I’ve Had to Have Adam Put to Sleep

I’ve had to have Adam put to sleep.  I’m sorry to have to tell you all the news via the blog, especially since I know that so many of you had come to care so deeply for him.  But this way it’s, well, why lie?  It’s easier than trying to call you all on the phone and tell you.  Yes, I took my loving “husbro” of six years down to that Utah ASPCA and had him euthanized tonight.  Though generally considered a liberal, I am mostly against euthanasia unless it is absolutely necessary to avoid a very high level of suffering and in this case, that requirement was definitely met because I would have probably beat him to death.

Incidentally, the picture you see above is of my beloved studying in bed this morning.  I heard him giggle and thought he must be listening to the YouTube I was watching (Tim Curry on “How to Make it in Hollywood.”  totally worth a chuckle.)  But when I turned to Adam, I realized he was wearing his earbuds.  I know you can’t tell it from the picture but what he’s watching is brain surgery!  And he’s giggling like a little kid watching cartoons.  None of that has anything to do with why I had him put to sleep.  I thought you just might want to know some details about that picture.  In fact, his giggling at a brain surgery video was almost cute  enough to keep me from having him put to sleep.  Almost.

But all the other offenses of the day added up to a greater sum so really, when you think about it, I had no choice.

I usually leave one cup of coffee in the pot at the end of the night.  That way I can pop it in the microwave and jumpstart my heart while I’m making a fresh pot in the morning for Adam.  I bring him his first cup in bed.  This morning he actually beat me to the kitchen.  “Was there a cup of coffee left from last night?”  I asked when he came back into the bedroom, empty handed and whistling.  “Yep.”  “Well, where is it?”  “I drank it.  There’s a new pot brewing.”  So I laid there resenting being awake for several minutes and expected not to kill anything when I hadn’t even had a sip of coffee yet.  I timed it out in my head so that I went to the kitchen just as the last drop of the new pot fell.  That’s when I saw that my little sleep-eater had been up doing his thing during the night.  Now I really can’t blame him for what he does in the night while he’s basically still asleep.  But I have to tell you that he has a knack for eating the messiest things available.  Tomato sauce, if allowed to dry on the bowl is about like scraping paint of the damn thing!  And unless he’s having friends over in the night, I really can’t tell you how one man can dirty so many dishes of the course of one night!

So while I’m chiseling the marinara off the dishes, I hear that he’s come upstairs to the upstairs bathroom to have his morning poop.  I guess he just wanted to be nearer to me.  How sweet.  I piddled around in the plants a few minutes and heard him finish up and flush and go back downstairs to hop in the shower and get ready for school.  I went into the upstairs bathroom to wash the potting soil off my hands and… “Hey Baby, where’s the hand towel for the upstairs the bathroom?”  Silence.  I know he can hear me.  “Adam?”  Then:  “We were out of toilet paper up there!”  (Oh no he didn’t!)

He had to go the clinic today so I told him to take the truck and I would drive the motorcycle.  Even though I knew it was likely to rain today, he was wearing his nice little doctor drag so I wanted him to look nice.  Plus, I love to suffer for him.  It fits into my idea of who I am.  Sure enough, as I headed from work to Crossfit this afternoon, the skies opened and the first freezing rain of the season came rocketing toward me and the rest of the rush-hour travelers.  “That’s okay,” I thought, “This just proves even more how much I love him.”  I was actually glad to get to Crossfit if for no other reason to get out of those freezing wet clothes and into my workout gear.  But all Crossfit workouts are torture so those clothes too were soaking wet with sweat by the time I left there an hour later.  Better to be more covered on the ride home if my choices are wet clothes and wet clothes.  So I put back on my soaked blue jeans and t shirt.  “I just can’t wait to get home and take a hot shower,” I said into my helmet and I barreled through the second monsoon of the afternoon.  Finally I made it home.  I  raced toward the door and turned the nob.  Locked.  Oh please God, let him have left me a key in the secret key place.  No key.  (We don’t have a house key on the motorcycle ring ’cause it scratches the tank.  If someone’s on the bike, the house key goes in the secret house key place.)  But not today.  “Maybe the patio door is unlocked.”  I slosh around to the back and give it a tug.  Nope.  Dennis is on the inside of the sliding glass door desperately meowing something at me but I can’t read his lips.  I hope like hell it’s not “I forgot where my litter box is.”  Maybe the balcony door is open.  I jump up and grab the railing to the second floor and, in great Marine fashion hurl myself up to the second story, over the fence and onto the balcony.  The dogs are on the inside of this door. Confused as to why I might be entering from the balcony instead of the way I usually come home,  they nonetheless start their jubilant “Daddy’s home!”  barking and won’t stop even when I discover that this door too is locked.  In fact they keep on barking (and trying to open the locked sliding door with their noses) until I realize that it is going to continue (and possibly wake the neighbors’ baby from his nap) as long as the dogs can see me.  So I throw myself back over the balcony railing and jump back down to the back yard, slipping in a pile of Willie’s artwork and landing on my ass.  My phone makes the little noise it makes when it wants to tell me the battery is dying.  I use the last juice to text Adam and say, “Battery dying.  Locked out.  Please be home by 9:30 if you can.”  Now it’s time to go make coffee at the meeting where it’s Adam’s job to make the coffee.  He had a final tonight after all.  Hey, who’s complaining?  Not me!  Let him go take his Anatomy final and get one little step closer to being a doctor. If making coffee is another way I can help move my queer ass toward my future Audi Q7, Honey, I will make that coffee!

When the meeting ended I made my way toward home.  My clothes have actually (mostly) dried out by now.  Little did I know when I left this morning that it would be dark when I got home so I took the helmet with the limousine tint visor. Do you know how hard it is to see driving up 4th south at night trying to look through black glass?  At last I made it home.  And yes, Adam was there!  I came in to discover my tie-clad stud sitting on the love seat with a Frosty in hand and Wendy’s bags everywhere.  (Junk food!  That should fix my mood.)  “What did you bring me from Wendy’s?” I asked hopefully.  “Frosty,” he said and I all but ran to the kitchen.  I got to the kitchen, opened the freezer, no Frosty.  “Where is it?”  I yelled.  “This is it.” he said referring to the one he was eating!  “It looked too good. You want the rest?”  I opened my mouth to respond but the words caught in my throat as I looked down at the floor.  For an hour yesterday, I was down on my hands and knees with a brush a bleach water scrubbing our kitchen floor.  You could’ve done surgery on that floor when I finished.  I said yesterday, right?  You heard that?  Like the day before today?  Tonight it appears that someone has been running laps around the kitchen in his dressy doctor shoes and there are big skid marks of black shoe polish from wall to wall.  I just walked downstairs and turned on the shower.

Inside the shower, the billows of healing steam and fragrant pine soap seemed to wash away the worries of the day.  I thought of the warm flannel sheets that awaited me.  I turned off the water and opened the shower curtain.  And there was Adam, standing four full feet from the toilet and ringing the bowl with an arch of golden liquid.  The worst part is he was peeing over my freshly laundered bath mat! With the grin and the tone of a three-year-old he exclaimed, “Look what I can do!”  And that when the decision was made.  He really made it for me, when you think about it.

I put him in the truck and drove him to the Humane Society.  I paid the girl working the night shift and extra fifty bucks to bump him to the top of the “nitey nite” list.  She somehow seemed to understand after I told her about his severe behavior problems.  And I didn’t even get to the pee-pee part!

He’ll be missed for sure.  But it had to be done.

I’m sorry you had to find out this way.