It is never easy. It’s the promise you make when you first take your puppy home. You are going to do your best to give him a healthy, happy life. Though you can’t imagine it at the time, when that playful ball of fluff exemplifies all that is joyful in life, there is another promise implicit in the first: when the quality of that life deteriorates, when your dog is neither healthy nor happy, you are going to facilitate a peaceful, comfortable death.

We have had to say goodbye to five cherished pets this way, keeping our promise as our hearts were breaking. Yesterday, it was our beloved 12 ½ year old English labrador, Logan, whose failing kidneys led to failure of his other major organs, leaving him bewildered, very weak, and miserable. He had a good death: a peanut butter treat to distract him from the sedative, a few minutes of drowsiness while he was being petted and kissed, and then the final injection which sent him into oblivion. His suffering was over, while our grieving had commenced. We toasted dear sweet Logan that evening, remembering his goofiness, his annoyingly incessant licking, his joyfully wagging tail which could knock over a full cup of coffee, his friendliness to all, and his pure loving heart.

When and if I am in that state, I would welcome that same death to mitigate my suffering and that of my family. Under current law, that is not my right. When my parents were each dying of cancer, they would have welcomed it as well. The best medicine had to legally offer was strong and stronger opioid doses which rendered them pain-free (I hope) but too out of it to recognize even me, their only child.

A sad state of affairs and no easy answers, I know.