Part 2: My Eighty-Five-Year-Old Father Had One Last Request in Hospice — He Wanted Us to Bring His Fourteen-Year-Old Dog Up Onto the Bed. The Dog Did Not Get Down for Four Hours. Three Days Later, the Vet Told Us Something About Dogs I Have Not Stopped Thinking About.

Part 2

I want to tell you about my father and Beau before I tell you the rest, because you need to understand what those two were to each other.

My father was not a sentimental man. He was a lineman. He was practical, and quiet, and he showed love the way men of his time and place showed love — by fixing your car, by showing up with a chainsaw after a storm, by being there and not saying much about it.

He had not, that any of us could remember, ever been a dog person before Beau. We’d had dogs growing up — outside dogs, farm dogs — and my father had been kind to them and fed them and not thought about them much.

Beau was different, and the difference started the year my mother got sick.

My mother was sick for fourteen months before she died in 2019. My father took care of her at home for thirteen of those fourteen months. He learned to do things a lineman from Hancock County had never imagined doing. He learned the medications. He learned the lifting. He got up at night.

Beau, who was eight years old then, did something during those fourteen months that I watched happen and did not have words for at the time.

Beau started splitting his time.

He had always been my father’s dog. But during my mother’s illness, Beau began spending his days lying beside my mother’s chair, and his nights at the foot of my mother’s side of the bed, and he only went back to being fully my father’s dog in the last weeks, when my mother slept most of the day and my father sat alone in the kitchen at two in the morning with the lights off.

Beau sat with him. Every one of those nights. On the kitchen floor. In the dark.

After my mother died, my father and Beau closed ranks in a way the whole family noticed. They became, the four of us used to say to each other on the phone, “an old married couple.” My father talked to Beau. He told Danny once that Beau was “the only one who doesn’t argue with me,” and Danny had laughed, and my father had not been entirely joking.

For five years, in that white frame house on the county road, it was the two of them.

My father was eighty when Beau slept on my mother’s side of the bed for the first time. He never moved him. I asked my father about it once, the Christmas before he got sick. I said, “Dad, does it not bother you, him being up on Mom’s side?”

My father had looked at me for a moment.

He had said: “Somebody ought to be on it.”

That is the last thing I am going to tell you before I tell you about the Thursday.

Part 3

I am going to tell you about the nine days in hospice, but I am going to tell you the parts that matter and not all of it, because some of it belongs to my family.

My father went into the hospice facility in Owensboro on the first Monday of March. The cancer had started in his pancreas and by then it was most places. He had declined a final round of treatment in January. He had told the oncologist, and then he had told us, that he had had a long life and a good wife and four children who turned out and he was not going to spend his last months sick from medicine instead of sick from the thing itself. He had been clear about it. He had been calm about it. My father was calm about most things.

The four of us — me, my sister Carol, my brother Wendell, and my brother Danny — set up a rotation. None of us let him be alone. My own children, his grandchildren, came in and out. By that Thursday, there were eleven of us in and around that room: his four children, four of his grandchildren, two of his grandchildren’s spouses, and one great-granddaughter who was two years old and did not understand and kept being taken out to the hallway.

My father was lucid for the first five days. We talked. He told stories I had heard and stories I had not. He told Wendell where the deed to the back five acres was. He told Carol he was sorry about something from 1986 that Carol would not tell the rest of us about and that I have decided not to ask her about ever.

He asked about Beau every single day.

How was Beau eating. Was Beau getting his walk. Was Beau sleeping all right at Danny’s.

Danny told him the truth on the first two days — that Beau was not eating well, that Beau stood at the door — and then Danny stopped telling him the truth, because there was nothing my father could do about it from a hospice bed and the truth was only hurting him.

On the sixth day, my father stopped talking much.

On the seventh and eighth days, he mostly slept. When he was awake, he was not always all the way with us. The hospice nurse, a woman named Pamela who had been doing this work for twenty-two years and who was, I want to say clearly, one of the finest human beings I have ever been in a room with, told us that this was the body doing what the body does. She told us to keep talking to him. She told us hearing is the last thing to go.

On the ninth day — Thursday — my father had not spoken a full sentence in close to forty-eight hours.

We were all there. It was early afternoon. The light was coming in the west window of the room, the way it does in March, thin and a little gold. Carol was reading the Twenty-Third Psalm out loud, not because my father had asked but because Carol needed something to do with her voice.

My father opened his eyes.

He looked around the room. He looked at all of us, slowly, one at a time, and I believe — I will believe until I die — that he knew exactly who every one of us was.

Then he said it.

