As many of you are aware, over the past few months I have been reflecting in this space on my dog Aggie’s struggles with canine cognitive dysfunction. Yesterday, after she suffered through an interminable seizure, I decided it was time to let go.
Aggie was 13 ½ and besides the CCD was in excellent health. But despite months of trying meds to calm her down in the evenings when she began sundowning, she had reached the point where meds were no longer working, in fact seemed to be exacerbating her problems. She would pace for hours, constantly trying to settle down only to be jerked awake by something (god knows what) that frightened her. On her beloved walks, she startled frequently and would bark continuously for no discernible reason.
This is the third time I have written about losing a dog at Daily Kos. And in many ways it feels like the most difficult loss yet. A lot of this is due to my age; I’m 74 and I wonder if I have enough time remaining and the stamina to introduce another dog into my life. The option, however, of being a dogless person is so painful to entertain. For the past few years, my life has revolved around Aggie. To deal with her restlessness, I took her on four walks a day.
Aggie came into my life quite soon after I had lost my 12-year-old Stella, whom we now believe undoubtedly suffered from CCD. Back then they weren’t yet diagnosing dogs with dementia.
It was a Saturday in October 2012 and a friend of mine convinced me to attend a huge adoption event up at the San Rafael Civic Center. At this point, Stella had only been gone a few weeks and I told my friend to put aside any ideas that I would be leaving with a dog that day. I was still so deep into my grieving. Just the day before, I had been driving downtown Mill Valley when a deer was hit by a car right in front of me. It scrambled up the hillside and died looking right into my eyes. I cried so hysterically that I wasn’t able to drive and a police car came and ordered me to move on. The extent of my despair was exacerbated by the depth of my grief over the recent loss of Stella.
We weren’t at the adoption event for more than 10 minutes when we came across the Lake County selection of adoptable dogs. This black and tan 8-month-old was sleeping behind the fencing and as we walked up she looked up right into my eyes. It startled me, reminding me of the deer the day before. Her assigned name was Carmela. We asked to spend some time with her and took her out to a grassy area and sat down. She immediately began playing with my friend’s older puppy. I felt right away she was meant to be mine. The next day, Aggie and I drove over to Strawberry Point to meet a friend for a walk. We stopped at an intersection and there was a deer grazing in the front yard of someone’s house. The deer looked up, once again right into my eyes.
Aggie lived out her life with me in Sausalito. For years, I would take her at least three mornings a week over the Golden Gate Bridge to the beach at Crissy Field. We would walk the beach and she would play with other dogs or fetch sticks. Huge chunks of her day were spent with her friends at the Mill Valley and Sausalito Dog Parks. As she got older, however, she became reactive around other dogs and aggressively guarded me and other humans she was close to. She became a leash only dog. I took her most everywhere with me; she loved being in the car and slept while I was in yoga classes or out to breakfast with friends. I hated hot days when I had to leave her home. But we had a routine for that, soothing music and two small frozen kongs, one tossed into her crate, the other left on her bed in the living room.
Up until the last few years, she would fall asleep each night beside me in my queen sized bed by leaning against me and then just plopping down to cuddle closer. These past years I would wake often with her body wedged tightly against mine. For the past few months, we had moved into the other bedroom to sleep, where the mattress was closer to the floor and easier for her to access. For two weeks now, she was wearing diapers and we had doggie pads on the bed.
With 13 years between us, there are just so many memories. One day my friend took her to hike up on Mount Tamalpais while I was at a doctor’s appointment in San Francisco. Aggie crawled into this large section of undergrowth and became frightened when she couldn’t find a way out. She froze. My friend called me from the mountain and I drove up. We had flashlights, treats, hedge clippers. Several hikers joined in as we tried to lure her out. Night was descending. I finally was able to cut my way through and grab her collar to pull her free. She did the same thing a few months later when she was up there with another group of dogs.
One time she chased the neighbor’s cat under their house into a very tight space and we had to call the Sausalito Fire Department to help us get her out.
Yesterday, my daughter came down from Petaluma to go to the vet with me, bringing along some bacon and an In-N-Out doggie pattie. Her partner drove over from a meeting in the East Bay.
There was a special room at the vet set aside for saying good-bye. A comfy bed, some treats, a container of Hershey’s kisses so your dog could have taste chocolate. A box of kleenex.
Tears have been impossible to me for some years now, and I had often wondered if I would be able to cry when the time came. The enormity of my grief was so intense that I cried uncontrollably and once she was gone just didn’t want to leave her body behind. It felt like I was leaving an integral part of my soul.
Aggie was quite the barker! The neighborhood will be so quiet with her gone. My life is so quiet.
Sleep, dear Aggie. No more bogey men to frighten you once the sun goes down. No more dreaded trips to the vet. No more barking at invisible threats. You are so loved. So missed.
Kitchen Table Kibitzing is a community series for those who wish to share a virtual kitchen table with other readers of Daily Kos who aren’t throwing pies at one another. Drop by to talk about music, your weather, your garden, or what you cooked for supper…. Newcomers may notice that many who post in this series already know one another to some degree, but we welcome guests at our kitchen table and hope to make some new friends as well.
