What Biscuit Knows

Biscuit is fifteen, which for a dog his size is old in the way a very old person is old, where you stop saying the number and just say old. His back legs go. He's on three kinds of tablets. He can't hear the door any more and he sleeps most of the day in a patch of sun that he moves around the kitchen to follow, and when I come in he lifts his head and his tail goes twice against the floor, thump thump, and that's the whole greeting now. The vet, who is kind and about twenty-nine, said, "You'll know when." Everyone says that. My sister said it. The woman at the pet shop said it. It is a thing people say to make the decision sound like it will make itself, and I understand why they say it, and it isn't true. Nobody knows when. There isn't a morning where you come downstairs and he's holding up a sign. There's just a very slow slope, and you are standing on it, and every day looks almost exactly like the day before. So I've been trying to work out what I'm actually asking. Is he in pain? Some. The vet thinks some. The tablets help. He doesn't cry. He did once, in March, when he fell on the step, and I nearly rang then, and the next day he ate a whole chicken breast and looked at me like I was mad. Is he happy? He eats. He follows the sun. When I sit on the kitchen floor he puts his chin on my knee and sighs, and that's a sound of a creature who is where he wants to be. But I don't know what happy is for a dog, not really. I'm guessing from the outside. I've always been guessing from the outside. I've been guessing for fifteen years and calling it knowing him. Would he want this? That's the question people ask and it's the one that's meaningless. He doesn't want or not want in that way. He's not weighing it up. There's no version of Biscuit who considers his condition and forms a view. There's just Biscuit, in the sun, now, and again now, and again now.

Which leaves me. Which is what I've been avoiding, because it's the true thing. The decision isn't his. It was never going to be his. It's mine, entirely, and I'm going to make it on his behalf without any way of checking, and either I'll do it too early and have taken days from him he'd have spent in the sun, or too late and have let him hurt because I couldn't stand it, and I will never, ever know which. My sister says I'm overthinking it. She's probably right. She says, "He's a dog. Love him and then let him go." As if those were two things and not the same thing. This morning he couldn't get up. I lifted him, and he stood, shaky, and walked to the back door, and I opened it, and he went out into the garden and stood in the wet grass for a long time with his nose up, doing whatever it is he does with the air. Then he came in and lay down in the sun and thumped his tail twice. I've got the number on the fridge. I've had it there for a month. I looked at it for a while and then I sat down on the floor and he put his chin on my knee, and I still don't know, and I don't think I'm going to know, and I think that's what the decision is.