“Bring Beau up here.”

Four words. Clear. All of his remaining strength spent on four words.

Danny was already reaching for his phone. Danny’s wife was already getting her car keys.

Part 4

It took Danny’s wife fifty minutes to drive to Lewisport and back.

We did not know, the whole fifty minutes, whether my father would still be with us when the dog arrived. Pamela the nurse did not say it that way, but she rearranged some things, and she made sure my father was comfortable, and she told us, quietly, in the hall, that she had seen people hold on for a reason and that we should not be surprised either way.

My father did not speak again during those fifty minutes. But he did not close his eyes either. He lay there, looking at the ceiling, breathing in the slow way he had been breathing, and I sat by the bed and held his hand and I told him Beau was coming. I told him over and over. Beau’s coming, Dad. Danny’s wife has got him. He’s coming.

I do not know if he heard me.

I have chosen to believe he heard me.

Danny’s wife came through the door of that hospice room at two-forty in the afternoon with a fourteen-year-old Pit Bull mix on a leash.

Beau came into the room and he stopped.

He stood just inside the doorway. His white muzzle lifted. His old nose worked the air. And then he did something none of us had to help him with, none of us had to coax, none of us had to lift him for.

He walked straight to the bed.

He did not look at any of the eleven people in that room. He did not look at me. He walked to the side of the bed, and he gathered himself the way an old dog gathers himself, and he jumped.

He did not make it all the way the first time. Danny caught his back end and steadied him. And then Beau was up on the bed, and he climbed — carefully, deliberately — up the length of my father’s body, and he lay down with his chest and his head on my father’s chest, his white muzzle tucked just under my father’s chin.

My father’s eyes were closed by then.

But his right hand came up off the blanket.

It came up slow. It was the last deliberate movement I ever saw my father make. His hand came up, and it found the top of Beau’s head, between the ears, and it settled there.

And my father let out a breath.

I have heard that breath described, since, by people who do this work. It is a particular breath. It is the breath of a body that has been waiting for something and has been given it.

The room was very quiet. The west light was on the bed. Carol had stopped reading. My two-year-old great-niece, out in the hallway, had stopped fussing, as if even she knew.

My father lay there with his dog on his chest and his hand on his dog’s head.

Pamela the nurse stood at the foot of the bed and she did not move and she did not tell anyone to do anything.

My father died twenty minutes later.

His hand was still on Beau’s head.

Part 5

I want to tell you what happened after, because the part after is the part the vet would explain to us three days later, and it is the part I think about most.

When my father passed, the room did what rooms do. There was crying. There were the things you have to do, the people you have to call. Pamela was gentle and quiet and competent and she gave us time.

Beau did not move.

He stayed exactly where he was. On my father’s chest. His muzzle under my father’s chin. He did not lift his head when Carol sobbed. He did not lift his head when Wendell put both hands over his face. He did not lift his head when the two-year-old was finally brought in and did not understand and reached out and touched my father’s foot.

Beau lay on my father’s chest, and he did not move.

After about an hour, Danny said, gently, that maybe we should get Beau down. And he reached for him.

And Pamela — twenty-two years a hospice nurse — put her hand on Danny’s arm.

She said: “Leave him.”

She said: “He’ll know when.”

So we left him.

We left Beau on my father’s chest, and the family moved through the things a family has to move through, and the funeral home was called and told there was no rush, and the afternoon turned into evening, and the gold light moved off the bed and the room went blue and then dark, and somebody turned on the lamp in the corner.

Beau lay on my father’s chest for four hours.

I sat by that bed for all four of them. I had my hand on Beau’s back for most of it. I could feel him breathing. He was not distressed. He was not whining. He was doing something, and all eleven of us came, slowly, over those four hours, to understand that whatever he was doing, it was not ours to interrupt.

At a little after seven o’clock that evening, Beau lifted his head.

He had not lifted it in four hours.

He raised his white muzzle, and he looked at my father’s face — really looked at it, the way I had watched that dog look at my father a thousand times across a kitchen — and then he leaned forward, and he licked my father’s cheek. Once. Just once.

Then Beau stood up on the bed.

He stepped, carefully, over my father. He came to the edge of the bed. And Danny lifted him down, and Beau’s old legs touched the floor, and he did not look back at the bed.

He walked to the door of the room and he sat down and he waited to be taken home.

We did not understand, that night, that Beau had just told us goodbye.

Part 6

We buried my father on the following Tuesday in the cemetery in Lewisport, in the plot next to my mother, in the Maddox section where his parents and two of his brothers are.

Beau went home with Danny after the hospice room.

