Lessons from an Old Dog About Creaky Bones and Graying Hair

The terrible truth about pets aging faster than you

I realized the other day, with a shock, that as of her last birthday, my dog 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 lifespan unfurl in a decade or so means seeing the arc of life in extremis, moving from being dewy with 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 leggy pup. Seeing her now showing her age makes me feel like time has been snapped like a rubber band.

The dog I had before Ivy died very suddenly, at the not-so-senior age of nine, so we never saw him growing old. Ivy is eleven. She’s in good shape, but she is not the dog she was five years ago, or even one year ago; aging starts slowly and then seems to accelerate, and suddenly you can notice the difference in a month more, and, I suppose, eventually we…