Elegy for a Dog

I used to say that I loved Heidi so much because no one else would. She wasn’t the typical golden retriever; she was high-strung, neurotic, loud, bossy, at time cantankerous. She had a penchant for rolling around in the lush green lawns of our neighbors and for leaping into puddles. She was obsessed with Frisbees and tennis balls, although she had a peculiar idea of what fetch meant—she was convinced it involved her chasing after the tossed object and then dropping it at her own feet, demanding one of her humans to pick it up and launch it again. She also had a peculiar habit of climbing on my head during thunderstorms. She spent exactly one night in the veterinarian-recommended dog crate, because she cried so pathetically that I couldn’t stand the idea of locking her in a cage—from then on, she roamed the house freely. She was kicked out of obedience school for talking back; every command the instructor gave her, Heidi responded with yips, barks, and yowls.

I was always happy that she never became obedient.

Heidi had personality. She was spunky, feisty, bossy, recalcitrant.

She was sweet and incredibly attuned to our emotions. I remember the morning my grandmother died. I came downstairs to eat breakfast before school, and I immediately noticed my mom’s red eyes, her tear-stained face. I asked what was wrong and she choked out, “Grammy died.” She started crying again, and Heidi, an anxious look on her face, ran over to my mom, jumped up to put her paws on her hips, and stretched her neck in an attempt to lick my mom’s face. Heidi did provide some comfort that morning, making us all laugh.

She was my golden girl, my Heidi dog, my goofball.

She didn’t know when to stop. She would swim at the lake until she was absolutely exhausted and slept for three hours when we got home. When she was two years old, my dad and I took her out in the back yard to run around in the snow. She played fetched for well over an hour, tossed herself into snow banks, and her reddish gold fur looked like lambskin by the time we dragged her inside. At some point during the outing, she tore a ligament in her leg. I have no idea when, because she would have continued playing if we hadn’t called her in. She had surgery, and that entire spring, I walked her up and down the steep cemetery hill to make her spindly leg strong. She often resisted and was afraid to go into the cemetery too near dusk, but twice a day, every day, for months, I walked her and for years, I couldn’t tell which leg she injured.

She seemed to think that I wouldn’t notice her trying to climb up on the couch if she moved very, very slowly. One paw on the cushion—sideways glance at me—the other paw up—quick, nervous glance at me—lean forward, not too fast, no one will ever notice. Within five minutes, she’d be sprawled across my lap.

She didn’t try to sneak her way onto the couch when I was sick. Heidi was sure she could cure me by staying by my side every second. Scratching those curly ears did make me feel better. I wish I could have been there for her at the end, to give her some comfort.

Heidi minded it when I left her. She was five years old when I left for college. She stared at my piles of bags and blankets with a despairing look: “How can you leave me?”
I came home a week later, just for the weekend, but Heidi greeted me with such joy that suggested she thought she would never see me again. I’m afraid I broke her heart every Sunday for four years, though.

Heidi, do you know how you’ve broken mine now?

I will miss her greetings and her unrestrained exuberance. Thump-thump-thump: tail spinning against her dog bed as I came in the door at midnight after dropping Jarrod off at the train station. The clicking toes, and sometimes sliding paws, as she ran to me when I came home for the first time after almost two months in Buffalo. The slower greeting I received this Easter, the last time I saw her, when I first realized just how sick she was. She was too tired to jump up, and had been sleeping in my parents’ room for most of the day, but when I said her name, “Where’s my Heidi?” her tail still rotated around and around, thumping against the dog bed. She still seemed to know when I was leaving that Sunday.

I didn’t know that would be our last goodbye. So I want to give you a better goodbye now, Heidi.

I’ll miss you, my friend—your antics, the way you never got used to Jarrod’s sneeze, your firm belief that offering your paw would make amends for any wrongdoing and instantly grant you the treat you were seeking, your perseverance. You always were one to defy the odds, from the allergic reaction to your first vaccine to these last months of hanging on well beyond what the vet expected and what I dreaded. That dreaded time has come now, and neither of us would ever be ready for it. I’ll say goodbye the way I always did. You be a good girl, Heidi. You always were.

Sasha

I was twelve years old when we first said goodbye, me and Sasha. I vividly remember that first dinner without my fuzzy friend sitting next to me with her chin in my lap, begging for whatever was on my plate. I sat at the table, sobbing over my untouched macaroni. That dog, who had been my companion for six months, was on her way to Kansas with my sister and brother-in-law, and I missed her so much already. I knew that Sasha belonged to Laurie and Brian, and that they loved her as much as I did and would take good care of her, but that did little to console me. I couldn't stop my lip from quivering as I found smudges on the windows from when she would press her nose against the glass, intently watching a squirrel in the yard. I missed that happy face waiting for me in the window when I came home from school.

