Soapbox

Simply The Best

    So I had this dog….  and his name was Boomer. And he was not just any dog, you know. He was the best dog there ever was. I’m sure everyone who loses a pet says that about them, but in this case, it was true.

    Katie used to say that you could tell true "dog people" by which of our dogs they were most fond of. Rocket is small and cute and has soft ears and carries around stuffed animals in an endearing way. He is non-threatening and basically sweet, and people who don’t really know dogs often prefer Rocket.

    But Boomer was the real dog-lover’s dog. Boomer had a depth of character that you don’t always find in dogs. It was almost impossible not to anthropomorphize Boomer: he was such a unique individual in both personality and appearance. Boomer was a blue merle Australian shepherd, and the first thing people noticed about him was his unusual eyes. "Is he blind?" they would ask, because one eye was half blue.

    We adopted Boomer from a rescue group when he was about 9 months old, and he learned basic obedience quickly. He was a herding dog in the truest sense: he was smart and loyal had a strong instinct for his home territory. Shortly after we got him I was taking him for a walk in the big field behind the school where my kids’ bus picked them up, and let him off the leash, as I had begun to do. He would run in great, happy loops out in front of me, chasing birds and the joy he took in his freedom as he flew over the grass was a beautiful thing to see.  He always looped back to me before running off again: the herding instinct, I guess. On this day, however, Boomer spotted a cat darting in between two of the houses that backed up onto the field, and a different instinct kicked in. He took off like a streak, and no amount of shouting and whistling would call him off his hunt.
   I ran after him between the houses but Boomer was out of sight. I called a few more times, then gave up and headed home to get the car and scour the neighborhood. How far would he wander? I remembered times when Mischa, our Siberian huskey had run off, and was finally found miles away. How am I going to tell the kids that I lost their brand new dog? I worried as I loped up the street, praying he wouldn’t get hit by a car…. and there he was, sitting on the front step, waiting for me. He already knew where he belonged, and when he lost sight of me, he simply went home. Ted says this is the difference between a dog bred to run in a straight line, and one bred to run in circles.

   Boomer always had a taste for cats, and squirrels (caught one once,  to his chagrin!) but he also always held true to that sense of home. Several times I put him in the back yard without realizing that the gate was open…. because he never strayed. With Rocket I would realize my error when I caught sight of him wandering in the neighbor’s yard, but not Boomer. I came home from work once and he was sitting at the open gate- on the inside… wagging his hind end (no tail on an Aussie) and waiting patiently. I regarded him in surprise for a moment as I got out of the car and he looked at me, wiggling with excitement but not venturing out. Impressed, I finally  said " OK, big dog" and he ran out like a shot. He knew the command "stay in your yard" and I could let him out to sniff and wander when I was working out front without fear of his running off.
   Except when it was snowing. Oh my, how that dog loved snow! When I would bundle up and head to the garage for the shovel, Boomer would stand anxiously inside the door, quivering with anticipation until I said "OK". Then out he would go into the snow- running, sniffing, rolling.  I have always loved snow- the way it sounds, and the way the world feels- and it almost seemed like Boomer felt the same way. But I suspect that what he really loved was that for him, it erased his boundaries. If I didn’t keep an eye on them, I would look up and this dog, who would sit all day by an open gate without venturing out, would be sniffing happily 5 or 6 houses down the street with Rocket, his partner in crime.
    "Get back here, you morons!" I would shout and he would bound back happily with no sense of guilt for having broken the rules. I guess snow covered up the boundary lines.
   He loved to run, and he loved the wind. No matter the weather, Boomer wanted to be outside. Wild weather brought wild smells, perhaps. Aussies have very long hair on their legs and haunches. Boomer’s long hair was straw-colored, and we called it his grass skirt.  I loved to see him standing outside, muzzle into the wind, with his "skirt" blowing wildly. The only time he didn’t want to be out was when it thundered. Then he would run upstairs and lay down beside my bed, in his safety spot, and pant until the thunder passed.

   Boomer would jump over poles or chase a frisbee, but he most loved to play with his black rubber kong toy. We would throw it and he would tear after it and bring it back to us… eventually. First he would blow past at top speed just a foot or so away, daring- begging you to leap on him and try to wrestle it away from him. He would give it to you at once if you gave him the command "drop it!" but he seemed to have so much more fun taunting you with it that often I would lunge forward as if I was going to try to grab it, just so he could gleefully evade my reach.
    Our other dog, Rocket, would get incredibly excited by all this. He wouldn’t chase the kong, but would chase Boomer, and run alongside, barking at him all the way down and back. Apparently Boomer found this annoying: from time to time he would veer off course and head-butt Rocket along the way, bowling him over. Then Boomer would resume his run back to me with the toy, unencumbered by his critic.
   He posessed great loyalty, energy and dignity, but he could also be very funny. Just his sheer zest for life would make you smile. Sometimes we called Boomer our "cow dog" because he had a habit of making a low rumbling sound of contentment that was more like a moo than anything else. He often made this sound while he rolled over and rutched himself back and forth on his shoulder blades, feet flopping in the air. Then he would flip to his belly and, hind legs dragging out behind, would pull himself in a dog’s version of an army crawl across the grass, or through the snow, to the great amusement of any watching.

