Another goodbye

Nearly fifteen years ago, I went just to look at a litter of puppies. Cocker spaniel puppies. Of course as my mom, my younger brother, and I all trooped off my dad was there saying, "Sure. To look. That's what will happen."

One of the puppies caught me, because of course one would. As my dad well knew, there was no way we could go look at puppies without bringing one home. From that first snuggle, when she put her head on my shoulder and sighed contentedly, she was my dog and I was her person. The little black and white sweetheart came home with me that day. It was, frankly, stupid and irresponsible. If I'd truly thought it through I would have realized that my life was too chaotic for a puppy. I was twenty-one years old and had no idea what I wanted to do in the future, or where life would take me. I ended up moving several times, sometimes without being able to take her with me. My parents, who by that time loved her as much as I did, took care of her for me when I couldn't be around. Through it all, though, she's been my dog and I've been her person.

"I'm beautiful."

Over fourteen years later and bringing her into my life is one of the best things that has ever happened to me. It ranks right up there with meeting my spouse. When HusbandX and I decided to move in together, in Alaska, I told him that I would be bringing my dog up to (finally) live with me. He said okay, but I could tell that he wasn't excited about the idea. He said, several times, that he wasn't going to be responsible for her. She was my dog, not his.

And then they met. It was pretty much love at first sight. He'd been dreading a small dog with yappy tendencies and a hyperactive need to be in your face at all times. Instead, he got a laid back dog who loved walks and runs but was also content to just sit on the couch, encroaching on the space of whoever was there with her. I'm not going to lie, she could be pretty barky too, but generally for good reasons.

"Dignity. Always, dignity."

The joy she's brought to our lives is indescribable. So many of our favorite stories and moments are about or with her. There was the time she knocked down an entire pan of gingerbread and ate it, then spent the entire next day groaning and wheezing in pain. There was the time she confronted a moose outside of our dry cabin, tail wagging as she went to meet this strange new creature while I quietly had a panic attack on the front porch and tried to whisper-shout her back to safety, thinking that surely the moose would just stomp her to death. It snorted and she ran, yelping, back to safety. After that, we could always tell when there was a moose in the woods because she would run up and down the driveway barking, but never venturing close to the strange, scary beasts.

There was the Halloween that she had minor surgery and, drugged up, fell off the couch, barking strangely, as she realized trick-or-treaters were there just after they'd left. Every time someone came to the door we repeated this routine. She still insisted on getting back up on the couch. There was the time HusbandX was throwing leftover noodles to her and one got stuck to the hair on her back, so she spent 15 minutes doggedly sniffing around the kitchen looking for it, tail wagging, as we laughed until it hurt, intermittently throwing more noodles on her back. We finally had to pull them off and feed them to her because she would have looked for them forever. There was the time HusbandX took her to the groomers and asked them to shave her everywhere but keep her mutton chops. (They were glorious.)

She had a taste for cat poop, which we discovered only after we got our cat. She seemed to think he pooped out treats covered in pee-flavored sprinkles just for her. She also never seemed to want to lick anyone unless she had cat poop breath.

"You wish you could grow 'chops like these."

She has also been the best family dog we could have asked for. She knew I was pregnant the first time before I did, sitting and staring at me rather creepily until I figured out what was going on. Initially highly jealous of the baby, she settled down fairly quickly for a senior dog. I felt that it was a little unfair to throw a baby into the mix when she was so old but she took to her role as Babushka Dog amazingly well. She even challenged my mother-in-law, growling and barking fiercely, when she thought my mother-in-law had abandoned her baby somewhere. Then we put a second baby into the mix and she was nothing but protective and loving with the new little one. She snuggled the baby when the baby cried, she slept next to her whenever possible. After a bath, the dog ran around rubbing herself on the baby's stuff so that she'd smell like the baby, not herself. She let the baby tangle fingers in her hair and didn't even move when the baby flailed tiny fists at her face.

