my dogs are old as fuck

I was walking around the dog park with my dogs today and I was sorta ruminating as I do more and more these days about how they're old. They're 13 now, and they're getting creaky. It's clear that they aren't going to live forever. I figure they're around 85% through their life cycle if things continue to go well.

That sucks. I don't like the idea of my dogs senescing and dying. it's lame sauce, as the kids recently stopped saying. I remember when these dogs were annoyingly young. Now they're getting infirm.

I've been trying to find a perspective that allows me to make peace with the idea. The best I've come up with is that they are, at this moment, older than they would have lived to be if they'd been wild dogs.

I figure a wild dog has ten years on the outside. Barring unfortunate events, a dog in a pack of dogs without human supervision and medical procedures is liable to snuff it by then at the latest, because they'd start to slow down. A younger dog will take an older dog out sometimes, because the older dog seems sick or something.

By this metric, my dogs aren't 85% through their life cycle, they're actually 130% through their life cycle, and they've got another good year in them anyhow. Surely that's worth something.

But the idea doesn't really give me the peace that I want it to. What I eventually realized, walking through the dog park and thinking it over, is that it doesn't help because I object to the idea of getting old and dying completely. It's not that dogs don't live an adequate amount of time, it's that nothing does (except Dick Cheney, who really ought to have died in 1984).

Bring on the immortality, I say.