   Life with Boomer wasn’t always easy, of course. When he was young, Boomer liked to chew things: logs from the firewood pile, the legs on the kitchen chairs, the uprights on the deck railing, the legs off Katie’s Barbie dolls. Once I spied him coming up from the basement and he just had a guilty look- you know how dogs get. They duck their head a little and there’s something about the eyebrows- you just know they know they were up to no good. I ran down to to the family room and found that Boomer had eaten a chair.
    My dad had an older, kind of tweedy recliner that he didn’t want any more, and my sister Becky had called dibs on it. But Becky didn’t have room in her house, so we were "babysitting" it until such time and she had the space. Well now it had no seat. Fortunately (for himself  and the chair) Boomer hadn’t actually ingested the chair- just dismantled it in great chunks. I glued in as much as I could of the foam chunks, covered it with quilt batting and spent over an hour sitting on the floor with needle and carpet thread, reweaving the cushion cover. From time to time Boomer would poke his head around the top of the stairs, I would glower at him and he would disappear again.

   Boomer was the nemesis of squirrels, stray cats, possums and woe betide the bunny that ventured under the fence! More than once I had to dispose of the remains of his keen hunting instinct. Squirrels would sometimes taunt him, I swear, chattering from the rooftop while he ran in lathered circles, barking at the house. When I would open the door and order him to be quiet he would look at me in confusion.
       Don’t you understand? You’re in danger!
He even got so zealous about protecting the yard that he chased birds from the feeder. In vain I tried to explain to him that they were supposed to be there: to him they were interlopers. And yet, I have seen him lay there and take all manner of abuse from puppies without a whimper. He just knew the difference. Or maybe, it was because he recognized that they were babies.
    When Boomer was still pretty young, I babysat my nephew Anthony every day. When Anthony could not yet crawl  I would settle him in on a big cushion with some toys and leave the room for a minute. This bothered Boomer quite a bit. He would pace back and forth from me to the baby, me to the baby:
   Why are you away from the little one?
When I returned I almost always found him curled up beside Anthony: on guard, no doubt, in case a squirrel somehow made its way indoors and attacked.
    Boomer was a pretty laid-back dog (when no kong or squirrel was in sight) but we knew he was always on guard. Katie was nervous at night when she was younger, but said that she would remind herself that Boomer was asleep either against the front door or in the hall right outside her room, and it made her feel safe. I confess that when Ted was gone, his presence across the front door was very reassuring to me as well.

   I awoke with a groan this morning from an unsettling dream- I was dreaming that Boomer was dieing, and the nurses asked me if I wanted to them to save a part of the sternum and ribs that people sometimes used from dogs to make clocks, and I said yes, I had decided to make a grandfather clock out of Boomer. (?)  I opened my eyes and looked at the clock- 6:15 AM. Just 4 hours since we had had Boomer put to sleep.

   Last spring, just as the lilacs were in full bloom, Boomer developed a cough. No other symptoms, just an occasional cough when he laid down, but as a former nurse, I immediately suspected CHF. He was 12 1/2 years old, after all, and while he seemed in robust good health, it was a possibility. I took him to the vet. He took an x-ray, and came back and said to me "Your dog has a very big heart"
    I sighed. "Yes, he truly does. But I don’t think you mean that in a good way, do you?"
    The diagnosis was an enlarged heart with severe valve disease. He was started on lasix to clear out the fluid, and a heart medication. The cough almost disappeared, and Boomer was still the grand old man of the neighborhood, dashing around the yard like a puppy… when we would let him. I was afraid to throw the kong more than once or twice for him for fear he would run himself to death before my eyes. Not that he would have minded going that way, I guess.

    It was just hard to believe that he was as sick as they said he was! We have friends who had dogs they had to carry in and out of the house by Boomers age, but if he spotted a squirrel making a break for the feeder, Boomer was still out the door and in the yard without bothering with any of the 4 steps between the deck and the grass. He could still catch a fly off the living room window. Sure he seemed to pant longer than he used to after exertion, but who doesn’t? But sometimes, when I was brushing his beautiful white ruff on his chest, I could feel his heart beating very hard, and I knew it was trying to compensate for those bad valves.
   He was enrolled in a heart drug study at the local veterinary hospital where all the doctors and techs just loved his sweet nature. (Boomer used to kiss them while they were drawing blood). I would drive him over once a month for an hour or two of ultrasounds and blood work, and at the end of the 6 month study they pronounced him ill but remarkably stable, and sent him on his way with some nice expensive medicine.
       He began eating less, so mealtimes were a bit of a chore, what with all the pills and then mixing wet food in with the dry to make the pills taste good, and keeping Rocket from pilfering the food- and possibly pills- from Boomer’s bowl. Because he was on lasix he now had to sleep in our room with the door closed, so that we would hear him when he wakened and could let him outside to do his business. It was like having a baby again, as he would often get me up 2 or 3 times a night. At least there were no diapers to change.

