Remembering Tucker: Writing What You Don’t Know and Wish You Didn’t Have to Learn

By Nichole Bernier

There is a scene in my novel where a dog is put to sleep at a veterinarian’s office. It is a telling moment, because the dog’s owner slips away at the beginning of the procedure, leaving his girlfriend to comfort the dog at the end of his life.

The euthanasia of a dog is not something I had ever seen myself, and writing this scene was not something I enjoyed. At the time, our own dog was a healthy seven year old, and I resisted thoughts of the day we’d have to say goodbye to him, whenever that might be. It also brought to mind the Golden Retriever of my childhood, who’d lived to be 18. By the time she was eased out of this world, I’d already left home and hadn’t had the chance to say goodbye.

But years later, I was there for my own cat’s last moments. And as much as I didn’t want to dwell on that memory, when it came time to write, I did know what it was like to be in that exam room doing the hard thing.

The veterinarian had agreed to let her stay on my shoulder, which had always been her favorite place to be. Her front paws kneaded at my shoulderblades, small tapping movements that felt on that day like a pat on the back, You’re doing the right thing.I was five months pregnant with my third child, but that cat had been my first baby, adopted 12 years before from the ASCPA in New York. Its staffer had even questioned on my ability to be a working, single kitten-mother: “How late are you at the office?” she’d asked. “Do you travel?”

As they gave my cat the sedative I stroked the soft lawn of her back, feeling the bump of each vertebrae. Soon, her weight settled in a way that conveyed her departure even more than the last injection would. As painful as it was, there was some relief in knowing I’d had the strength to be present: I had seen her out of this life with the same companionship she’d shown me through it.

Still, I knew my perspective was different than the one I was writing for my novel. I’d held my cat in my arms as she’d died, an intensely intimate act, but I had not had the experience of looking at her as it happened. I thought about asking a few friends what it was like to euthanize their dogs, but frankly, I didn’t want to put any of us through that. I assumed I could extrapolate well enough from my own event to create this new one. Writers must always be writing about things they have not themselves experienced.

But when it came time for me to experience it for myself, there were things I had not known. It had not occurred to me that a dog put on a metal examination table might work to stay up rather than lay down. That even wearied, he’d be reluctant to concede his ability to stand, to give up his view of the world upright for the last time.

I didn’t know that after the sedative the pupils would dilate, increasing and decreasing as we spoke to him. I thought it was in response to the familiarity of our fading voices, my husband’s and mine, but it could have been just a reaction to the chemical. Or maybe in his final moments, a dog sees bits of his life as people are said to do: Revisiting the first swim in the lake chasing a thrown stick, and the arrival of each noisy newborn who would grow to pull his tail. Recalling his first meeting with that cat, who had hissed until eventually becoming dear as a sibling. And finally settling back on the memory of those actual siblings, littermates of fox-colored pups photographed together in a large Christmas box for the owners who would claim them at eight weeks. Hopefully in his visions there were flashes of the kindness I’d shown him instead of the scoldings, which at that moment I was remembering all too well.

In the end I rubbed his never-groomed-enough ears, as my character had in the scene I’d written. But unlike my character I bent low and told him Good boy, over and over. Because unlike my character I was the dog’s owner, and an owner knows the final words her dog wants to hear. That in spite of the counter surfing and carpet soiling, he’d been a very good boy.

Those are the things I didn’t know when I wrote about the fictional dog five years ago. But I know them now.

Originally appeared on Beyond the Margins July 29, 2010.