by Tod Davies.
Then Strider died. In the last year of his life, I learned more from him than I had from any other dog. More, in fact, than from any other human. Pain teaches you that, I find.
I’ll never know what caused that first terrifying seizure. He had run on an estuary beach the day before, and I suspected a red tide, poisonous algae, though none had been reported. The vet told me it could just have been old age. We didn’t know how old he was. Another vet, looking at his teeth when I first adopted him, said he was anywhere between six and twelve, which would have made him between thirteen and nineteen when he died.
I was upstairs at my desk when I heard a thrashing around downstairs. I thought I must have shut Strider in another room by accident, and went down to let him out. There he was, trying helplessly to raise himself up, circling, falling, his eyes wide and wild, frantic. I grabbed him, but he didn’t know I was there.
I had no idea what was happening. It was one of the most frightening things that ever happened to me, that not knowing what was wrong, that not knowing what could be done to soothe him, to make it better.
I started calling every vet, they all told me to take him to emergency. Emergency said it would be hours before they could see him, I should just monitor him. Which I did, petting him, helplessly telling him I was there, not knowing what else to do.
Slowly, slowly, he came back to himself. I sat there with him on the floor for hours until he could stand on his own and drink water.
The next day, it was as if it had never happened. But things were never the same for him again, or for me with him, and he died a year later.
It was a difficult year.
There was the guilt. The news came after his seizure that there had been, in fact, a red tide, unreported until after it had dissipated. I’ll never know if it was letting him race around in the sluice that came in from the bay that caused the seizure and his decline or not.
Then there was the guilt that I wasn’t handling him as gently as I could have. The guilt that I longed to have him back the way he had been, not the way he was. The guilt that led me back to searching the internet for another dog, one who might replace him, because he seemed to weaken every day, every week, every month. He would weaken, then return stronger, though always a little weaker than before.
He went on medication for the seizures. When they happened now, they were less frightening, since I knew what they were. The vet had recommended I put bells on his collar so I knew when they were happening, but there was no need for that—he was always with me. When a seizure came on, he would start staring blindly around, and I would go and sit with him until it subsided.
Then he actually went blind. And deaf. Were these just the usual progressions of old age, like his and my arthritis, or had it been brought on by the seizures? I’ll never know. Slowly, he also was overtaken by dementia, where he hardly knew where he was or who I was, though he always seemed comforted, even in the most extreme moments of confusion, if I was nearby.
Before it progressed that far, though, I had found a puppy.
I felt guilty about this. But I had no idea how long Strider had yet, and I have always wanted to have an older dog teach a younger dog, the way Happy did with True, and True did with Leo.
As it happened, though, the puppy was just what Strider needed. I saw him in a photo put on the internet by a local animal sanctuary. A half heeler and a half—they thought Jack Russell, though time proved that guess wrong.
He was meant for me. And for Strider. We all did the drive out for the first meet and greet, Alex, Shadow, Strider and me. But it was Strider who was the most taken with the pup; that was obvious. And the pup, then named Comet, was taken with him. That was obvious too. There was really no choice about the matter. Once the adoption went through, and the pup had been fixed, Strider and I would go out to bring him home.
As it happened, Alex and Shadow were away the week the sanctuary said Comet was ready to come home. So Strider and I set off to bring him back. We filled the back of the car with a dog bed and a mound of dog toys. It was a long drive, we had only driven the last bit of it once, and that was to meet the pup. When we turned down that last road, Strider suddenly sat up and, excited, said to me as clearly as if he spoke, “Are we going to get him? Are we going to get the pup?” I told him we were, and he could hardly contain his excitement. He didn’t walk well by then, so one of the sanctuary workers had to walk the pup to our car while I lagged behind with Strider, who watched the pup happily as he staggered along.
We drove home. I let them both out of the car. Strider immediately insisted on showing the pup around the property. And the pup followed. We all went for our usual walk in the woods. No need to leash the pup. He watched both of us for cues. He watched Strider. Strider was so proud to be his teacher. He was so proud of him.
