204 - The Worst Episode

Before we go to Mike's, you said this is going to be the worst episode ever that peaked my attention. What are you going to do? I think we should consider calling it the worst episode of this podcast. Is it going to be the truth?

I think so. I think it will. Then why are we doing this? We should try to make the best episode every time.

I think it's important. I think this topic is important. I mean, maybe we could just put what the topic is about right in the title, but I think that's too much. I think that's too much for people.

So I want to talk to you about something and I want to see what your thoughts are on it. Very painful for me. What we're about to talk about. So let's start here.

I think we need a warning. I don't think children should listen to this episode. I've never done that. I've never done a warning before an episode, but I don't think if you are a parent, you've got small kids.

I know a lot of people listen to this as families. I don't think kids should listen to this until parents have listened to it first and then judge that they think their kids are all enough to listen to this. Because this is heavy. What we're about to talk about is heavy.

OK, I'll quit screwing around. Let me just tell you my thesis statement real quick. And I'm going to get to it in a very weird way. And this episode will probably go all over the place.

But my thesis statement is this. I think people are jumping to euthanasia too quickly and we should reconsider that. That's my thesis statement. So euthanasia is obviously a really, really big deal.

OK, so euthanasia, meaning the good death is the idea that I'm getting towards the end of life and I feel like I'm going to experience a lot of pain. Therefore, I feel like I should end life on my own terms. That's the way the argument goes. That is the most charitable way you could possibly frame that.

And the most charitable scenario you could draft up for that. I recently heard about a gentleman who won this big. I want to say it's the Nobel Prize or something along those lines. It's a very intelligent man.

He recently ended his life. I think it was in Switzerland or somewhere like that. Anyway, this is a really, really big topic. And I don't think it's good.

I think you should try to stay alive as long as possible. However, there's a weird case that I want to talk to you about. And I want to know what your thoughts are. So have you ever had a dog die?

Yes. OK, this is why this is the worst episode ever, because everybody thinks their dog is the best. And everybody is right. Their dog is actually my dog is not the best.

Freya is a nightmare. I thought your dog. Everybody thinks their dog is the best. Freya's not mine.

You don't like your dog. That's a little turd. Really? No.

Do you know how hard I work on my lawn? Yeah. And then she just is like, let me out. I have to go pee.

I'm like, do you really have to pee? And she looks at me like, yeah. I'm like, no, I don't think that's what you have to do. She's like, I'll pee right here.

Then I'm like fine. You can go outside, but make sure you only pee. And she runs out and just digs giant holes in the yard. Doesn't pee at all.

Comes back in, pees on the floor and gets mud everywhere from digging holes in my yard. No, she's not the best dog. That's not great. Oh, it's not great.

I think about that a lot. Anyways, most people's dogs are the best dogs. Go ahead. Do you me tell you whose dog was the best?

Who? Mine. I had the best dog. Wait.

When you say the best dog. Yeah. Do you mean the best dog you had in childhood? Who was wonderful?

No. Or do you mean buckshot? Buckshot is who I'm talking about. You're using past tense.

I know. Last time you and I talked about buckshot, it was not. Is buckshot gone? Buckshot's gone.

Yeah. Buckshot died. Oh, right. Oh, gosh.

I had a very man. I know, right. I had a very, very difficult decision to make. And I want to talk to you about it.

When did this happen? This happened last week. No, no, no, no, no, no. It happened about 10 days ago.

I haven't told you. So long story short. I'm sorry, man. Yeah, I know it's a big deal.

So buckshot has been a part of our family for 17 years. Longer than me. Yeah. She was the best girl.

And so the thing about buckshot is she always wanted to protect our family. That's all she wanted to do in the whole world. She just wanted to protect our family. And so she would, when Tara would go running, Tara would have the leash and she would run with Tara and she would protect Tara and she would come back and she would like always, you know, work around the yard.

She'd walk around the yard and make sure everything's good. She'd protect us. Everything's great. The kids, I've got videos of the kids hooking themselves to sleds and hooking themselves to buckshot and buckshot would pull them around the yard.

Buckshot was the actual best dog in the world. Tara's dog, Summer, who I affectionately name Princess Summer Booper. Princess Booper's new to me. I'm not a big person.

Also the best dog. So in the last year, I have participated in the death of two dogs, which is why this is the worst episode ever. Do we agree now it's the worst episode? This is the worst episode ever.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

So, so I did the death of these two dogs in two different ways. And I want to discuss that. We're going to do this. I think we need to do this, man, because I have noticed something.

