Lessons From An Old Dog

The hard truth about aging slower than your pet

I realized the other day, with a cold shock, that as of her last birthday, my dog Ivy is now older than I am. Obviously, I don’t mean in human years (if I did, this post would be headlined something like “Welsh Springer Spaniel is Miracle of Veterinary Science!”). I mean that she is now, in dog years, a bit older than me.

The worst part of having a pet is the incontrovertible fact that unless you acquire a young animal when you’re in your twilight years, you will certainly outlive them. It’s a cosmic cruelty. Watching a pet’s lifespan unfurl in a decade or so means seeing the arc of life in extremis, moving from dewy newness to hobbling old age at warp speed. I find it disorienting to accept Ivy now as a senior dog when in my relatively recent memory she was a bouncy pup. Seeing her showing her age makes me feel like time has been snapped like a rubber band.