV and he's sleeping, heart getting slower and slower. Knox insisted on sniffing the IV and each injection, then sniffed and licked Bammer a couple of times before he apparently decided that if Bammer was going to sleep then so would he.
The cardboard coffin the vet supplied just barely fit inside the wooden one I built from some thin plywood:
Due to circumstances he had to stay there in the coffin for almost another week. In that time I collected things to go in with him: a stick he brought back from the woods one day, some seashells from both ocean and bay, a rock from up the river from his final trip up there, one each of all the treats he liked, a small pillow I used to stick under his head when he fell asleep on the floor, the towel I used for a blanket over him when he fell asleep, a stick from out at his "best friend's" house near the beach.... The flowers are from the insurance office diagonally across the street from us. There are also a dozen peppermint candies under and around him, and another dozen went in before closing the coffin (they're a biodegradable alternative to mothballs for keeping critters from digging up a coffin), plus another dozen one by one as I filled his grave.
I took pictures when I buried him but I can't find them on my phone or the cloud backup!
Had a roaring fire in his honor that evening:
Knox had his own way of reacting to the loss:
Knocking things over and tearing things up. He also peed and pooped in the house for about ten days! He stopped when I took him out to Bammer's grave and sat with him and explained that Bammer isn't coming back, that Knox watched me build the coffin and put Bammer in it with some of his favorite things and sealed it and buried it, so Bammer is there under the ground, down below the decorative driftwood. I don't know if he recognized the spot where he last saw his "cranky old man" friend, but after that he started behaving again.
Since then I've planted a tree, two berry bushes, and a couple of ferns on his grave spot. As I get more plants from people who knew and loved him, they'll go out there, too (it's a low spot out where I do conservation work; low chosen because out in the dunes most rain runs downslope, which waters the low spots best).
If it wasn't illegal, I would have taken his big recliner chair out and burned it on top of his grave before planting anything; he'd peed and pooped both in it several times when he couldn't get up and head for the door and I couldn't move fast enough to help him. But I did pull some of the wood framing, which will go in a small fire near his grave once spring is here; I have some decorative grasses that prefer an alkaline soil so the ashes will help them.
- = - = - = - = -
Many thanks to my buddy Tony for help on several parts of the process, and many to Knox who licked tears from my face and in other ways let me know that he missed Bammer, too.
On October 27, two weeks and three days after his fifteenth birthday, I took Bammer in to the vet to give him his final rest. He'd been losing weight and getting weaker even though his blood work showed all his organs were working fine and I was feeding him as much as he could eat; the vet said it looked like he had a non-malignant tumor that was sort of sucking the nutrition away. When one evening he fell over turning around and couldn't get back up, I knew I had to end it for him. He was getting pain meds but many evenings he lay in his big recliner and cried, so I knew he was hurting despite the meds and the vitamins and mineral nutrient pills.
Bammer with Knox, both know I'm up to something:
That's in the "terminal room" at the vet. I took Knox along hoping it would help him through losing Bammer, and for support.
Bammer's final nap:
They'd just removed the IV and he's sleeping, heart getting slower and slower. Knox insisted on sniffing the IV and each injection, then sniffed and licked Bammer a couple of times before he apparently decided that if Bammer was going to sleep then so would he.
The cardboard coffin the vet supplied just barely fit inside the wooden one I built from some thin plywood:
Due to circumstances he had to stay there in the coffin for almost another week. In that time I collected things to go in with him: a stick he brought back from the woods one day, some seashells from both ocean and bay, a rock from up the river from his final trip up there, one each of all the treats he liked, a small pillow I used to stick under his head when he fell asleep on the floor, the towel I used for a blanket over him when he fell asleep, a stick from out at his "best friend's" house near the beach.... The flowers are from the insurance office diagonally across the street from us. There are also a dozen peppermint candies under and around him, and another dozen went in before closing the coffin (they're a biodegradable alternative to mothballs for keeping critters from digging up a coffin), plus another dozen one by one as I filled his grave.
I took pictures when I buried him but I can't find them on my phone or the cloud backup!
Had a roaring fire in his honor that evening:
Knox had his own way of reacting to the loss:
Knocking things over and tearing things up. He also peed and pooped in the house for about ten days! He stopped when I took him out to Bammer's grave and sat with him and explained that Bammer isn't coming back, that Knox watched me build the coffin and put Bammer in it with some of his favorite things and sealed it and buried it, so Bammer is there under the ground, down below the decorative driftwood. I don't know if he recognized the spot where he last saw his "cranky old man" friend, but after that he started behaving again.
Since then I've planted a tree, two berry bushes, and a couple of ferns on his grave spot. As I get more plants from people who knew and loved him, they'll go out there, too (it's a low spot out where I do conservation work; low chosen because out in the dunes most rain runs downslope, which waters the low spots best).
If it wasn't illegal, I would have taken his big recliner chair out and burned it on top of his grave before planting anything; he'd peed and pooped both in it several times when he couldn't get up and head for the door and I couldn't move fast enough to help him. But I did pull some of the wood framing, which will go in a small fire near his grave once spring is here; I have some decorative grasses that prefer an alkaline soil so the ashes will help them.
- = - = - = - = -
Many thanks to my buddy Tony for help on several parts of the process, and many to Knox who licked tears from my face and in other ways let me know that he missed Bammer, too.
