Dogs, Love and Death (Part III) — Lucy Loses Her Best Friend

I’d been holding my breath in the years after Daniele’s death, hoping that Beau, 13 at the time, would live another few years. A family can tolerate only so much loss. Mercifully, two years on Beau had a massive vascular event while I was working in Alaska, sparing Mike and Jon the angst of deciding whether to put him down or not.

Following Beau’s passing, Jon witnessed how lost Mike became. When he suggested getting another poodle, Mike balked, maybe because getting a new dog felt disloyal to Beau. As importantly, grief’s inertia abetted by his unemployment stymied Mike’s decision-making. Jon devised a lie, saying he wanted a dog for himself. The deception worked. Mike would do anything to satisfy his sole remaining child.

In April of 2012, Jon and Mike brought 16-week-old Lucy home from a Wisconsin farm. Although she was affable with a keen emotional intelligence, the latter wasn’t immediately apparent. Within a week, she’d destroyed Mike’s hearing aids and glasses along with a video camera. Maybe if he’d had a job and a living daughter, Mike might not have threatened to euthanize Lucy. Grief can make anyone irrational. From the Arctic, I talked Mike down from his fever pitch.

Weeks later I came home and fell in love with Lucy. I would run my fingers through her first-year fur — downy as an Arctic fox. She became mesmerized by anything unordinary like the plastic bag that drifted across our front yard one day. Off-leash she exercised her hunting instinct in two distinct styles. If she thought the squirrel hadn’t noticed her, she approached as seamlessly as a ballet dancer, stealthily advancing and stopping strategically to ensure her prey wouldn’t detect her. Most often, though, she gave fruitless chase except for one time in early March when she caught up with a sleepy squirrel. Lucy’s hunting mind was too hijacked to attend to my screaming “no’s.” The poor squirrel barely ascended its tree, and later dropped dead at its base, two puncture wounds in its belly.

Although Lucy was game for most anything, she was rarely reckless. As a young dog she’d bound toward another dog and then veer away when she caught an aggressive vibe. Despite the vet’s recommendation to keep her inactive for 72 hours after her sterilization, Lucy was out bounding 24 hours later with her best friend, Chance, a black lab whose owner, Rich, was Mike’s daily dog-walking partner. The poet-philosophers argued literature and politics while the dogs gave chase and played fetch along the Mississippi’s shore and riparian woods. At dog parks, the pack mentality would overtake them, and the twosome would gang up on other dogs but without inflicting wounds.

Perhaps Lucy’s most endearing trait is her silence. For years she would only bark to implore another dog to play or to compete for a ball. A stranger at the door elicited a solo bark. The mailman bored her.  

But all that changed in February 2017 soon after Mike was given his prostate cancer diagnosis. His tumor-infiltrated lumbar spine began causing him to groan whenever he bent over. Lucy may have smelled his cancer as dogs are purported to do but it was Mike’s pain that signaled to her that he needed her protection.  For the first time, she began barking repeatedly when a stranger approached the door.

I might not have been so sure of Lucy’s newfound protectiveness had I not been home alone one day when a repairman rapped on the front door while Lucy was resting nearby. Mike was at the oncologist’s office. I was in the kitchen.

She didn’t even pick her head off the floor, let alone bark.

Mike and Lucy had always had a morning date at one of their many haunts. Nearby Como Park, an inner-city jewel with a zoo and arboretum is reliably empty at 6 AM. One morning in January 2020, Lucy began crossing the main thoroughfare while a car was traveling in her direction. Mike panicked and ran after her, falling on a mound of curbside snow and fracturing one of his lumbar vertebrae. Nerve compression caused his legs to become weak. 

A month later just ahead of the pandemic, Mike ran out of effective cancer treatments and entered hospice at home. Because he couldn’t drive safely on painkillers, Mike would walk Lucy in the early mornings in the neighborhood. My long afternoon wooded walks along the Mississippi bluffs with Lucy became my respite from keeping Covid out of the house and fulfilling my household responsibilities and caring for Mike.