I think this is something people need to talk about. I think people need to talk about this because I literally googled when buckshot was, okay, you can just lay out both of them. Yes. Okay.

So when Summer, who was a golden retriever and absolutely the happiest dog in the whole world, great, she loves to play fetch. She loves to just all the things. She's wonderful. It was so kind to my kids.

We had a litter of puppies with her. She's great. The golden retriever, Summer, she just wasn't acting right one day. And Tara said, hey, something's wrong with Summer.

In Summer and Tara, they had like a bond, like an incredible bond. They could read each other. When Tara was not feeling good or had a hard day, Summer would come jumping her lap. I've got pictures on pictures of me coming home late and Tara laying down and Summer just snuggled up next to her.

Tara took Summer to the vet and the vet said, huh, something's not right. She's like, yeah, obviously it's why I'm here. She's like really tired and stuff. And the doc said, no, something's really not right.

So we pulled her blood. You need to take her to Mississippi State. And Tara's like, pardon? Like Starkville, Mississippi, Mississippi State?

And the doc said, yes, that is the best place in the Southeast for you to get this dog right now. And she said, I'm sorry, I don't understand what you're talking about. She said, something's not right with her blood. You need to get her to Mississippi State right now.

And Tara loves Summer like her. If there was a fire and it was between me or Summer, it's questionable if I would make it. It's not, but your point is well taken. OK, she took her to Mississippi State, turns out she had some kind of blood cancer, blood disorder, blood something.

I don't know. And it was clear she wasn't going to make it, which was awful because she was so full of life and she was a young pup two years. Tara looks at me and says, can you go get Summer? This is like three days afterwards.

Tara took her and then came back home. She said, can you go get Summer? This is like a seven hour round trip. Yeah.

I looked at my wife and I like, I tried to understand what that meant. What does that mean to you? Can you go get Summer? You are very strong people.

You are willing to talk about emotions, but if you have the option to speak plainly and practically, you will go that route and let things mean the things that they ought to mean. Let the reader understand that is her style and that is your style. And if Tara said something like that to you, I would take that to mean this is emotional torture and I need you to support me right now. Yes.

And so I said, of course, I love you. I love Summer. I will do that. So I went over to Mississippi State.

I went into the room and they said, OK, you're here for Summer. Yeah. And I'm like, what's this? So real, like I was throwing fetch with this dog three, four days ago.

I don't understand what's going on. They bring her out with an oxygen mask on and she's happy and she's wagging her tail and she's got an oxygen mask on. And I said to the vet and the vet tech, I said, what's going on? And he said, her blood can't hold oxygen.

So if we take this mask off of her, she will lose energy extremely fast, basically go hypoxic. Her blood is not working and she's unable to make new blood. I don't know what it was. I got the name of it.

It's not a genetic thing. It's something. It was a environmental thing. I don't know what it was.

The doc says, yeah, so we've got some options here. So we can take the mask off. We can also give her something to calm her down. She's going to die.

Did he say when it's going to happen in the room that I'm in? Like I'm going to pick up summer and take her home and bury her. That's what I'm doing. Okay.

I was on the phone with you on that drive, but I didn't understand this. So he was saying that as soon as the mask comes off, the countdown starts and it won't, it won't be a real long countdown. Correct. Yeah.

Yeah. Minutes. Wow. Yeah.

Less than 30 minutes. I'm like, oh my goodness. I understand the gravity of the situation. And I call the kids and I call Tara's like, we need to face time.

And we need all the kids together and we need to say goodbye to summer. There's this really strong dad mode, super, super strong dad mode. So I'm in the strong dad mode and I'm saying, Hey, I don't even want to say something about say goodbye to the dog. And we do that.

And everybody's crying. I can't imagine what it was like to be on the other end to be at home. I'm there with this vet who was great, by the way, absolutely fantastic. I had no concept much like when you and I met, I thought, Oh, you're a pastor.

That must be interesting. I had no concept of your job, right? You taught me a lot about the job of being a pastor. That's not an easy job.

You still feel that way. I still feel that way. Yeah. What do you think about the job of being a vet?

I think much like being a pastor. You are there and you are in the room for a whole lot of moments. People will never forget. Good ones, bad ones.

And that's one of the most sneakily under appreciated aspects of the job of pastor. You are there so much for days. People will remember forever. And then you have to gear up and turn around and do it again an hour later and an hour after that.

