R.I.P. Gallo ... July 18, 2001-June 17, 2008

It is harder than I ever thought it would be to write the words that we had to put Gallo to sleep last night.

Hopefully, in a day or a week or a month, I’ll be able to write something a little more poignant and emotional about my boy. But right now I just don’t have it. For now, as those of you know who’ve followed our struggles along here, I’ll lean on my habit of trying to content myself with writing about it in an effort to find some peace and solace in relating what happened.

G’Lo had gotten sick after work, but we chalked it up to him running around outside in the heat, drinking too much water too quickly and being over-excited. He went on a walk, played in the backyard and had plenty of energy through the evening. However, something seemed to be nagging at me in the middle of the night, and I woke up to Gallo panting somewhat heavily. I walked with him into the kitchen to see if he wanted any water, but he went past the bowl and to the back door, wanting to be let out.

As I normally do, I let him out on the back deck and into the backyard and waited for him in the kitchen. When he didn’t come back for a long time, I went outside to see what was going on. I looked over the deck railing and saw him just laying in the grass, a breeze blowing around him. He looked up at me and the bottom of my heart fell out. Not only was it unlike G to just lay on the ground like that, but he would normally come racing up the steps to me when he saw me. I had to call him a couple of times to get him to come up the stairs and inside.

When he walked directly to his dog blankets and laid down, still panting, I knew something was severely wrong. Yet inside, I knew that calling the vet would likely mean ending his life, for we had been told that if another tumor attacked Gallo, there was basically nothing left that we could do. But he was slow to respond and lethargic, and we had no choice but to call our vet. We were told that there was no one on staff that late at night, so we were recommended to the NC State Vet School Emergency Hospital, and our vet would call ahead to alert them of our arrival.


On the drive there, I sat in the back seat with G’Lo, and he put his head on my leg and tried to sleep. His breathing slowed so severely that there was one point when I wondered if he had passed. But when we got to the vet school, he jumped out of the car, got on the leash and walked with us to the locked door to the emergency area. He laid down on the pavement, however, as we waited to be let inside, a sure sign that his energy was flagging alarmingly.

After filling out some papers and letting G be taken back for examination, a doctor came out to let us know that they had found some fluid in his chest cavity. They had every reason to believe it was blood, but pending calling in a radiologist, they couldn’t be positive. If we called in a radiologist, that would be setting us on a decision course to allow another emergency surgery on Gallo. But we agreed that we couldn’t put our little guy through yet another surgery, and it was simply his time. We had done all we could do for him, and as hard as it was for us to give up the fight we had waged with him for four months, there was no other choice to make.

While they put a catheter in Gallo to boost his energy somewhat, they placed us in a “quiet room” to wait for him and say our goodbyes. He came in and immediately laid down on the cold floor, so we sat near him and held his head and petted him and whispered in his ear and covered him with love. After a few minutes, the doctor came in to administer the overdose that would stop his heart, and she told us during each step of the process exactly what she was doing and what his reaction would be. G’Lo wagged his tail a final few times as we petted him again, and as the drug was flushed through his tube, we could feel his breathing slow, and then the moment when his spirit left his body. It was at about 1:15 in the morning, and it had been almost exactly four months since the day when he was diagnosed with hemangiosarcoma and a little more than five weeks after his last emergency surgery, when we took him off chemotherapy. We were told that we could pay a little extra to have G cremated, so we could spread his ashes wherever we would like, and we elected to do that.

We left and walked down the quiet, antiseptic hallways and drove home in near-silence, numb. It was like a bad dream, and even though it was a moment we knew was inevitable and had been trying our best to prepare for for months, it still didn’t seem real. On the way home, I drove us by the home where Gallo (and I, in many ways) grew up, gazing upon it in the middle of the night and reliving some memories. We then drove on and went inside our own house, stood around for a while and wondered what we were supposed to do next. We said a brief prayer for Gallo to join his friends Cleo and Foster and Dudley and Lucy in the great open field in the sky, we took a couple of shots and toasted the “Miracle Dog,” and we laughed and cried as we remembered certain moments. We especially spoke fondly of our recent journey to the Outer Banks, and how our decision to have the last emergency surgery had allowed us to enjoy one last great trip with our little big boy, and how that had made it all worthwhile ... to see him with his nose in the air, smelling the salt drifting all around him, framed by the glow of a sunset.


We went to bed and stared at the ceiling for hours. And for the first time in seven years, I woke up without G-boy licking my hand, staring at me and wagging his tail … my own personal alarm clock was truly gone. Reality set in hard when I had to make calls to my family that Gallo had passed.

That numb feeling is still there, and I’m still not sure what I’m supposed to do next. Being a writer, it’s rare that I’m out of words, but that’s where I am. I miss him already and I’m sure I’ll spend a lot of time in the near future thinking I saw his shadow. He was the best part of me for several years, and he helped me become what I hope is a better person in the course of our seven years together.

Thank you as always for all of you who have sent your kind thoughts and words our way. They helped and they will forever be remembered.

"The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long ... and you have burned so very, very brightly ..."