Beau did not eat on Friday. He did not eat on Saturday. He drank a little water. He lay on the corduroy bed Danny had brought over from my father’s house, and he did not get up for his walks, and he did not stand at the door anymore.

He had stopped standing at the door.

Danny called me on Saturday night and said, “Tess, something’s wrong with Beau,” and I said, “He’s grieving, Danny, dogs grieve,” and Danny said, “No. Tess. Something’s wrong,” and I drove out to the county road on Sunday morning.

Danny was right.

Beau was not standing at the door because Beau was not getting up. He lay on the corduroy bed and he lifted his eyes to me when I came in but he did not lift his head. He was not in pain — I want to say that, because I asked, and the vet would confirm it. He was not in distress. He was an old dog, fourteen years old, with an old dog’s failing heart, who had carried himself through one more thing he had needed to do and was now finished.

Danny and I took him to the vet in Hawesville on Sunday afternoon.

The vet was a woman named Dr. Sutton who had known Beau his whole life — she had given him his first puppy shots in 2011. She examined him for a long time, and she was kind, and she did not rush.

She told us Beau’s heart was failing. She told us it had likely been failing for some months. She told us there was nothing to fix and nothing that had been missed.

And then Danny asked her — Danny, my baby brother, fifty-one years old, asked her the way a child asks a question — Danny said: “Dr. Sutton. Did he wait? For Dad? Did he hang on so he could be there?”

Dr. Sutton did not give us a tidy answer. She is a good vet and a serious person and she did not tell us a fairy tale.

But she said this. She said: “I have been doing this for twenty-six years. And I will tell you what I have seen. I have seen, more than once, an old animal who is bonded to a person decline very quickly after that person dies. I cannot tell you the mechanism. I am not going to pretend I can. But I will tell you that I no longer find it surprising. Some dogs, when their person goes — they seem to decide to go too. I have stopped trying to explain it. I have just come to believe it’s true.”

Beau died on Tuesday.

He died at Danny’s house, on the corduroy bed, with Danny sitting on the floor next to him and his hand on Beau’s side.

It was the same Tuesday we buried my father.

It was three days, almost to the hour, after Beau had licked my father’s cheek in that hospice room and climbed down off the bed and walked to the door.

Part 7

The four of us — me, Carol, Wendell, and Danny — made a decision on Tuesday night, and we made it fast, and we made it without one minute of disagreement, which is not a thing the four of us are otherwise known for.

We were going to bury Beau in the same cemetery as our father.

You cannot, in the Lewisport cemetery, bury a dog in the family plot. We knew that. We did not ask anyone to bend it. But the Lewisport cemetery sits next to a wide hayfield, and the man who keeps the cemetery, a man my father had known for forty years, walked the fence line with Danny on Wednesday morning, and there is a strip of ground just outside the cemetery’s back corner, under a hackberry tree, that belongs to the family that owns the hayfield.

Danny knew that family. Danny talked to them on Wednesday afternoon.

They said yes before Danny finished asking.

We buried Beau on Thursday, one week after my father had said bring Beau up here, under the hackberry tree at the back corner of the Lewisport cemetery.

Wendell measured it.

Wendell is an engineer. Wendell needed to measure it. He paced it off and then he went back with a tape because pacing it off was not good enough for Wendell, and the distance from my father’s headstone to the spot under the hackberry tree where Beau is buried is six feet.

Six feet.

Wendell told us the number standing in the cemetery on Thursday with the tape still in his hand, and Carol started crying, and Danny started crying, and I started crying, and Wendell — who had measured it precisely because he could not cry, because measuring was the thing he could do instead — Wendell put the tape measure in his pocket and put his arms around the three of us.

Six feet.

Close enough.

Part 8

It has been a year.

I drive out to the Lewisport cemetery about once a month. I bring flowers for my mother and my father. There is a Maddox plot and there is a hackberry tree and there is a strip of ground between them, and I have come to think of all of it, the whole corner, as one place.

My father was eighty-five. He climbed poles for thirty-nine years. He loved one woman for fifty-five of them. He was not a sentimental man.

His last sentence on this earth was four words long, and it was the name of his dog.

Beau was fourteen. He slept on my mother’s side of the bed because somebody ought to be on it. He waited for my father, in a hospice room, long enough to lie on his chest and feel his hand. Then he licked his cheek once, and got down, and three days later he followed him.

The vet would not promise me that is what happened.

I do not need the vet to promise me.

Dad. Beau.

You are six feet apart under the hackberry tree.

That is close enough.

Go on, now. Both of you.

You are not alone.

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