The Longest Minute

A minute.

Sixty seconds to say goodbye.

That’s all the time that I had left with him as the needle slid into his leg.

I stared into his drooping eyes, looked at the blood-tainted saliva dripping from the corner of his mouth. They said that this was the best thing that we could do for him, a last kind act for a best friend…but if that were the case, then why did my heart feel so heavy?

I wanted to stroke him, to tell him that everything was going to be all right, but I could not lie to him. He deserved better than that, better than to die in the back of my dad’s truck. Life isn’t fair, though.

I forced myself to think about the good times. Just a few months prior, we had been running around in the back yard, playing as though the lymphoma diagnosis had meant nothing. He acted as young as he ever had, and I would have sworn to you that he wasn’t sick. I would have told you that the lump in his cheek had just been a cyst from another thorn that he had stupidly eaten.

But time passed. He didn’t stay that way forever. Before my very eyes, he rapidly devolved into the skeleton form that now lay before me. He went from running to walking, from walking to crawling. Eventually, he stopped trying at all. So long as he was at my feet, he was content. We were content.

It tore my heart to not be at his side now, but there was no room. There was only room for me to watch on as the concoction that would take his life rushed into his veins, causing his body to twitch and convulse as he took his final breaths.

All too late, I looked away.

My dad wrapped his arms around me and pulled me into an embrace. I cried into his chest, shaking and trembling as terribly as my dog had as the life had left him.

I wanted to fall. I wanted to pass out. I wanted to yell at everyone there, tell them that it was all a big mistake and that we shouldn’t be doing this.

He was my dog, the one I had raised since a puppy. He was mine to protect no matter what. He was my fur baby. He was my world.

But it was too late.

In under a minute, the longest minute of my life, it was all over.

I braved a glanced over at him. He appeared to be sleeping. The bloody drool still dripped from his mouth onto the towel stretched out beneath him on the floor of my dad’s truck. I pulled myself away from my dad and walked up to the truck, past the vet tech and to my eternally sleeping baby. I took the corner of the towel and wiped the bloody drool away from my dog’s mouth.

“Goodbye,” I whispered, trying not to choke on my words. “I’ll miss you.”