Each night I would help steady Mike as he took one stair at a time due to partial paralysis of his legs. He’d climb into bed and then pat the bed to signal Lucy to jump up and join him. She never took the privilege for granted, maybe because I wouldn’t let her sleep with me. 

When Mike became too weak to negotiate the staircase, he reluctantly began sleeping in the hospital bed in the living room. While holding onto Jon or me, he would shuttle between the bed and the recliner chair in the library where he could watch television or rest. We had an outdoor 70^th birthday party for Mike on July 4 – divided into three shifts so that he could rest and fewer people would be present (and masked.) He read poems while his friends gathered at a distance to see and hear him one last time. The next day he asked me, “What now?” His days posting on Facebook were over as his body and mind deteriorated with only sips of Coca-Cola to sustain them. His bed became a fortress with the guardrails up and the hospital tray table covered with Coke cans, pills, and a urinal. I placed Lucy’s day cushion in front of the fireplace where she could see him while he was lying down. She never approached the bed, perhaps out of a canine humility. She seemed to understand that she had no role to play except to be present for Mike.

On August 10 Mike took his last breath while Jon and I were discussing one of his school assignments in the dining room. Lucy gave no signal that anything was amiss from her perch on the cushion. Because the law allows the body of a person who has died at home to remain there for up to 72 hours, I had decided to have a small wake. Mike had given me the names of twelve people he’d like to come. Several stopped by over the next 36 hours to pay their respects. By that point, I felt like we’d said our goodbyes and arranged to have two men from the crematorium come get Mike.

Before they came, I lowered the bed guard rails and removed the tray table to make it easier for the men to transfer his body to the stretcher. 

This was Lucy’s cue. She approached the bed and placed her paws near his upper body while standing on her hind legs. She sniffed inside his ear and waited for a response. Within a minute, she returned to the floor. Once again she stood on her hind legs and this time sniffed his arm and chest. After some moments, she retreated to her cushion. When the two men took Mike’s body out on the stretcher, she watched passively.

 Lucy and I carried on our daily routines until we left with Jon for Grand Rapids, Michigan three weeks later. Jon was beginning his second year in a graduate Occupational Therapy program there. We traveled in our pickup truck attached to our fifth-wheel RV where we’d crammed many of Jon’s belongings.

 While Jon attended his university hybrid program, Lucy and I spent several weeks exploring parks and the apartment complex grounds where Jon lived. When I began packing the RV to return home, Lucy stopped eating.

 After overnighting in Chicago, we arrived home the following evening. Lucy jumped onto the boulevard grass from the pickup and lowered her nose to the ground and intently sniffed the walkway in front of the house from the curb to the front door. This was a first. When I’d taken her on camping trips without Mike the year before, she would run up the walk to the front door and wait for me to open it, and then eagerly search the first floor for him. This time she walked through the hallway, glancing left into the library where he most often sat at his computer and then into the kitchen where he prepared snacks and meals. This time, though, not a single tail wag.

She followed me up the stairs and checked out the bedroom where she used to sleep with Mike. She tailed me down to the kitchen where I filled her bowl with kibble and cheese. She didn’t touch it. When I went to bed, I invited her to sleep on her cushion, which I’d moved from Mike’s bedroom to mine. She lay on it for a while and then padded back downstairs where she spent the night in front of the door. 

The following night I invited her to sleep on the cushion in my room again, and this time she did. And every night after that. 

I believe that she’d been biding her time in Michigan, waiting to return to find Mike. When she understood that I was packing to leave, she became anxious and stopped eating. On our arrival home, she’d fruitlessly searched for olfactory evidence that Mike had returned home during our three-week absence. 

 I imagine that she remains hopeful that Mike will return, and I think about the bliss that comes with her ignorance of mortality.  She bolts down to the beach along the Mississippi to play with children, bounds over logs, and chases squirrels as always. Within my own consciousness, though, I feel her loss because I know Mike will never return to her.