Part 2: We Drove Our Dying Golden Retriever to the Beach to Say Goodbye — Then He Stood Up, and I Understood Something I Can’t Unlearn

Part 2

We got Banjo in the summer of 2011, eight weeks old, from a family two towns over whose retriever had surprised them with a litter.

Mark and I had been married three years. No kids yet. We brought home this ridiculous gold puppy with paws too big for him and named him Banjo because Mark said he had a face that looked like it was always about to play you a song.

I was twenty-eight then. I worked at a credit union. I still do.

Here is the thing about Banjo and water.

From the very first time we took him to that beach — he was maybe four months old — he was not a dog who jumped straight into the ocean. He was not reckless about it. He would trot down to the waterline, and he would stop, and he would let the foam run over his front paws and stand there for a moment, completely still, before he ever went any farther.

Mark used to laugh at it. “He’s checking the temperature,” he’d say. “Old man in a young dog.”

Banjo did it every time. Thirteen years. He would always go down and touch the water with his paws first, and stand, and only then would the day really begin.

I never thought about it as anything. It was just a thing he did. One of a hundred small things that make a dog your dog and not some other dog.

I want you to remember it. The touching the water first. The standing still.

I didn’t understand it then. I’m not sure I fully understand it now.

But I know it mattered.

Part 3

Banjo grew up alongside our whole life, the way a dog does when you get him young.

He was there the year Mark lost his job at the mill and we ate a lot of rice and Banjo slept against the front door like he’d appointed himself to the worry. He was there the morning I took the pregnancy test and sat down on the bathroom floor, and he came and pushed his whole head into my lap before I’d said a single word to anyone.

He was there when we brought Nora home. He did not jump. He did not get jealous. He walked over to the car seat on the living room floor, smelled her for a long, careful minute, and then lay down beside it and stayed.

For seven years he was Nora’s. He let her use him as a pillow. He let her dress him in a sun hat. He walked her to the bus stop and walked back to it in the afternoon, and he learned the sound of that specific bus from four blocks away.

And the beach was always the beach.

Every summer. Every good weekend in fall. Banjo on that gray sand, going straight down to the waterline first thing — touching the foam with his paws, standing still in it, reading something the rest of us couldn’t read — and then turning and exploding into the whole loud joy of the day.

The last two years, he slowed. His hips went. The gray came up his muzzle and around his eyes like frost. He stopped chasing the gulls and just watched them, the way you watch a thing you used to do.

The last time he ran into the water on his own was a Sunday in May. I didn’t know it was the last time. You never do.

By September he was not eating. By the first weekend of October the vet had said days.

And so we drove him to the beach, because we wanted his last good thing to be the thing he loved most, and we set him down on the sand, and we sat around him, and we waited for the end to come quietly the way the vet had promised it would.

We thought we were giving him a gift.

We did not understand that he was not finished giving us ours.

Part 4

It happened about forty minutes in.

Banjo had been lying on his side, eyes closed, nose working at the wind. Nora’s hand was on his ribs. I was memorizing his face. The tide had been coming in slowly, and the nearest line of foam was maybe fifteen feet from where Mark had set him down.

Then Banjo opened his eyes.

He did not look at the water. He looked at us. He looked at Mark, and at me, and last and longest at Nora — a slow, clear, unhurried look, the way you look at a room you are leaving.

And then he moved.

He got his front legs under him first. They shook. He got his back legs under him, the bad ones, the ones that had not held his weight in weeks, and they shook harder, and for a second I was sure he would go down.

He did not go down.

My thirteen-year-old dog, who could not walk out of the car that morning, stood up on a beach by himself.

Nobody helped him. I want to be exact about that, because it is the part nobody believes. Mark’s hands came up — instinct — and Banjo just waited, standing there trembling, until Mark understood and lowered them.

Then Banjo took a step.

Toward the water.

One step. His whole body swaying with it. Then a second step. The wind pushed his ears flat. Nora made a small sound and I put my arm around her and we did not move, because some part of all three of us understood that this was not ours to interrupt.

He walked to the waterline.

It took him a long time. I don’t know how long. Long enough that I stopped breathing right.

And then a thin sheet of foam slid up the sand and ran over his front paws — and Banjo stopped.

And he stood still in it.

The same way he had stood in it at four months old. The same way he had stood in it for thirteen years. Down at the waterline, paws in the cold foam, completely still, his head up, his nose in the salt wind, reading the whole ocean one more time.

He stood there for about thirty seconds.

I counted later, in my head, trying to make it last longer than it had.

Thirty seconds.