And so for that vet, my mind went straight to them when you're saying, everybody's crying. My question that I didn't muster was, well, was the vet? Cause what's that like? How can you muster that every single time a family goes through that?

That changes a person, maybe not in the bad ways, but being a pastor changed me. It changes people who do it and mean it because it's just something that you carry with you, you feel things for other people that aren't really yours to feel, but you still do. It's hard to know how to process that. It's kind of easier to work through your own stuff than feeling things vicariously through other people.

So yeah, my brain went straight to the vet. How did they do? Fantastic. The vet a great.

The vet understood the situation I was in. What I settled on is after the kids said goodbye, we were going to take the mask off. And I was just going to sit there with her. I was going to scratch her ears.

It's what I was going to do. I was going to scratch her ears and scratch her ears for a while. And then they were going to give her a little bit of with an injection, a little bit of morphine or something to calm her down. Or maybe maybe I decided to go with the sodium pentathol or whatever it is that stops the heart.

I don't remember what it was, but I remember thinking I don't want her to feel pain. And I wish I could look up and figure out what I did. I remember feeling conflicted like, Oh man, this is the thing I have to decide. I don't want to decide this.

You know what I mean? Because it feels a little bit like playing God. I'm looking up the thing Mississippi state. I'm trying to find if we actually got.

OK, this vet, his name was Wes. We'll leave it at that. He did fantastic. And I had questions.

I was like, Hey, here's the deal, man. This is a dog that we just had a lot of puppies and a lot of people took those puppies and they're going to be wondering if their dogs going to have the same issue. And I said, are they? And he said, no.

And he wrote a letter for me to give it to the people who took summer's puppies. And just the first sentence here to whom to those it may concern. He wrote this on letterhead signed by Mississippi State College of Veterinary Medicine at the bottom to whom it may concern recently, Princess Summer Booper snoot was a patient here at Mississippi State College of Veterinary and medicine animal health under the care of myself and names names names. And he explained everything.

It was determined she had a very rare form of cancer. He explained everything about it. And then he says to those who are blessed to have one of summer's puppies, we understand the concern of your own. We have the data that shows blah, blah, blah.

And he basically says this is not going to pass on. But just the fact that he wrote a letter that says recently, Princess Summer Booper snoot was a patient here. He wrote that down. I thought that was amazing.

So anyway, I believe we euthanized summer, if I recall, to make it fast. So we did that. I laid there in the floor because she was on the ground. I laid there in a scruff of your ears and I cried.

I just laid there and cried. I was trying to be strong because this is one of the worst moments of my life. It's not the worst moment. It's one of them.

So I prayed with my family over FaceTime. We said, thank you for summer, basically got off the call and then we removed the mask. And I believe we did do euthanasia. I don't remember exactly what I think we did.

At a minimum, there was some kind of morphine to ease it, right? And then I cried. And then I looked up at the guys and I was trying not to cry, but I looked at the guys and I said that right there, that was a good dog. It was hard.

So took her back at Barrita, where we bury our dogs fast forward a year later. Buckshot's getting old. It's a joke. It's been a joke for a long time amongst all my kids, friends, that when they come over, that when you come in the driveway, you have to go very, very slow because there's a blind deaf dog.

And we know she's about to go out, but you don't want to be the person to hit her because, you know, my dad might kill you because he loves his dog so much. So that's the joke. So anyway, she quit walking and then she laid down. And then over the course of three days, she couldn't move.

She was just sitting there. And so the question was, okay, we know she's about to die. And so my question to you, Matt, if you're in this situation, what do you do? She's not in pain.

She is clearly going to die. You got three days ish guessing with this dog. What do you do? At that age, with a dog whose behavior, you know very well, and the dog can't move, which is a very important function for a dog.

If they've lost all mobility, there's ways to augment that with a person, with a dog. It's over. Then you put a dog down and in the culture I'm from, you do that somewhere safe and far away from people and you do it with a bullet. OK, I've done that before.

I had a three-legged dog one day that was clearly dying and I put the dog down. Actually right here and it sounds cruel and I need you to kind of make me look a little better here for people who don't understand. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For people who haven't worked around animals, for people who don't understand what I'm talking about, it just sounds horrible.

It's the quickest, fastest way to do it. Yeah. Yes, I've seen it done and I've put animals down this way. I mean, you put the warning up.

