My beloved wife and I were never able to have children despite all kinds of medical treatments and surgery (long story). And we were not able to adopt after a major disaster (another long story).
So we’re especially bonded to our critters (dogs, cats, horses, donkeys, birds, etc.), especially the dogs.
This morning at 5 a.m. our beloved albino Doberman Angel died of a massive heart attack at age 9. She weighed 100 lbs. After major surgery two years ago, I’m not supposed to lift more than 20 lbs., but I helped my wife get Angel onto a sheet, into a cart, and onto the bed of our truck, and she is on to cremation.
Albino Dobermans are disfavored by the dog establishment because they have a common genetic defect—about half of them (including all Dobermans) develop a terrible heart disease called dilated cardiomyopathy. We were cursed. Both of our albino Dobermans died of the same damned thing at just about exactly the same age.
Many years ago, after my mother was a suicide, I wrote a short poem: “Mother is like a continent/God is like that too.” That’s what it feels like right now. I can’t see any part of my house or property without heartbreaking memories of our wonderful, friendly, goofy dog Angel.
In some ways this is a relief, since her treatment had become so complicated that my dear wife was waking up at 4 a.m. every night to give cardiac pills and Angel had gotten very incontinent, making big messes everywhere. And she had been in such distress for several weeks.
She was just diagnosed with congestive heart failure four days ago, and she was prescribed Lasix to reduce fluid build-up. She was incontintent to start with, and that greatly increased the problem, so we were dealing with a major mess. On Friday my wife got all kinds of dogly diaper stuff, which I was supposed to learn to use today. Sigh.
I’m aching at the loss of that beautiful, wonderful, super-sweet dog.
Yes, I know it’s “just a dog” and not a big deal like all the thousands of injustices and slaughters and persecutions of humans around the world.
But it was my Angel who just died. Two years ago we spent an incredible $10,000 to pay for surgery to save her from a catastrophic spleen injury. I wish there was a way to do that now.
That picture above is from soon after we rescued her. She’d been running in the woods wild in southern Virginia and was almost starved to death. She didn’t smile a single time until she’d been with us at least three months. After that, it was all big smiles and goofy grins for many years.
Damn.