Then he turned around — slow, careful, swaying — and he walked back up the sand to us. To the exact spot. He lowered himself down beside Nora, against her leg, with his side pressed to all three of us.

He let out one long breath.

He closed his eyes.

And he did not open them again.

Part 5

My dog did not stand up that morning because he had gotten better.

I understood that, sitting on the sand with my hand on his still-warm side. He had not found some hidden reserve of health. There was no health left to find. The vet was right. He had days, and that was the last of them, and he had known it in his body better than any of us knew it in our heads.

What I understood — slowly, over the weeks after — was what he had actually spent that strength on.

A dying body has one instinct. To breathe. To keep the next breath coming. Every cell in a failing animal is bent toward staying. That is what the end looks like — a body fighting to hold one more minute, and one more, until it can’t.

Banjo did not do that.

He had a small, final, finite amount of strength left in him. Enough for one thing. And he did not spend it on one more minute of breathing.

He spent it on the walk to the water.

He chose. With the last fuel in his body, my dog made a choice — not to last a little longer, but to go and do the thing one last time. The standing in the foam. The salt in the wind. The whole reason the beach had ever been the beach.

He used his ending not to delay the ending. He used it to live.

And then, having done it, he came back and lay down in the middle of his family and let go.

He didn’t die where the car set him down. He died having gone to the water first. He died on his own terms, in the order he chose, the way he had started every good day of his life — touch the water, stand still, then turn to the people.

Part 6

It was Nora who said the thing that made the rest of it make sense to me.

We were still on the sand. Banjo was gone. Nora was crying the open, unembarrassed way seven-year-olds cry, and she looked up at me and asked: “Why did he stand up and go to the water?”

I did not have it ready. I just said the truest thing I could find.

“Because he wanted to touch the ocean one more time,” I told her. “The way you’d want to hug somebody one more time before they go.”

And the second I said it, the smallness of the foam ran back through thirteen years in my mind, and I understood I had been watching this for his entire life and had thought it was nothing.

The puppy at four months, stopping at the waterline, standing in the foam before the day began.

Mark laughing — he’s checking the temperature, old man in a young dog.

Every summer. Every visit. Touch the water first. Stand still. Then the day.

It had never been checking the temperature.

It was a greeting. It was Banjo’s way of saying hello to the thing he loved before he let himself have it. Thirteen years of the same small private hello, every single time, paws in the cold foam, head up, still.

And on the last morning of his life, too weak to walk off the car, he had spent everything he had left to go down and do it one more time.

Not a hello, that last time.

The same ritual. Turned around. A goodbye.

I have not been able to tell that part to anyone — about the foam, about the four-month-old puppy, about what the standing-still had always been — without my voice doing something I can’t control.

Mark didn’t say anything, that morning on the beach. He is not a man who has a lot of words at the worst moments.

He just waited until Nora and I were ready. And then he knelt down, and he slid both arms under Banjo one more time — under the chest, under the hips — and he lifted him.

There was sand in Banjo’s gold fur. There was salt drying on Mark’s forearms.

Mark stood up, holding our dog the way he had carried him down four hours earlier, and he started up the beach toward the car, and he did not look back at the water, and he did not let us see his face.

Part 7

We don’t go to a different beach now. I want to say that, because people assume we would.

We go to the same one. Coos Bay. The same gray sand.

And every time we go, the three of us do the same thing before anything else. We walk down to the waterline first. All of us. Mark, me, Nora. We let the foam run over our feet, and we stand there in it, still, for a moment, before the day starts.

Nora started it. The first time we went back, that spring, she just walked straight down to the water and stood in the foam without being told, and Mark and I looked at each other and walked down and stood beside her.

We don’t talk while we do it. There’s nothing to say. It takes about thirty seconds.

It is Banjo’s hello. We kept it.

Nora is nine now. She is the one who keeps the time. She does not announce it, but I have watched her — she stands in the foam and her lips move, counting, and when she gets where she’s going she gives a small nod, and that’s when we turn and walk up the sand and let the day begin.

I asked her once what number she counts to.

She said, “Thirty. Same as him.”

Part 8

Banjo’s collar is in a wooden box on the shelf by our front door.

There is still a little sand in it. I have never cleaned it out. I never will.

People say a dog gives you their whole life. That’s true. But that morning on the beach Banjo gave us one more thing, on purpose, with the last of himself.

He showed us what you do with an ending.

You don’t spend it holding on.

You stand up. You walk to the water. You touch it one last time.

Then you turn around, and you go home to the people, and you close your eyes.

Follow this page for more stories about the animals who teach us how to leave, and how to stay.