My little man is gone. But he’s also still here. I never thought he would die. Truly. I know it’s crazy, but I mean it. I never imagined it probably because I couldn’t.
Walter Block was my constant companion. My shadow. My love. My comfort. My peace. My distraction. My joy.
He was my little man. And now he’s gone.
Walter Block was a chihuahua terrier. I adopted him in 2008. I had gone to the shelter with my girlfriend because she wanted to visit the cats. But when we arrived, there was a pen in the corner of the room with some furry creatures in it.
“What are those?” I asked, pointing to the creatures in the pen.
“Dogs,” the shelter volunteer said with an odd look on her face.
“No,” I said. “Those. Over there,” pointing again at the pen.
“Dogs.”
“Dogs? Not ferrets or some other feral creature?”
“Nope,” she said, with an exasperated sigh. “Dogs.”
“Can I?” I asked, pointing to the pen again.
“Have at it,” she said. And I did.
Inside that pen, there were, indeed, dogs — two of them. They were scrawny and mangy and shaky and scared. I picked one up and then the other.
“What happened to them?” I asked the shelter volunteer.
“They were bait dogs,” she said. I must have looked confused because she continued. “They throw them in to rile up dogs in a dog fight.”
My eyes welled up with tears. I couldn’t even imagine these tiny little things going through that, especially the littler and uglier one, the one I was already way too in love with.
I finally got myself to put him down. I left crying. I wanted that little guy. But I wasn’t in the market for a dog. An hour later I was back there signing the papers. I just couldn’t leave him there.
We did everything together. I took him everywhere. He sat with me when I wrote. He walked with me every day through the neighborhood and the park. He slept with me, his little body curled into mine under the covers.
But in the last couple of years, things went downhill quickly. He became blind in both eyes.
He had terrible dementia. He was peeing everywhere, all the time. He couldn’t seem to stop himself from drinking so much water that it would immediately make him throw up. Then his legs started to fail.
I took him to the vet on a Friday afternoon last winter, hoping she could offer some kind of help.
“We could do a bunch of tests,” she said. “But even if we find out what’s wrong, there won’t likely be anything we can do at this point. It would simply be too much for his little body.”
He was skin and bones at that point. All he did was shake and sleep — stopping only to bump into walls and drink too much water and gobble down his little dish of wet food, his only happiness, it seemed, at the end.
“Are you saying it’s time?” I asked. “Only you can decide,” she said.
“But how?” I asked. “If a pet has three things he loves,” she said. “Then it might not be time. Otherwise…” Her voice trailed off as she said it
“Dinner,” I said. “And lying in the sun. Maybe.” Then I started to cry. I knew it was time. I knew it was time when we got in the car to go to the vet. I just didn’t want to know.
“Do you want to take him home for the weekend and come back Monday?” I shook my head no. That seemed worse somehow.
They took him back and put in an IV catheter. In the meantime, I called my wife, and she came up to meet me with a bag of chicken for the little man.
They brought him back to me, and he snuggled into my lap, eating his chicken in rapid, giant chomps. “But he’s so happy now,” I said.
“We can wait,” she said. “But you can’t hold him and give him chicken 24 hours a day forever. His heart is failing.”
I couldn’t stop the tears, and I knew I would never truly be “ready.” But, finally, I managed to get out the word: “Ok.” They put in the meds, and, just like that, he was gone. His head dropped, and I wished I had had my hand under it. That simple movement hit me harder than I could have ever imagined.
I cried for days. Still do sometimes. The vet sent him to be cremated, and I tossed and turned every night thinking about what I wanted to do with his cremains. As usual, my best friend Rachel came to the rescue, introducing me to a company called Parting Stone.
They take the cremains — animal or human —– and turn them into stones. They look like river rocks, varying in color, shape, size, number and texture, based solely on the cremains.
Everyone there was so kind. They kept me informed about the entire process, so I knew when they received his cremains and when they were working on them and when I would receive them.
As I opened the box when they arrived, I cried and cried. And when I touched them for the first time, I felt the most incredible sense of calm and my tears subsided. I suddenly felt him there with me once again.
The stones are so beautiful — all different shapes and sizes. I have them in a beautiful, handmade bowl in my study.
I miss him — every day. And I am grateful to still have him by my side in a form that I can interact with. I hold those stones when I need him. I rub my fingers across the smooth surfaces and can still feel him with me, reminding me that he’ll always be my little man.