In the days after, Strider taught Comet, now renamed Woody, everything he knew. It was as if he knew he wouldn’t be around forever, and someone was going to have to take his place. He introduced Woody to Shadow, and was doubtless pleased that the pup showed proper respect to his elders. He showed Woody his favorite spots to sleep. He had always slept next to me, lengthwise, and he taught Woody to sleep on my feet. But then, slowly, he found it harder and harder to climb onto the bed. We bought him carpeted stairs, and that helped for a while. But then the stairs, slowly, began to be too much for him. He took to preferring an orthopedic bed I put next to my side where I slept.
And Woody took his place, lengthwise, next to me.
Every morning, Woody would wake up at the same time as Strider and they would buss noses. Then Woody would wait, patient, as first Strider, then Shadow got their breakfasts before him.
We would go on walks together. Soon I had to keep Strider on a leash, especially going across the streams on the little plank bridges. He started not being able to see, and after the first time he fell off on his back in the mud, I took greater care.
Then, slowly, his dementia made it so that he couldn’t walk a straight line any more. He would weave away from the path, tugging on the leash, obviously not looking where he was going, having to be guided back. I started to think, guilty, how little fun it was to walk him anymore.
Then, slowly, he started refusing to go on the walk. He would just lie down on the deck, or in the house. It used to be he hated being left alone, but when he got so tired, that was just what he wanted. Only a short time, though. He still didn’t like being left alone for long.
When Shadow was dying, he seemed to come back to himself a bit more. He would lie next to her in the sun during the day. At night, sometimes she would lie on his bed and he would curl up next to her. Woody watched them both, anxious to be of help, though there was really nothing he could do. When she died, and we wrapped her in an old Japanese robe of Alex’s and laid her on her bed, Strider and Woody lay beside her, watching. Saying good-bye.
After that, he declined even more quickly. He would get anxious—it was the dementia, the vet told me—and wander the house, circling aimlessly, knocking into things. He would knock over his water bowls—one time at two in the morning. He would knock into the wine rack, and the sound of the bottles rattling would make me scream.
I would scream when he knocked into the water bowls. Alex would say, gently, “Don’t yell at him. It’s not his fault, poor Strider.” And I knew it wasn’t his fault. I was ashamed. But I couldn’t seem to help it. I would scream at him. When I took him out at night for a last pee, or in the morning for a first one, he had to be always on the leash. He would wander off, in his dementia, and for some reason what attracted him most was a steep slope down to the stream, one covered with jagged branches. Woody usually watched him during the day and would alert me if he wandered off, but this particular time I had only turned my back for a minute while I cleaned up some of the dog messes. When I turned around, Strider was gone. But I saw Woody’s behind disappear down over the hill to the stream, and a moment later, Strider appeared, blind, demented, and grinning. Then Woody’s head appeared, pushing Strider from behind.
Woody was Strider’s comfort in his old age. The puppy would try to attack the older dog, get his juices going again, and even though I tried to stop it, sure enough, Strider would pretend to get mad, round on Woody and give a little chase. Then he would prance as if he was saying, “Still got it!”
Woody would look at me anxiously.
When Strider had seizures in the middle of the night, Woody would come and lie with his head next to my lap, and we would wait together for Strider to come back to himself.
I kept losing patience, though I tried my best. It made me remember my mother’s rages with us, my brothers and I, when we were very small. She was under so much stress, my father drunk and unhappy, his family rude and uncaring, his brother stalking her with no one to protect her from his unwanted, more than creepy, attentions. No wonder she would scream at us when we would race through the house, breaking things, or when we wouldn’t mind in public.
I screamed at Strider now. But he always forgave me. Always. And I was always his person. Just as I’d been from the start.
My pain about his decline made me face the pain about my own. And his crashing into objects taught me something unexpected. I had discovered early on that if I got unusually upset at some happening, a thing that didn’t warrant the strength of my emotion, this was a sign that hiding behind it was some horrible happening in the past, one I had pushed so far down it wasn’t yet remembered. And the only way to stop from reacting like that is to stay very still, especially when I was awake in the night, and let the memory come up, no matter how painful.
