Generosity brings life into the world

Ajax is the perfect little dog, but we almost lost him several years ago.

My wife and I bought Ajax just a few months after we married because our first apartment had a rat problem. He’s a rat terrier. That doesn’t mean he looks like a rat. It means he’s bred to catch them. And he did his job very well.

These days, he’s as old as our marriage. (In dog years, my wife and I have been married a very long time.) But Ajax almost didn’t make it past his fifth birthday.

His back gave out. It was subtle at first. He stopped jumping. His hind legs would go wobbly. He whined and yelped when we touched his back. After a few days, he stopped getting out of bed except to do his business in the backyard. Then he stopped eating. Then he stopped doing his business in the backyard and started messing in his bed.

When a dog pees in his bed, something is really, really wrong.

The vet had been working with us to get the spinal swelling down, but clearly it wasn’t working. Ajax was going to die.

“You don’t have to put him to sleep,” the vet said. “We could do back surgery and fix his vertebrae.”

It involved some kind of insane cartilage replacement procedure that would turn him into a bionic super dog—if it worked.

“We can’t make any guarantees, though. Worst case scenario of a successful surgery is that he loses his hind legs and becomes a cart dog.”

You’ve seen cart dogs, right? The little guys with wheels where their hind legs should be.

But the procedure was not affordable.

That didn’t seem fair, you know? We were a single income family on a teacher’s salary with a new baby. We didn’t want to let our dog die just because we couldn’t make the economics work. (Even now, this story makes me think of people across the world who have to let their children die because they can’t make the economics work.)

That’s when I experienced the most startling act of generosity I’ve ever experienced. My wife’s brother offered to foot the bill. We didn’t let him pay for all of it, if I remember correctly. But the dog would have died without his help.

It wasn’t cheap. And accepting my brother-in-law’s generosity wasn’t simple. Was a dog even worth this kind of money? I asked the vet, and he said, “Ajax is young. You’ve got several good years of dog left.”

So we did it. The surgery worked. Ajax had a Frankenstein style track of staples down the length of his back for several weeks. Then he was jumping and frisking and doing business in the backyard like his old self.

Here’s what I learned. Generosity brings life into the world. Sometimes it breathes new life into stale despair.

Sometimes it extends the life of a little dog so my kids can grow up and love him just like we do.

Ajax won’t last forever. At thirteen he doesn’t have as many years of good dog left as he once did. But that’s the thing about generosity and good will and kindness. It doesn’t end the despair. It doesn’t destroy death. It doesn’t save the world.

But we don’t have to save the world in a big dramatic way to do something wonderful.

Sometimes we can just save a dog for a little while longer.

NOTE: I wrote this to support Robert Hruzek’s current writing project What I Learned from the Generosity of Others.

Tagged as: dogs, middlezonemuzings, robert hruzek, what I learned from, WILF