So I'm assuming there aren't kids here right now. Yeah, if there are kids here, this is signed off on. I had people from the generation before me show me how to do this because the objective is mercy. I mean, this is something that I learned from the generation before me, from people I trust, saying when you are sure you are at the end of life, there's tremendous suffering going on with an animal that maybe you hit while you're out driving at night or even with a beloved household pet or livestock is where you want to position the shot.

This is how you want to take the shot and they will feel nothing. Yeah. And so I've seen it done and I've done it myself and it sounds so morbid and so bad. It is meant to be a gesture of mercy.

So I called people. So when Buckshot was, uh, when Buck, it was very clear, her legs have been, she's been having a hard time with the legs for a while. And so the first thing I did is I asked Tara, I was like, can you please go buy steak? Can you just go buy a bunch of steak and I'm going to cook steak for Buckshot?

She likes that. She's had it once or twice. That's all she's going to eat right now is, you know, she's got the little sirloin steaks, you know, so I'm frying them up. And so I come home late one night.

It's like 11th, 30th night and I walk out on the front porch and she had, she had pooped herself laying there right on the front porch and I get that cleaned up, get her positioned, move her legs to where and I'm like, all right, I'm going to make you some steak. So it made the steak, took it out there and gave her steak. She's like, Oh, this is interesting. You know, she's, this is great.

And so she ate the steak. We did that for a day or so. And then she wasn't interested in the steak anymore and she's all in the front porch. And Tara said, I cannot watch my girl suffer like this.

I was like, well, she's, that's the thing. She's not actually suffering. To do this. I couldn't bring myself to raise my hand against the most loyal animal I've ever had.

I couldn't do it that language. Well, yeah. And so I'm working through that with my children. I'd walk her in the house and I'd wear so and so other outside.

They're just in the front yard, petting her and crying. And I'm like, man. So I was conflicted for the first time in my life. I've normally never hesitated to do this, to go to the vet and euthanized dog or to do, as you described, if it's a, it's a lot of pain situation and we got to do something quickly, 22 caliber long rifle does the job very quickly.

You got to do it a very safe way, all this sort of thing. However, in this case, I was like, she's happy. All she wants is to be with me. I can't do that.

I'm going to let it take its course. And so that's what I did. And it was really, really interesting because with summer, you know, it's kind of a different situation because, you know, take the mask off, like we were artificially keeping her there and they kept her there till I could get to her. But in this situation, she's just laying there and she's happy.

How I ended up doing this is, uh, Tara made a comment. She's like, it breaks my heart to see her like this. And I said, okay, that's enough. And so I got her and I put her in the back of the truck and I took her to her favorite tree.

And this was a tree when, when, uh, years ago, when I was just, she was a young pup, there's a dog in Mississippi that could tree a squirrel. And the old man, John would say, Tiger was the name of his dog. He's a tiger. Go tree me a squirrel and that dog would run off and tree a squirrel.

And it was the coolest thing ever. And I was like, I want my dog to do that. So I talked about shot how to do that. So treating a squirrel, she'll run up, she'll find a squirrel, run it up a tree, and then she'll bark at the base of the tree.

Well, this is the oak tree that the squirrels always ran to. And so I had her on the tailgate, I drove her under the oak tree and we just sat there. I sat there and I pet a scruff of her ears and I scratched her ears and I just told her how good she was. She's a great dog.

But here's the thing. Let me show you a picture. I'm going to text you a picture, sorry to do this to you, but I'm going to text you a picture of buckshot less than 10 minutes before she died. And you tell me what this dog looks like.

Sorry to do this to you. Four steps at ever. Look at this picture. I'm not having fun, buddy.

Sorry. Oh, pop. What does that look like to you? Just describe the picture.

It looks like extreme old age in a dog who has had a very full life. Yeah, it looks like her eyes are having a tough time. You can see that she has muscle memory of how to look at someone who she trusts. But you can just tell by the cataracts and the look of the eyes that she can't see anything.

Her musculature is gone the way is the way her limbs are relaxed. You know, Maya, who is the best dog ever for you. You know, she's struggling. Maya, who is the best dog ever when she lays down, you can still tell that she's strong.

She's trying to relax, but her musculature holds her legs in a certain way. This dog has no strength. Buckshots worn out. And the other thing I see is the despite the fact that she can barely hear you in this shot and can't see you.

She can feel you and she loves you. She's happy, right? She's happy. Yeah, isn't that weird that she's happy?

She just looked like that the whole thing time in. And so she was happy. And I'm like, there's no way I'm going to kill Buckshot. I can't if you're looking at me like that.

