Our theme for the month of October is “childhood fears.”
Somewhere in the mess of my childhood memory box rests a piece of paper listing the eighteen pets who sojourned with the Schoon household, including but not limited to: two caterpillars (named Eric and Carle), eleven bunnies (five of whom were born in my bedroom), and two guinea pigs who thought they belonged on stage at Carnegie Hall.
Also on that sheet of paper are the days that all of these pets died. Call me a morbid child; I remained constantly aware of the fact that my pets were going to die. Some of these deaths I mourned deeply, some passed almost unnoticed.
Zoey’s death? That one I feared.
Zoey was a mutt, border collie and lab mostly, adopted into our family from the SPCA when she was just over a year old. Ask my dad, and he’ll tell you Zoey was the “eternal optimist” who always believed in the possibility of a “yes,” no matter how many times she had been told “no.” Ask my mom, and she’ll tell you Zoey was scared—of thunderstorms, of fireworks, and of another abandonment, performing daring acts of escape when we were out of sight for too long. Zoey was my brother Nate’s dog more than anyone else’s, though. He remembers her faithful presence, her playfulness, and also that one time she left a mouse on his bed as a present—maybe there was some cat thrown in that mutt mixture somewhere.
I started watching her breathe when she was ten and I was eight. Ten was old for a dog, old enough to die, I reasoned. Zoey slept on an oversized green blanket, nestled at the foot of my parents’ bed. My room, attached to theirs, put me in a prime position to watch her sleep, and most importantly, to watch her breathe. She often snored. That was good. It meant she was still alive.
What would I have done if she stopped breathing? Shaken her vigorously probably. Rocked her body back and forth, tempo building alongside my worry, as if my quickened heartbeat and shallow breathing could supplement hers. It was the only thing I knew to do.
It worked every time. I used to sit on the ugly carpet in my parents’ room, by the foot of the corduroy couch in the living room, under the dining room table, or wherever Zoey happened to be sleeping and just watch. My eyes would drift away from the TV, my book, or my plate and toward the steady rise and fall of her chest. In. Out. In. Out. In. Out. As her sleep deepened, the breaths did too.
In.
Out.
Pause.
In.
Out.
Pause.
When those pauses got too long, I would shake her. The feel of my hand was often enough to elicit the opening of a single, chocolate-brown eye. At the risk of anthropomorphizing her too much, she looked downright annoyed. I had probably interrupted a beautiful dream about Milkbones or licking the dredges of an ice cream carton. I felt guilty, but not enough to stop.
I remember telling my mom once that holding onto Zoey felt like my hands were covered in butter; try as I might, she continued to slip away. She was getting older and I couldn’t stop it. She didn’t run as often. She lost her signature tolerance of our other pets, snapping at a rabbit who ventured too close. Her joints creaked and her hips sagged when she walked.
I watched the slow erosion of her life, afraid that any day might be the one when she stopped greeting us at the door after school. She couldn’t make it to the big mailbox halfway down the road. She lost control of her bowels. She only wanted soft foods. I overheard conversations about quantifying a dog’s quality of life and shut my ears.
We put her down when she was fourteen and I was twelve. My parents had to carry her into the veterinarian’s office—she couldn’t walk anymore. “Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened,” I was told, but it never clicked. I had spent the happening afraid of the over. My parents told me we held on too long; I thought we let go too early.
When I was a child, worry was confined to the space between breaths, death could be averted by shaking it hard enough, and love was another word for being afraid to let go. I held on as tightly as humanly possible, even as I felt her slipping through the near-invisible cracks in my hands, until I was left white-knuckling nothing but air.
Karis Schoon (’26) graduated with degrees in social work and psychology and also a major in English because people and their stories are pretty cool. She’s currently getting her master’s while working at Baylor University in Texas, where she gets paid to play board games and grab coffee with students. When not working, she’s probably playing a role-playing game, reading somebody’s memoir, or brainstorming a new writing project.
