Frodo's Death

 

Frodo was sick.  Frodo was dying.  

For a week, the dog watched Gander.  Frodo’s eyes were big and wet.  Sometimes, he whimpered.  At night, the dog was restless and Gander heard him whining when he dragged himself from place to place.  He lay on his belly on the hardwood floor for a while and, then, rolled onto his side.  Then, he staggered over to the carpet and rested there.  Frodo was too stiff to climb up on the couch where he used to sleep.  Gander didn’t know how he could help the sick dog.  

Gander wasn’t well himself.  His joints ached and he couldn’t walk very well.  He never imagined that he would grow to be so old.  His wife was gone and most of his friends and, now, his dog was dying.  Vials and bottles of medicine stood by Gander’s bedside like pieces battling one another on a diabolical chess board.  

In the morning, Gander found the old dog lying on his side next to his steel water bowl.  The dog’s tongue was hanging from between his teeth but the animal was still breathing.  

Gander remembered when Frodo was a puppy.  He was a mischievous rascal always leaping here and there with boundless energy.  Gander recalled throwing a stick in his backyard for the puppy to retrieve.  Frodo was tireless, charging out to the place under the old oak tree where the stick had fallen.  Each time, he seized the stick in his mouth and pranced back to Gander tail wagging and bright-eyed with joy.  How long had they played in that way?  Gander wasn’t sure any more but he hoped it had been at least an hour or, even, two.    

Gander rolled the old dog onto a blanket and, then, called his neighbor whom he saw working with a rake in his side-yard.  He neighbor shook his head sadly when he saw the stricken dog.  “He was a very good dog,” Gander’s neighbor said.  The two men hauled the inert dog to Gander’s van and they carefully set the animal in the back of the vehicle.  Frodo opened his eyes for a moment when Gander slipped the leash around his neck and tried to wag his tail, but it only twitched a little.

He was alone when he came back from the vet’s office.  If he had been younger, Gander would have brought the dog home and buried him under the old oak tree.  But he was too feeble to accomplish this.  Gander carried Frodo’s leash and hung it around the bedpost next to the chess pieces of painkillers and heart and gut medication.  

Gander couldn’t fall asleep.  He thought about Frodo.  He knew that it was blasphemous to speculate about such a thing, but he wondered if Frodo was in heaven.  Gander imagined the little brown dog dancing back and forth under the oak tree, tail wagging, waiting for the stick to drop down between his front paws.  He supposed that if the dog were in heaven Frodo would be playing ‘fetch’ in some celestial backyard.  But there was something wrong with this picture.  As he thought about the little dog carrying the stick in his jaws, Gander knew that someone was missing.  Dogs are companion-animals and they are unhappy without human friendship.  

Gander wondered whether you are given a healthy, pain-free body in heaven.  He had heard something about the resurrection of the body and supposed if that idea meant anything, Frodo would be romping around in heaven’s backyard with all the vigor and spirit of a puppy.  

He slept for a few hours and rose before dawn.  Gander surveyed the pills and vials next to his pillow.  Death had made a move at midnight and, now, it looked like checkmate.  

Gander carried the bottles of pills into the bathroom and ran the faucet.  He knew his next move.  After that, it was all a mystery.