There's no way I can raise my hand against my dog. It was the first time in my life I felt that I was very, very conflicted. I was like, you know, what you do is when your dog gets old and your dog can't do anything's more, more, you just put your dog down. That's just what you do.

And this whole experience made me think that maybe we jumped to that too quickly. I don't know. I mean, maybe for a, like, I don't know if for a bark a little too much, maybe you could put it down like tomorrow or something. No, I talk a tough game.

My heart is so soft for that little baby husky that she, no, I love her. She's frustrating and I'm going to be patient with her and we're going to get her at some point, probably to be a good dog or find her a nice farm to live on, but probably be a good girl. So I'll tell you how Buckshot died. We sat there and I scruffed her ears just like this, just right, right.

Like you say, right here. And we're under her favorite tree and we sat there. We had a connection so I could tell you exactly what she was thinking. It's our cousin there.

Send her scruff in her ears and then she is breathing real hard like that. And then she can stop. And then she looks up at the tree and I imagine that she finally saw that squirrel that I've been telling her to tree for many, many years. So she sees something in the tree or at least acts like she sees something in the tree and then she starts trying to run really fast, like her young buckshot.

They see, she starts trying to run her legs, run, run, run, run. And then she lets out one big, and then she died. And that was the moment I finally had my emotional release because I was playing, when I realized I was playing this tough guy game the whole time for the family and for all the things for Buckshot and all the stuff. And then finally I got to cry and I cried so hard.

I knew I was going to cry one buckshot. But I finally cried so hard, heaving, sobbing on the tailgate. And I imagined I was like, I've got neighbors. What on earth are they thinking right now?

But I had gone earlier to the thrift store and Miss Debbie was there, who I know. And I said, Miss Debbie, I got a dog that's dying. I need a nice cotton blanket. And so we start looking through all the blankets at the thrift store and she said, is it the girl said, yeah, she said, well, here's a nice pink one.

It's cotton. It's got rabbits on it. I was like, that's a great one. So I had that laid down on the ground and when Buckshot died and I got done crying, which was awesome, by the way, later down wrapped her up.

And I was like, all right. And I called my dad and then we have a place where we bury our dogs, just like all the dogs are buried there. And I took the dog and this time I took a tractor with an auger on it and I augered a hole in the ground and then used the shovel to go right and I buried buckshot right there. My dad and my brother helped me very kind of them.

They knew I was hurting. And that's how I buried buckshot. But my question is, and this is the question I want to wrestle with, you know, all the emotion aside, I want to wrestle with this question of rushing to put our dogs down versus like, when is it right? When is it wrong?

Can you imagine how hard it would be to be a vet? It's just something that this experience made me think about because she wasn't in pain, but everything in the world was telling me to put her down. But I had a really, really nice last few moments with her that I wouldn't have had otherwise. Maybe I would would have.

I don't know. What are your thoughts? That story was a lot. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, your description of what she did physically and how she acted in those last moments, that was a lot. She saw the squirrel, I'm pretty sure. Sounds cool.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. When families are dealing with things, you talk to family about stuff, whether it's a difficult time, a difficult season, an impending loss, a tragic loss that has just happened and now you're doing services, family stuff, whatever, there's always a thing that I'm trying to think of for the family.

And that is what do they need this to be? What needs to happen for who they are and what their story is, the history of their family, the insecurities that they drag around as individuals and as a family, whatever it might be, there's a whole bunch of factors that put us in the spots that we're in. I try to think about that. What do they need?

What does this need to be for the story to make sense, for, for there to be one more blessing from the situation that they get out of an otherwise very difficult thing. There is always at least one more gift to be given by a person or dog who we love when we lose them because it's a card you can't play very often, you know, losing somebody and contending with that. So I put together a funeral service. I think really hard to get stuff that you just need to do.

You know, talk about life and death and memories for a dog. No, for a person. Okay. I've never done a dog, you know.

But when you put together a service, there's obvious stuff that you do, but there's touches, there's less obvious stuff that you do that are that you're doing to try to make sure this is what this particular family, this individual, whatever needs out of the service, out of the situation. And I think you got what you needed out of this. I think it's a grace that you got to experience the loss of your best dog ever. The way you did.

I mean, you just do the math on it. How many hours a night do you sleep? Let's say your average seven and a half and let's say that you're in bed, getting ready, whatever, for another hour and a half total on either side. Well, that's nine hours in the night.

