Last Tuesday, my dearly beloved dog, Marley, was shuffled off this mortal coil with a couple of hypodermic shots. She was lying in my arms, scared by what was happening to her. I hated that - I wanted her passing to be peaceful, but instead she was trembling until the anesthetic took effect and her consciousness flagged.
This is one of the few times I wish I was rich - rich enough to have somehow patched her up for a few more months. Or days. Or hours.
It was hopeless.
I had taken her up to the field where she could run free the day before. All her life when I took her there, she knew where we were going when we got close and she started whining in happy anticipation of getting out in the field to pee and poop and sniff and wander around, and sometimes play with other dogs who were there. Last Monday she was silent. She was lying in the back seat of my car and wouldn't move when I opened the door for her to get out. She just looked at me as if to say I was asking too much of her. Just, "No."
Her kidneys were failing, and she wasn't going to get better. The vet told me that I was lucky to have had her this long, and she had already outlived her expected life span.
I thought she was 13, because when she came to live with us in 2012 we were told she was four years old. I was also told that American Staffordshire Terriers lived "about 14 years." Which seemed like a long time back then, and gave me the wrongheaded idea that she should have another year. Thus I was hobbled by my expectations - no, she can't go now. She's only 13. (The internet says 12 - 16 years for Staffies)
She was pure love. She never judged me, even when her incessasnt barking got on my nerves and I yelled, "Shut the fuck up!" Not that yelling at her ever made her shut up. I think she thought I was barking with her, not at her.
I also think she barked out of boredom, or to tell me to do something - "Pay attention to the dog. Go sit on the couch and let the dog cuddle up next to you. What are you doing that is more important than that?"
In the evening, when she was ready to go to bed - in my bed, that is - she would stand at the end of the hallway to the bedroom and look at me with meaning. The meaning was: "Come to bed." If I did not turn off my British mystery and come to bed, she would give up after a while and go down the hall to jump up on the bed and snuggle in. After I came home from rehab in early July, still dealing with my broken back, going to bed early was appealing, so I would often heed her call. "Yeah, Marley, you're right. Let's go crawl in."
One of her vets and I speculated that she was the product of a puppy mill. She had purebred problems - shoulder dysplasia, and a crooked jaw that left her tongue hanging out most of the time. She was all white (a color "not encouraged" in the breed) and would have an allergic reaction to the grass she loved to lie in during the hot days of summer. She'd get hot spots.
Fleas were not much of a problem. Because she was shorthaired and white, as soon as a flea jumped on her, I could see it and remove it. I kept her flea control in hand, using what seemed like magical drops between her shoulder blades, and did the same with my cat, Mellow. Not magical - the drops are chemical and are poison to fleas and stay on the animals' skin killing pests for weeks or months, which means a flea-free animal and house.
If you had lived through flea infestations, as I had before these drops came along, it was easy to embrace the drops. Poison, yes, but so much easier to live with than poisoning the whole house with those flea bombs that killed everything, and told you to leave the doors and windows open and not to come back in for at least three hours and to remove all your potted plants as well. Oh yeah. Only had to use those bombs once, but that was sufficient to make me diligent about flea control before fleas got out of hand ever after.
One unexpected benefit of those bombs: I had an old hand-me-down dresser that was infested with some kind of wood drilling bugs. There were little holes in the wood that sawdust dripped out of and onto the floor. After the flea bomb, no more holes, no more sawdust - no more drilling bugs. Also, we had no more fleas, which was the desired outcome.
But I do digress.
Marley was the sweetest dog I've ever had. AmStaffs' temperament is described as, "friendly, tenacious, devoted, loyal, attentive, courageous." Marley never had to prove her courage, but she was all the rest of those things.
She did have abandonment issues from losing her first two or three homes. She becamse anxious when I left, and totally freaked out when she was on the wrong side of a door she wanted to get through - her magnificent jaws and teeth made slivers out of our French doors, our front door, and one of the bedroom doors when she got stuck in there. She actually pulled the trim off the wall. She also chewed up some doorframes in one of Joanna Gardiner's rental houses, but we don't talk about that. They were fixed by a carpenter who showed up out of the blue.
Marley shed so much of her short white hait I'm surprised she didn't go bald. It was everywhere. It still is everywhere, and I will look at it fondly when I run across it.
Well.
Goodbye, Marley, you good dog. How I miss you.
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