If I had known I
would have to bury her in the backyard later that afternoon, I might not have
hurried so much through our usual morning walk. I might have let my little
sheltie stop to sniff her favorite flowers a little while longer, and I might
not have tugged at her leash so impatiently or coaxed her away from the gravel
lane, back so quickly into the house.
But I had work to do, and she was content as always to follow me inside, and content as always to plop down with a sigh on the rug next to my desk. As always she would look up at me expectantly and thunk her tail on the floor, glad just to be there and to keep me company.
In recent months she’d been moving much more slowly, yes, and had clearly mellowed with age. Twelve years—almost thirteen—is a good, full life for this breed, and we all knew she was reaching the age when dogs died. But she remained friendly and happy to the end, never understanding about life expectancies or tumors and such.
If I had known what would happen that afternoon, though, I might have offered her another treat or her favorite dog biscuit, before the seizures grabbed her so suddenly out of a peaceful nap on the braided run by my feet. They shook her cruelly as I knelt on the floor, holding her steady and stroking her in her last hours. At first the shaking and panic subsided after a few minutes, but then set in so fiercely there could be no mistaking their grip on my little friend.
After a few minutes I passed my hand in front of her eyes, but got no reaction. I don’t think she saw me, or could not respond as she always had, with an ever-friendly swish of her tail. She had always loved everyone she met, which was perhaps as much a feature of the cocker spaniel in her as anything, but we loved her for it. What more could a family ask of a dog?
At first she had been my son’s pet, after we saw her picture tacked up on a community bulletin board. Free to a good home. So, since our ten-year-old son desperately wanted that puppy, we brought her home, and she happily moved with us from house to house over the years. As long as she could see us in the room, she remained content. (And so were we.) In a touch of irony, she died on the day our son announced a wedding date with the young lady he’s been engaged to.
I think I still have the “Free to a Good Home” ad somewhere, just as I still have her collar and tags, which I gently slipped off before lowering her body into the crude grave I’d dug on the edge of our property. I slipped off her collar the same way every time I was about to give her a bath—which she hated, by the way. In fact, any time she heard water running she would run to a corner, or even hide herself under a bed. This time she received no such warning, however, or I think she might have tried to do the same thing.
If I had known what was coming, I would have scratched her behind the ears once more, or bent down to whisper what a fine dog she was, while she could still smile back at me with her strange, endearing eyes. The sheltie in her gave us one eye blue, the other eye brown. As it turned out, that was usually the first thing people noticed about her. Is she blind? they would ask. And no, she was not—until her last hours.
The veterinarian understood my pain as she lay writhing and twitching on his cold steel exam table, as he glumly told me there was little he could do for a thirteen-year-old dog with a apparent brain tumor. It was time to let her go, he said. I consoled myself knowing she had lived her days happily following a boy as he grew up, and then in her last years just as happily keeping a lone writer company as he wrote stories about life, love, and families.
At the same time I felt a moment of guilt for shedding tears that should have perhaps otherwise been reserved for human sorrow—for babies unborn or teens cut down before they can grow to adults. For people with deep needs. I will cry for them, too, but the tears for this little dog were as much for myself and my family. They came as I recalled happy memories each of my three grown children shared, as well. Even from halfway across the country I heard the catch in their voices, their own sadness as I called that afternoon to tell them what had happened.
Now I must stop crying, and I will, though I walked alone this morning without a leash and a happy little dog. As I passed the spot where I buried her, I paused for a moment to see the stone where I had roughly scratched her name with my pocket knife. Just like a little boy would do.
And I remembered again laying her in that grave, running my fingers through her fur and feeling the faint, lingering warmth of her fever. Kneeling by the open hole, I had apologized over and over for what I’d told the vet to do, and then for covering her with dirt. But as I had—just at that moment—a light rain fell, adding to my tears. It lasted only long enough for me to finish filling the grave with dirt before promptly stopping once again.
But it was enough to know that Heaven had perhaps also shed a small tear over the death of a dear family friend.