That's a time when a dog would be likely to pass with no attention, kind of wait till things are quiet. I mean, there's a real good chance that you wouldn't even be present when your dog passed most of the time, but you just happen to be. You were there. You were attentive the whole time and you got to walk your puppy all the way to the finish line.

And as a result, the story has beautiful symmetry, the tree teaching your dog about that stuff, the things that your dog teaches you, because that's how that relationship works. It's perfect. Not everybody gets an ending like that. Timing doesn't work out the ailment.

The circumstances aren't as graceful. Aren't as elegant and gentle as the circumstances of her passing me out. That's a good description. It is it felt abnormally gentle abnormally.

And I think that was a grace that was from, you know, I think I did that for me, but it certainly felt like grace and mercy. Yeah, it didn't feel like a grace and a mercy when Brosnan, my dog named after the actor who played Remington's deal in James Bond, got blasted by a pickup truck when we lived in the house in the country. And I just had to go recover his body, but we were so poor, we didn't have anything and we couldn't pay for anything. So I just had to pick him up because he was a big dog and grab him under his arms and carry him in the rain.

Was he dead? He's dead. Yeah. Yeah, I found him.

Yeah, it was horrible. I mean, absolute core imprint memory for me. Oh, yeah. Still to this day, I feel everything about the day I lost Brosnan.

I don't know. Um, I don't know why the grace of a dignified, gentle death wasn't extended to Brosnan. I don't know why things work the way they work. I had another dog that had something I think I've talked about that on here, maybe in the episode where we talk about does the dog die.

Yeah. We swapped the stories that existed at that point. Horrible stories between us. Yeah.

Yeah. They're horrible stories, but if you decide to let somebody into your life, they're going to lose you or you're going to lose them. It's what you're signing up for. The alternative is don't let anyone into your life.

The alternative is don't share the journey of life with anyone. Don't be tender and open. Some people just say it's not worth it. They don't want to go through what you just went through.

So they don't let a pet or anyone into their lives. I guess that's one way to play it. You love things. You love people.

So you're going to hurt. I do too. So I'm going to hurt. And if anything, I'm grateful that the hurt in my life has been so minimized to this point with one glaring obvious exception.

Yeah, your brother. I don't know. It makes me think about how precious life is. And as I was talking to people about buckshot, everybody was so, so very kind.

I searched on the internet, I Googled like what would have the best things to do in the life of a dog. And I found a couple of threads and everybody was just. Everybody was telling the person, oh, yeah, just go take them back and euthanize them immediately. First time anything happens.

And I understand why that was said and I'm, I'm just questioning it. Cause I don't know if I did it right the first time. Like I said, I had a very good experience that I think is the exception, not the rule the second time. I think it's very much the exception, not the rule.

Absolutely. The last animal I put down was in pain. Yeah, even though we have a disclaimer on this episode, I'm not going to describe what the animal looked like, but it was an absolute mess. And I absolutely did the right thing.

Yeah, that's awesome. Proud of you. It's hard to do. This wasn't like that.

No. Yeah. And that's also really hard to do. There's a whole technique because you have to plug one ear with your shoulder.

You do. Yeah. You should plug your shooting ear with the shoulder. You do.

You're not shooting arm here with your with your pointer finger on the other hand. And it's not great for accuracy. It's not. So you got to be really, really careful and thoughtful and it's emotional.

So it'd be easy to make a mistake. It's a bigger deal than your figure. I sounded pretty callous when I was talking about that earlier. I don't mean to exude that because of what you said, life is precious.

I want to ask you, why did you say that? Why is life precious? Yeah. And that's kind of where it's taken me.

It's taken me to that because it's a very, it's a very, very rare exceptional thing, no matter how you look at it. If you just look at the geometric volume of the universe and think about where life is, it's in a very tiny location and there's not a lot of it. And if you think about the vastness of time and you think about the length of the timeline, no matter what you believe, it's very, very big. Big might not even be the word infinite might be the word.

It is the word probably the amount of time that life exists on that my life exists on that or buckshots life or whatever, you know, time that that life exists on that life. That life exists. It's so small that it's like every second matters. Matters a lot, which is why scrolling on the dang phone is so dumb, but we all fall victim.

We got to, we got to win that back. I think we're starting to win that back. So I think life is precious because of how rare it is. It's just very, very special.

You have the ability to make decisions. You have the ability to compute things and make choices and it's just, I don't know, it seems self-evident that it's, it's precious. I don't know how to do the math on this, but if you're talking about the incredibly incredibly unlikely confluence of events that would cause particles, matter, energy to come together to make a sentient being with feelings and body and emotions and dreams and imagination and memories, then you multiply that out by the unlikelihood in the grandeur of time and space, you know, this three coordinate system that that would in any way let alone meaningfully intersect with you. That's insane.