I'm twenty three now, but I found myself tearing up over lunch at work and sobbing on my way home because there would be no gentle face in the window.

Sasha and I had our last goodbye this morning.

I've said goodbye to this dog a lot of times over the past twelve years; she was a dog with two families. My brother-in-law is in the Army, so Sasha couldn't always go with them when he and my sister relocated; and when she couldn't make the journey, wherever it may be, she came here. That first time, Brian was training in California and Laurie was in New Hampshire finishing her undergraduate degree and Sasha, alone in Kansas in need of rescue from a negligent dog sitter. She came back again a year later when they were stationed in Texas with an apartment too small (and an inhospitable climate) for a Siberian husky. In the months since Sasha had left, we missed having a dog so much that we got our golden retriever Heidi. We were a little anxious over whether the two dogs would accept each other, especially since my Heidi has a lot of attitude and audacity. But that qualm was quickly dispelled, and over the years, the dogs have bonded, to the point that Heidi searched the yard with perplexed sadness for weeks after Sasha had left us. To the point that Heidi stayed with her all last night.

Sasha was only supposed to be here for three years this time, while my sister and her family were stationed in Germany; but a year ago, it became evident that this visit would last the rest of her life. In October, we found out that Sasha had Cushing's disease, an illness caused by malignant tumors on her adrenal gland. An illness that would weaken her muscles, make her lose her fur, sap her energy, and eventually destroy her kidneys. The usual life span is a year or two.

When I first met Sasha, she bounded onto my front porch and greeted me by leaping up and throwing her paws onto my shoulders. She was almost year old then, but still had a lot of puppy in her, and I still had a lot of little girl in me. I formed an attachment to the dog like a young child has to a favorite toy endued with a vivid personality and internal life, a life which is a reflection of one's own inner world. Sasha was the keeper of the secrets of my twelve-year-old soul. I talked to her like she was a person, certain that, in the gaze of those intelligent blue eyes, she understood me. A precious feeling for the pains and sensitivity of that awkward age, which made it hard to let her go.

When I came home from Quincy on Monday afternoon, I knew that I had to let her go for good this time. She lay quietly on her side, her tongue lolling out. She couldn't stand up on her own anymore, and this morning, she was too weak to pick up her head. Her labored breathing was painful to watch. I sat down on the floor next to her, a cup of coffee in-hand to compensate for the five and a half hours of sleep I managed last night. She looked up at me with those still evocative blue eyes, now stained with tears from an eye infection, dimmed by illness and pain. I stroked her soft ears, still the only part of her that had turned silver with age, and said, "Soon, Sasha." It would be over soon.

I was sad to see her in such a state, so different from the strong, energetic, magnificent animal I had known. The dog who could walk for miles without the slightest sign of fatigue. The dog who took running leaps onto the couch. The one who got so excited about snow that she buried her whole face in it and stayed outside virtually all winter. But she was my Sasha still, so sweet, so calm and quiet to the last.

For her final two days, she didn't want to be alone. She yipped whenever someone left her field of vision. Her bark was always a surprisingly little sound from so large and powerful a dog, though it was less incongruous now in her weakness. I remembered Sasha the puppy with terrible separation anxiety. She once destroyed every magazine in the house when she was left alone for only an hour, and she whined indignantly whenever she was kept out on the porch for too long after dinner, impatient to rejoin the pack inside.

That's how I thought I wanted to remember her. But this morning, I was compelled to take a picture of her, knowing that it would be the last. Perhaps that was reason enough to take it. to have a punctuation mark on her life, a final image that, while so different from the young, healthy Sasha, was essential. I couldn't discount her final year, her sickness. Even dying, she was ever graceful, loving and sweet.

I ran today, I ran for a long time along routes that I used to walk with Sasha in her youth, before she started to struggle to make it to the end of the street, then to three houses down, then to the next door neighbors' house, then beyond the driveway. My parents had to carry her into the vet (we couldn't take her walking, we couldn't euthanize her until death was certain; she would have died tomorrow, but perhaps only after having seizures and suffering terribly). I wished that I could be there with her as the life left her body. One moment, she would be breathing so heavily, still struggling to sustain the last painful breaths of life. The next, gone.

She's gone now. We'll retrieve her ashes and bury them in the yard, in the place on the hill where she always sat and watched the world with bright, happy eyes. She'll return to the earth, but remain buried in my heart too.