   One terrible night in January  when I got up with him, I found his breathing was very  labored and he seemed to be in pain . I sat up with him for over 2 hours and finally woke Katie and Ted because I thought we were going to have to have him put to sleep to spare him further pain. But at dawn he finally fell asleep and when he woke he was much more comfortable, and within a day or two was back to his old rambunctious self. And so we waited and we watched, expecting that it could happen again any day, trying to prepare ourselves but knowing all the while that it wouldn’t help when the moment came.

   And when it did come, it wasn’t quite what we thought it would be. We realized that he had  internal bleeding, so we took him in to the emergency clinic around 10:45 last night. Katie left her friend’s house and drove there to meet us. They took films and said there was definitely something going on in the abdomen, but also his heart was now in atrial fibrillation. As soon as the doctor said that, I knew that the end had come. There was no way they could really try to address whatever was causing the bleeding when his heart was in danger of stopping just from the fluids they needed to give him. And so we made the decision that every pet owner knows they may have to make some day.
     They took us to a quiet room with sofas and chairs and brought Boomer in. He had an IV shunt taped to his leg so they could administer the final drugs. He wagged his stump in relief at seeing us, sniffed us all and then spent the next 5 minutes of our time together anxiously trying to convince us to take him home- going back and forth from us to the door, sniffing around the door frame and then looking back at us.
     Come on, you guys know how to make this thing open! Let’s get out of here!
    We tearfully called him back to us, petted him and gave him a few final words. We told him what a wonderful friend he had been and how we would never forget him.

    "I- I wish he looked sick" Ted confessed. "I know this is the right thing to do… I just wish he looked like he needed us to do it." The doctor gathered her syringes.  I put one arm around Boomer’s neck and the other around his chest. I could feel his great heart, so big in so many ways, just thundering now inside his body, trying desperately to cope with the demands of his heart disease, hypovolemia, and anxiety.
    "You’re almost done now, big dog" I whispered, and nodded to her. First she gave him a sedative, and in just a few seconds I felt him relax, and then his feet start to slip. Ted and I lowered him gently to the blanket they had placed on the floor and we all stroked his fur. "It’s Ok, you can just go to sleep" we told him, and after only a few  seconds more, he did. That frantic hammering of his heart stilled at last, and the doctor collected her empty syringes.
   "I’ll give you a few minutes."

    We sat and stroked his fur gently while we wept. I remembered aloud the first day we brought him home, and Katie wondered how little Rocket would deal with the loss of his life’s companion. Ted said that he wants to get another dog soon, if everyone was in agreement. I shrugged, too numb to think about it.
    After a minute or two we got to our feet.  It was 2:15 AM: we’d been at the hospital for hours and we were all exhausted. We walked to the door and I opened it… and we looked  back, realizing that Boomer was never going to trot out after us again. Somehow, leaving him there, walking through that door and out into the night without him was much, much harder than giving the go-ahead to administer the drugs had been. I had a last glimpse of him lying there- my rambunctious dog, so still and alone, and I felt my heart break inside me.
   Katie, holding a fistfull of tissues to her face, scurried ahead of us to her car. "Go with her" Ted said. "I don’t want her driving by herself right now." And so the two of us rolled through the early morning, talking about things we remembered about him and crying.
     "Didn’t Julie and Craig have to put their dog Babes to sleep on the day after Easter?" I asked.
     "Yeah, why?" She considered for a moment. "Oh. It’s the day after Easter by now."
    We rode in silence a bit longer. "You know," she said, " I never quite believed in heaven or anything before, but now… I really hope there is a heaven, and that dogs get to go there. At least Boomer should."
   "If there is such a thing as a spirit, Boomer had one, as surely as you or I" I agreed. "Dogs may not be just like people, but there is some connection between people and dogs… I don’t think it’s just in our minds. I think it’s more than that, like we were made to be together."
    "He just seems too… real, too connected  for us never in any way to be with him again!"  she wept.
   That is the cry of everyone who has lost someone beloved: This just can’t be the end! If this is really is forever- what was the point? That’s a truth I guess we all have to resolve for ourselves in the quiet of our own hearts. If there is a life in spirit after life on earth, do dogs share it? I don’t know. There is more in heaven and earth, Horatio, than is dreamt of in your philosophy.

   All I know is this: we had this dog, and his name was Boomer. He was one of us- he completed us in a way we didn’t know we needed completing. He was our guardian and companion, our court jester and disciple. And he was the best dog there ever was.