It's insane that you and I are friends. Yeah. It is that you shouldn't exist. I shouldn't exist.

Let alone both of us exist. Let alone meet each other. Let alone decide through events and volition. We will be friends and I will tell you true things that shouldn't happen.

And if you reran the universe a billion times, that's going to happen zero more of those times. Yeah. Yeah. It really makes me think about people writing laws so that people can choose how they die, which I understand that this is a very, very deep topic.

It goes to all kinds of things you can call it, you can call it an age, you can call it an age, you can call it suicide, you can call it all these things. I guess my point is. Well, it is suicide. It is suicide.

Yes. It is suicide, no matter who pushes the button. But I think it's important to stay in the fight and I think it's important to fight for life. I think it is.

I think it's important to just because it gets hard or difficult, I don't think you should be like, okay, we're going to have a party and everybody's going to come over and maybe we spend a few days in Paris before we go to Switzerland or whatever it is they're doing. I don't know. I just know it's getting weird. No.

You withheld buckshot dying from me for 10 days. Yeah. I'm going to have a conversation and in the service of sharing this with the third chair. I did.

I like your dog. Yeah. And it's. There's that episode of the office where Ed Truck dies.

He was the old manager of the office before Michael Scott took over. And then I think in that episode of Bird, like a swallow or something dies. And Michael Scott wants to do a funeral for it. And at first everybody's really irritated with him because he wants to do a funeral for a swallow and who cares about a stupid swallow and then gradually the people who are most emotionally tuned in the office figure out he's breathing bigger things.

He's working through bigger things because Ed Truck died and Ed Truck used to have his position in his office. And so the swallow and Ed Truck are confluencing to make him think about mortality and the point of it all. And does anybody really love me? And so there's some tenderness to the end of the episode.

It's very, really nice. It's really nice. So in the early going of this conversation, I'm feeling a little bit sick for being so callous about what you do when an animal is at the end. I think it's right.

I just want a disclaimer that I'm feeling conflicted about my earlier remarks and I'm not sure they're going to play super well when I listen to Tina's edit of this podcast. No, I'm all of it. No, I think there is without a doubt a time like, okay, so that I had a dog named Cody. It was a, I think it was named Cody.

It wasn't my dog, but it was a three legged dog out of from pound or something. I don't remember exactly how I had this dog, but I had this dog for like four days and I've always wanted a three legged dog. It's a dumbest thing in the world. It's a very selfish thing for me, but I had three legged dog and then instantly just unbelievable pain.

This dog started dying. It was very, very clear. This is not just a dog yelping. This dog is dying.

I believe I got a vet involved. I don't remember that. But long story short, however it ended up happening, I ended up having to shoot the dog like old yeller style bad, not cool at all. It's a thing, man.

It's a hard thing. I told you about that I ended up running over years ago. We were at the vet and she was clearly in pain. She actually still have scars from where she bit me from in the moment.

And so we put her down very quickly. No, I don't think you need to second guess your comments. I think sometimes as men, we need to step up and do those things. And it's important for us to be like, I need to shield all of my family from all of this right now.

And I need to take this dog and we need to go somewhere else. And I'm sure that's happened many, many times in our lives that we weren't aware of because we were too young. Of course. And also as a man, even though you needed to be there alone with your dog, just makes me sad to picture you there alone with your dog while your dog died.

Your dog who you love. Oh, George came over and hugged me. It was good. George Chup Chup Chup Chup Chup Chup Chup Chup Chup Chup Chup Chup Chup Chup Chup Chup Chup Yeah, some of the best times I've ever received after dog died.

Could have this. Yeah. The point is, Ed Truck, the office, you said it. Buck shot, Brosnan.

All of this is practice for facing the beyond. All of this is us running the math and thinking about what makes us and what makes life special and what makes grief so sad and how all of it all of it works together. I mean, what we're talking about a while back. I mean, the point of honors philosophy is to prepare the student for death.

That's what we're doing in this conversation. You were showing, I mean, what's one of a funeral? It's to imagine, in part, it's to say goodbye, but a big part of a funeral is to allow ourselves to imagine that when we're gone, people will be sad too, that it mattered, that it meant something. If you dishonor the dead, you dishonor yourself.

