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Ah, nothing like looking forward to a nice drive home to warm weather -- balmy days, walks on the beach, fish in the bay, golf on the links, jogging in shorts, bicycling along the seawall. Enough of this cold weather; ski season's over.
Start early in the morning....before the sun's up....in spite of the blowing snow. Oops!
The good news - Kathy and I escaped unscathed. Just one more insurance claim to add to the list....
March 8, 2009
Perhaps it’s the catharsis that comes with reminiscence that makes us want to eulogize our departed loved one – even if it’s ‘just a dog’.
Molly came to us in 1998. We heard she was rescued from a small apartment porch where she’d been neglected for some time. When we got her she was skin and bones, recovering from heartworms. The vet said she was a young adult, probably three or four years old. It took her no time to understand who her two managers were, and for the first time in her life she had rules. Labs love rules.
She had never set foot off hard floors and concrete, so grass was a novelty. I’ll never forget that first summer we took her to the mountains. We discovered that in addition to having never experienced grass, uneven terrain was equally novel. She would run down a hill, turn and run back up, only to run down again. Dogs don’t exactly smile, but everyone knows what a happy dog face looks like. Molly had that face most of her life.
Like most labs with two managers, Molly preferred to be in between. On cross-country ski outings, she preferred to run back and forth between us, checking to be sure we were all on the same path. At home, with one manager in the kitchen and the other in the study, she’d position herself in the hallway where she could be at the beck and call of either of us.
As her life progressed, so did her extended family. She welcomed a son-in-law and a daughter-in-law. By the time of her passing, she had three granddaughters to dote on her and tend to her various geriatric idiosyncrasies.
A dog like this deserved to die at home, and so it was that after an agonizing night of discomfort, her managers took on the mantle of true decision-makers and made an early morning call to the veterinarian. Would we have the vet begin a hydrating i.v. and boost the narcotics for comfort, or would we opt for a humane euthanizing end to her ordeal? As we waited for the return call from the vet to signal when we would take her in for the choice, Molly made the decision for us. With three generations of humans around her, she took a final sigh and lay down for the last time.