Despite more provocation than any dog should ever have to put up with, she has never snapped or growled or otherwise rebuked our kids. For the past couple of years she's had arthritis that has steadily gotten worse, to the point that we knew she was in a lot of pain even with a narcotic. Her joints have stiffened up and mobility has gotten worse. Still, she didn't utter a word of protest as a rambunctious toddler and now preschooler occasionally fell on her or dropped things on her. I've had many other dogs in my life and this one is, hands down, the best and most understanding of them all. She's earned her place in the doggy Hall of Fame.

"Dis is my baby, guys. I snuggles it."

This dog has also helped me through some of the lowest points in my life, including my dad's death. Her quiet snuggly support, her unwavering devotion and love, has been incredible. I realize that many dogs do this but, in my experience, rarely to this extent. She helped me understand empathy better simply by being herself.

Which makes it all the harder that she can't help us through this final transition, this last goodbye. The cruelest part of loving a dog is that they don't live nearly as long as we do. We've seen her aging--getting mostly blinded by cataracts, going deaf, cysts and tumors growing that hamper her movement even as arthritis makes everything more painful. It's been tough to watch. In many ways, she's handled it more gracefully than we have. For the last year HusbandX and I have watched her at various times to make sure she's still breathing. I've woken up in a panic at night thinking that I couldn't hear her breath, only calming down when she rolls over or snorts and snores. I've even wondered if she's hanging on for our sake, rather than her own. Does she feel like she's abandoning us?

She started having lots of accidents in the house this past summer and we thought that it was the protest of an old lady because so much was changing--we were going back and forth between houses and she clearly knew I was growing another baby. More chaos into an old dog's life. However, when we fully moved into our new house the accidents continued. We realized that we had to take her outside once every couple of hours or she just couldn't hold it anymore. She was trying her best. But there were clearly digestive and urinary issues she was dealing with, which were just because of age. And, she needed someone to actually carry her out because she couldn't get up and down the steps herself.

We began to prepare the Munchkin. Most of her memories of the dog involve us calling her Old Lady, so it wasn't a surprise to her when we pointed out that, yes, our dog is old for a dog. We talked about how when creatures get old they sometimes get sick, and that's what was happening to our Babushka. We even talked about death. That's been a big topic of conversation at our house this year anyway, but laying the groundwork for our kiddo to be okay with losing her dog, the one that helped her learn to walk, was as hard a conversation as any we've had with her. Her third word was "doggy", which in the beginning she mostly deployed as she was dropping food for the dog and giggling.

Still we waited. Our dog was in pain and mostly blind and mostly deaf and kind of incontinent but she wasn't sick. Was it really time? She still had a bit of that spark, those brief moments when her personality was stronger than old age and she seemed like her younger self. That means she's okay, right? Besides, we were both hoping that she would gracefully bow out on her own. Just go to sleep one night and that would be that, because the best of dogs deserves an easy and peaceful passing.

"I stepped in paint and ran all
over the porch so that you'll
always have my paw prints."

In October, she had what we think might have been a small stroke. Her head compulsively ticked to the side over and over again as we were snuggled on the couch watching "Stranger Things". She looked terrified, and so were we. However, as time went on and she showed no recurrence, we went into a holding pattern of waiting and watching. We couldn't bear to say goodbye just yet, especially when she wasn't actively sick. She was just...old. She didn't show signs of another stroke (or seizure?) but she had two long periods of illness. We almost put her down but pushed it off just long enough that she got better again. I mean, as better as an old dog can get. Her baseline was always a bit worse after.

She started refusing her arthritis medicine. It hadn't been doing much anyway other than making her sick to her stomach. Even with the medicine she'd had trouble standing up from the wood floors, and she was stiff when she did so. She could barely walk at times. She would fall over frequently, either tripping over things or just because, and she sometimes paced because she was in pain. The worst, though, was the heaviness. After her illness around New Year's, she got this heaviness when she laid down, as if she didn't want to have to get back up again. In bed she would rest on my legs and trying to move them wouldn't startle her or get the push-back she used to give, she would just be limp and heavy. She didn't care what I did to her as long as she didn't have to move herself.