If you dishonor the dead, you dishonor the very notion of life. It's not something to be flippant about. It's why every society takes the desecration of a grave seriously and should. What's to keep people from dishonoring us?

What it does is it undermines the entire idea that this matters, that you've mattered. And yeah, it's clumsy and fumbling. And funerary rights are not enough in and of themselves to solve the grand conundrum of our quick fleeting lives and loss and grief. But there's something there intrinsically in the heart of man that says, this matters.

We are more than the other physical things we see in the world around us. Even if it's not perfect, we're going to do something to try to pause and reflect on that and honor the reality that this person, even this cherished pet that is gone, mattered. All matters. And that somehow in remembering that, we remember that all of this matters.

So your head is supposed to go there. I think you should feel grossed out by what's happening with assisted suicide. I do as well. Where I disagree with you is like, look, if you want people not to get together and have these parties, then people need to quit doing the hardcore masculine.

Nothing matters thing. I'm fine. I don't cry. Bull crap.

And do things while we're still alive to honor other people. Don't make birthdays, like decade birthdays into some kind of joke about your impending death and mock people for aging. I've hated that since I was a little kid and I still hate it. There should be times where we celebrate people while they're still alive, not like there's some kind of legend, but just I celebrate that you exist and that we're friends.

That should be built into the rhythm of things way more. If there's an impulse that people feel to do this in there, I'm getting in the suicide pod tomorrow party at the end of life. Well, what an ick way to express it. Let's scratch that itch some other way and celebrate it more.

So that's the only impulse about that that I appreciate. Is it's a reminder that we should do that before things are bad and we should appreciate each other more before things are bad. Yeah, we'll set. I'd like you to read the title of the article I just sent you, please.

All right. dated 12 December 2024. OK. Oh, no.

Huh. I challenged you on this earlier and you said you just know and now I know why the title is assisted dying now accounts for one in 20 deaths in a country where this is legal. That's too many. Yeah, the article is dated to 24, but the study is dated to more than two years ago, two years before you and I are recording this.

Yeah. I think that's too many. Um, I think it's possible. And so this is the connection that I'm making here.

It's a loose connection because people are not dogs and dogs are not people. The death of the human is very different than the death of a dog, I believe. My personal belief is that people have souls. Don't think dogs have souls, but maybe something like it.

Maybe some version of one. Yeah, I don't know. I think they kind of inherit the soul of the people who love them. Yeah, I don't know.

What I do know is I think it's becoming fashionable and I think it's wrong. So I just want to draw that connection. Well, OK, I agree with you. Did you OK, just quickly the average age was 77.

The vast majority around 96% had a death deemed reasonably foreseeable. Unquote, due to severe medical conditions such as cancer, but reasonably foreseeable isn't strong enough language for me to justify that action. And then it talks about a quote, small minority of other cases where, man, those are darker that rationale. I think I should be clear here.

So I've been in the room when people have died. You're familiar with the term palliative care, you know, at the end of life when someone's in pain and their measures taken to make sure the person is not in pain. Yes. I've been in the room when that happens.

I know. And I have seen situations where people are giving pain meds to ease their passing. I've seen that it's a horrible event. Also, that's very, very different from having a party.

The situation you're talking about in that particular country is very different from the people I've loved, who depending on your definition of a live could be sustained without any function with medical intervention, with robots and electricity that could make their body do things that it could no longer involuntarily do to simulate a liveness. And then I've watched and had to counsel families through the process of how they would respond to that impossible situation. Yeah. We're not talking about that here either.

I don't know the answers. A couple of things in this article here. A report released in October of his since sheds and lights on controversial cases where people were granted assisted dying when they were not nearing their natural death. Look at the way the dystopian language tries to clean up the ugliness of it.

It's grossed at dying. Yes, exactly. There's always a euphemism to go with these horrors. One example includes it's almost a Orwellian language.

It's very messed up. One example included a woman in her 50s with a history of depression and suicidal thoughts who had a severe sensitivity to chemicals. Her request for euthanasia was granted after she failed to secure housing that could have met her medical needs. That is the most jacked up, twisted.

Everything about this is wrong. I'm familiar with the story you're referencing right there. This isn't the direction the conversation needs to go. There are people listening who feel very differently and very strongly from what I think I'm not a fan of anything at all politically right now.

So I'm just not interested in lighting that match in any way. I don't like anything. All your politics are stupid. I mean, what you're talking about there, though, is a giant state apparatus where the tendrils of central planning are in every aspect of this decision about life.