I noticed that my involuntary scream would happen when Strider knocked something over. Not just a scream, but involuntary, shattering tears. I knew there was no reason for this, not even frustration at Strider’s decline, or at the water covering the floor that had to be cleaned up. It was only water, after all.
Then I noticed it was the sound. It happened when he knocked over wine bottles, too, even though none of them broke. Nothing to clean up. It wasn’t that. It was the sound.
I remembered it had happened to me once before, involuntary, helpless, horrifying tears and screams when something had crashed in another room from me. A counselor I talked it over with said it sounded to her as if it was hiding some memory, some trauma from childhood. I wondered if it was that.
It was unlike me, the involuntary crying and screaming. The impatience I could try to control, no matter how imperfectly. But this was something different.
So I tried to remember. I lay awake one night, Alex and the dogs peacefully asleep next to me, and let myself fall backward into memory, down and down, into a black hole.
Then I was there, in my childhood room. I must have been no older than four. There was a loud crash from the front of the house. And my mother screaming.
Now I know what it must have been. My father, coming home drunk, crashing into their drinks cabinet. The same sound—glass tinkling, the sound of the ice bucket upset. Then, too small to identify it, I didn’t know what it meant. I was terrified. My two smaller brothers were in a room between me and the danger, whatever it was.
I got up and went to the door, opening it to their room. My brother Bill, one year younger than me, was sitting up, scared, in his bed. My brother Peter must have been just a toddler, for he stood up in his crib. I couldn’t reach him, so I dragged Bill out of his bed and into my room, into bed with me.
I was horrified that I had to leave Peter. Had I left him to die in the danger? But what could I do? I couldn’t reach him, so far above me in the crib.
After a while, there was silence. And Bill and I fell into an uneasy sleep.
I knew then what the sounds had meant to me, Strider crashing into bowls and bottles. It had meant I was too small to help Peter. For now that we were adults, Peter was ill, and there was nothing I could do but, just as then, love him from another room. And every time I heard that sound, the agony of not being able to help him when I was a child would come up, unmediated, unremembered, untransformed.
The minute I grabbed hold of the memory and claimed it, I only felt a mild annoyance whenever Strider bumped into anything. So that was the sign. It was that memory, forgotten.
Strider gave me back that memory and, in doing so, helped me transform it. After I remembered, it was easier to find patience with him. Easier, too, to find patience in memory with the mother I had when I was very young. I’ll always be grateful to Strider for that. Even over and above the gratitude I feel for the life we shared together.
One day he told me it was the end.
I think he told our other dogs first, for by then we had two puppies, Woody and another rescue, Shy. I woke up at 3 am one night to see both of them lying next to Strider’s bed, staring at him.
They knew. I knew they knew. It made me uneasy. The next day, Strider peed all over the kitchen floor. He’d never done that before. He would lie, exhausted, on the floor, just getting up to circle before lying down again.
I called Paula, my friend the vet, who could come to the house and help Strider pass over. The morning she was to come, he didn’t finish his breakfast. He just lay down in the kitchen and sighed.
Alex helped him outside, onto a bed on the deck in the sun. When Paula came, he was lying with his head on my lap. Woody was over to the side, staring at us worriedly. Shy was interested, but unconcerned. He had never known Strider until after dementia had taken what he had been away.
But Woody had known him.
Paula gave Strider a shot of sedative. My old dog looked me straight in the eyes, as if he wasn’t blind any longer. I said, “He’s dying. I can see the light go out of his eyes.” Paula said, “It’s rare, but sometimes it happens that a dog dies just when I give him the sedative. He must have been ready to go.” She gave him the final shot. He died, I think, simultaneously with it, still looking me in the eyes.
I am positive he could see me. A nurse friend told me it happens sometimes with blind people—that they can see right before they die. That deaf people can hear. That the demented regain themselves
So it happened with Strider. It was a good death. But my shame at my impatience with him in that last year made it so that all my memories of the wonderful times we’d had together, they would all come back and I would cry. It takes a long time to transform pain. But it’s worth the treasure when it finally arrives.