Spending the morning with our 14 year old Yellow Lab and finally, having the veteranarian put her down today has me thinking a bit differently about things, including Scott McClellan

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Tough day today. We had to put down our 14 year old yellow lab, Vanilla.  I treated her better than a dog the past few days. It made me think about how I treat everyone, all  the time... and it made me think about Scott McClellan.

With people, you don't get a chance to plan out what to do on the day they're going to die, or the days before.

People generally don't die on schedule. And often, when you know the end is near, the dying person is already partially gone. That's what happened with my mother, 14 years ago when she was near passing. Between the morphine drip, the pain from her cancer, and what might have been Alzheimers, she was all there to even have a conversation with, let alone, do all the things I would have liked to do. I did tell her that I'd miss her as the person who most enjoyed hearing my good news and the new things I was up to. She told me to keep on telling her, that she'd be listening.

My father passed away when I was 11. He was 52 and he'd been having chest pains that put him in the hospital. But in 1962, they didn't do bypass surgery, at least not at the hospital he went to. The docs sent him home. We played cards that night and I won. Considering he'd made money to send home, during WWII, while in the army, by playing cards, it became clear to me, years later, when I was an adult, that by letting me "beat Dad," he'd given me a gift. As an entrepreneur, I published hypnosis and subliminal tapes with the message "I can beat Dad." The experts had used the phrase because research had shown that the phrase was a powerful one that made a difference.

I beat dad, that night and then, he died. my 52nd year was a scary one to get past. I made sure I exercised, did not smoke cigarettes and got checked regularly.

The past few days, as the time approached for putting Vanilla down, my heart changed a bit towards her. I became a bit more tolerant of her failings. She'd been incontinent for months, soaking the rug with urine and half the time, though she tried, not making it out of the door before she pooped on the floor. Cleaning up poop became a twice or thrice daily occurrence. For a month or two of that time, it was pretty bothersome, cleaning up the poop, especially since I work at home and was the one to clean up most of it. I would get irritated and annoyed. I would yell at her as I put her outside, even though it might be too late.

But the last few days, it didn't bother me as much. I let go of the irritation and annoyance. Looking back, I could have let go of it altogether, from the beginning. She'd been a good dog for a long time and didn't deserve my ire.

The last few days, I gave her extra treats and extra attention. I don't think her brain was working as well, in the end, and most of the time, she was just interested in getting food. In the past, she'd had a weight problem. We'd gotten that under control, but for this past week, it didn't matter, so she feasted every day, and I grilled a burger for her to eat, as part of her last few minutes.

Before we went to the vet, we stopped at the local park where Vanilla used to run into the lake. She loved the water, as most Labs do. This time, with her withered, weakened hips, she limped slowly, sniffing everywhere she went. We remembered the way she'd repeatedly run down steep, 50 foot embankments to dive in the creek, when she was younger. I was prepared to carry her the last few yards, if need be, back from the lake. She'd dropped from her peak weight of around 90 down to 52 pounds. But she made the walk on her own.

On the drive to the vet, from the park, we decided to have her cremated along with the other dogs the vets put down for the week. The cost was a bit less and the decision was to make a donation of the difference in cost to a lab rescue facility.

We waited outside, not in the office, with Vanilla, until the exam room was ready.

The veterinary tech asked us sign a document affirming that she hadn't bit anyone in the past ten days. The vet came in, gave her a mild sedative that took a few minutes to act-- and left us with her, alone. Vanilla was already lying down, head up. I'd wanted to give her the burger, which I'd brought in a baggy, as she was injected with the euthanizing drug. The vet objected, saying she might vomit. Better to give her the burger just before she was sedated. I gave her a piece. The vet injected her with the tranquilizer. Vanilla settled down. We talked to her, petted her belly. When she was younger, she'd push our hand, with her nose, to her belly, telling us that was where she best liked being petted. No nose nudging in those final moments, but we knew and petted her belly. I snuck her another little piece of burger.

Her head slowly dropped as the tranquilizer took hold. The vet came in, shaved off a bit of hair on her rear leg, inserted an IV and connected a syringe with a lethal dose of phenobarbital. She checked that we were ready, then gently pushed on the plunger.
Vanilla's head sagged, and gradually dropped, her eyes dulled. I closed them. The vet listened for a heartbeat. It was gone.

Later, my other half saw a butterfly and wondered.

Recently, anticipating losing Vanilla, I've been looking at dogfinder.com. They have tens of thousands of dogs available for adoption. Not surprisingly, there are more yellow labs than any other dog. Vanilla was as good a dog as one could ever have. I can't imagine how hard this is going to be for her lifelong companion, our other dog. He's never known a day, outside when he stayed overnight at the veterinary hospital, when he wasn't with her. We're giving him a lot of extra attention.

Somehow, this experience today is giving me a bit more tolerance. Even for Scott McClellan. I'm wondering. Is there a chance that he's actually doing this for a good reason? That he's really trying to set things right? We see how the right wing is all attacking him. What if other former Bush people develop guilt or wake up and decide to do the right thing? It would be nice if they were appreciated for telling the truth. They should assume that Bush's enablers and co-conspirators will attack them. They might even expect that the complicit mainstream media people who allowed them to lie, without challenging, without asking tough questions, might, as passive co-conspirators, attack them.

But if potential truth-tellers see that the reward for telling the truth is villification from everyone, even from those who seek the truth, then it will be that much more daunting for them to. Maybe we need to be thankful that McClellan is now telling more truth. Maybe we need to support this as the beginning of what will probably become a flood.

A lot of Bush people have left a lot of shit in the whitehouse, in Washington, throughout the US, in Iraq, and when you throw in the failure to do anything about global warming, the falling dollar, the credit crisis, well,  Obama and his team will be the ones to clean it up. Better if we at least reward those who relent and let the truth come free. In South Africa, after the end of apartheid, there was a long time when people were encouraged to tell the truth, without punishment. I don't think that Bush, Cheney and some of the highest level people should be absolved or given immunity, but perhaps we should start thinking of a way to get to the deeper truths, a way to start healing from all the criminality, all the abuses of the constitution, all the lies.

Enough people have already died.

Authors Bio:

Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.

Check out his platform at RobKall.com

He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity

He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com

more detailed bio:

Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, debillionairizing the planet and the Psychopathy Defense and Optimization Project.

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