Good Dog

Sonny, his last weekend 2013

Sonny smelling the flowers, 2004

I have been walking shadowless through the house these last four days. I have cried my 54 year old self to sleep every night…

I keep finding the empty places he left behind—under my desk, where, when thunder rolled up from across Alkire Lake, he would carry his toys and curl trembling at my feet…

Stretched out on the floor behind me as I cooked at the stove, where he lay in wait in the sure knowledge that something tasty would fall from the pan…

On the couch where he would kick off the throw pillows and curl up, watching to see if I needed him, till he dozed off…

The arm of my chair, where he would come to rest his chin and serenade me with the most unique melody of groans, rumbles, whines, and wheedles when he thought he wasn’t getting enough attention, which was always…

The backyard and the field beyond, where some of his toys still lay, because I haven’t the heart to throw them away yet…

At the front door as I entered, with that powerful wagging tail that swept over everything in its range, a welcome gift carried gently in that soft mouth because he was a good host ( the gift was whatever was handy—shoes, bones, teddy bears, even a live kitten once)…

At the back door, which he would swat whenever it was time to go outside, and which bears the marks of his claws…

Our bed, where in his last weeks he would gather his waning strength to jump up, and burrow in between us, his exhausted head laying heavily on my chest…

Sonny was an eternal puppy all his ten years, excited to get in on anything good we might be doing. He aspired to nothing more than to live in the land of Good Dog, where praise and snacks rained like manna, and on those occasions when he crossed into the dark frontiers of Bad Dog, he didn’t stay there long. His ears and tail would droop, and then, thanks to a short term memory equal to any goldfish, they would rise again, and that smiling face with the famous, serene  Golden Retriever eyes would tell us all was forgiven, even if we hadn’t forgiven him yet.

He was game and handsome and strong. We took him to a swimming lake once, where he made friends with all the kids along the beach, and let them hang onto his back as he tugged them through the water . He loved teasing our old terrier Pepper when they were outside, playfully nipping at her butt to get a rise out of her. He would wait by the deck for her to come running back to the house, then block her path till she eventually learned to walk back slow and indifferent, denying him the fun of impeding her progress. After Pepper died, and our new terrier came to the house, the roles became reversed—she would wait for him to run back, and he too learned to walk slowly, so as not to trigger her terrier response to swift motion.

His appetite was prodigious, and he was an incorrigible counter-surfer and while we might occasionally forget we’d left something on the kitchen counters, he never did. We kept a tally called Sonny’s Scarf List, of all the things he’d stolen and eaten—whole pies, pizzas, loaves of bread, pots of stew, and then there were the non-food items: four wristwatches with metal bands, ear buds, binder clips, plastic ground beef wrappers with metal tips—the list went on. Everything passed too, in large land mines of poop on the back field, that made him the anathema of all our neighbors who liked to stroll along the lake.

He was hell on four legs his first three years—no one told us Goldens are the slowest to mature of all dogs. We learned by trial and error—actually, error and more error, but we grew up together, and his last six years he was the dog we’d dreamed he be. A personality bigger than either of ours, an endless capacity for affection, mostly obedient, always entertaining. Beloved of all our cats, who napped with him, and groomed him, even as he’s steal their food and catnip toys. Our tabby Max, who was Sonny’s self-appointed toadie, has spent a lot of time looking out the backdoor these last few days, meowing, as he always did when Sonny went out. In Max’s world, if Sonny isn’t in the house, he’s in the backyard, though unseen now. Max always stood at the door meowing until we let Sonny back in.

A combination of a massive blood tumor the size of a cabbage on the left side of his neck, and a bad heart arrhythmia took him down.  The vet had never seen anything like it. The weight of the tumor wouldn’t let him lift his head at the end. He had no pain, but was so exhausted we knew the time had come. On the final day we had to lift him onto a Radio Flyer wagon to wheel him to the car. When we got to the vet’s office, he got out of the car on his own steam and walked unsteadily to the back examining room, wagging his tail. He was too heavy to lift onto the table, so we lay him on the floor, and got down with him, stroking him and assuring him he was forever in the land of Good Dog. The vet came in and administered a sedative, and as he drifted off, his head in Dani’s lap, I got down to his face and kept whispering what a good boy he was. His eyes opened and he draped his paw on my arm, as he’d done so often over the years, and drifted off again. The vet then injected the final drug, and then, astonishingly, he lifted his head and licked my face, and was gone. It was his last gift.

It was a gift to go with all the other gifts he’d given us over the last decade. He was not a child, he was a pet—I would never presume to compare the loss of a dog to the loss of a child—but I have grieved, and am grieving, as much as I ever have in my life. I’d like to think Dani and I gave him a good life, and what he gave in return is best measured by the empty spaces he leaves behind.