"Don't worry, she won't go anywhere. I gots her."

We finally decided that her time had come. It was not an easy decision and we were (are) both conflicted about it. She has been, at various times and sometimes all at once, our nanny, our cleaning crew, our therapist, a thief, our comedian, our entertainment, our biggest source of aggravation, our comfort, and always our best friend. Contemplating ending her life felt so wrong, even for good reasons. However, her bad days had begun to outnumber the good and we couldn't ignore that. She hadn't been able to go for a walk for over a year now, and even food had lost some of its appeal. We also didn't want her to get sick again and have to do this in a hurry, or watch her waste away to a withered and wretched ending. She deserved better than that.

We gave her two last wonderful weeks, taking pictures of her with the kids and feeding her home-canned salmon with rice for dinner. We spoiled her with snuggles and back scratches. I took her to preschool pickup and let her meet all the kids, who doted on her. And during these weeks, we've been watching her, hoping that it wouldn't come to the vet visit. We were hoping she would gracefully exit on her own. With all the love and attention she actually perked up and we tried to talk ourselves out of it yet again, but holding her and feeling how bony she was let us know that we were just deluding ourselves. So I found a mobile vet who would do a house call. We wanted her where she felt most comfortable, where she could be surrounded by familiar scents and her people.

"It's okay, she can jump here
and I'll just keep napping."

Our Munchkin was treating it all as a game. "It's okay, we can get a new dog!" It was frustrating and demoralizing, even though we knew that she couldn't possibly understand. We had my younger brother come to take her to the playground before the vet got here. It took a while (the dog ended up getting the sedative dose of a 140 lb. dog, though she was only about 23 lbs at this point) so they walked around after the playground, then listened to music in his car as we said our final goodbyes.

We weren't going to let the Munchkin see the body. HusbandX had come home early from work and dug a grave in the backyard while I did preschool pickup. However, the Munchkin was insistent. We both felt that maybe it would make the whole thing seem real at last, and she would understand. As preparation I explained burial, that when a spirit is gone we return the body to the earth, and she accepted that. Then we showed her the body. "When will she wake up?" We explained that she's really gone, that what made her herself was gone, and that was when she finally got it. She wailed so loud and so hard that one of the neighbors, a dog owner also, came out to see what was up.

The Munchkin insisted that she help bury our Old Lady. I don't know if she'd ever been introduced to the idea of burial before (my dad was cremated) but she immediately understood the concept, asking for a little shovel of her own. HusbandX had put apple blossoms in the grave, and he and I lowered her down together. Then we gave the Munchkin a trowel and we grabbed our shovels and, all crying together, we buried our dog.

Of course, four-year-old spirits can't be repressed. Sobbing and wailing she was crying, "Bye-bye! Bye-bye, Pepper! I love you--waaaaaah! Oh look! It's a w-w-worm! I want to *sob sob* put it in there. Waaaaaah! Bye-bye Pepper! Daddy, *sob* aren't you going to--waaah--help?" I was both crying and laughing as we did the hard task of entombing one of the best creatures I have ever known.

I have some bricks that I was going to use to make a small flower bed, but now we're going to have the Munchkin paint a few as a grave marker. I'll plant some perennial flowers over her, so that no one can be gloomy when we look at that corner of the yard.

We'll get another dog at some point, because there's a big gaping hole in our lives now that can only be filled by a dog.  Anyone who's ever owned a dog knows there's something incredible and special. We do not deserve our dogs, creatures with the purest hearts. So we will get another dog, but we will never forget or stop missing the dog who helped us become a family.

"Later guys, it has been a wild time."

Addition from HusbandX:
Your departure has left me shattered and I can't figure out how to put myself back together. When it all started I didn't even want you, now I don't know how to continue without you.