I’m not sure Stephen and I even liked each other very much when we first met. My great friend Robyn Zeiger, who’s a brilliant therapist and specializes in pet loss, told me that it’s best not to get the same breed, gender, or color as my Bob Slobbers, the smartest most intuitive dog in the world. Bob was a mighty eighty-plus pounds of black lab mix, a proud boy whose strength held me together when we both lost Billy.
Two years later when I was in a position to get another companion, what did I do? I chose Stephen, a five-year old black lab mix, lankier than Bob, less substantial. He didn’t cuddle, refused eye contact, and he seemed dumb. He was on one couch, I was on the other. We stayed that way until Eddie sauntered into our yard about eight months later and never left.
I always joked that “Of Mice And Men” was playing out in my house–Eddie was “George” to Stephen’s “Lennie.” They were inseparable, yet Stephen grew closer to me, my couch nuzzler, curled up into the size of a large basketball in the crook of my knee.
He was my little big dumb boy, almost special needs, really, but he’d look right into my eyes with his big browns with nothing but love and care.
When I returned from Chicago this past Tuesday, I could tell something was wrong. I feared the antibiotics that scotch-taped him together since last September had stopped working. By Wednesday night, his breathing was labored. I squirmed through Thursday at work and the evening screening I attended, rushed home and took him to the emergency room.
They drained almost three liters of fluid from him, pink viscous bad news surrounding his lungs. We left at two in the morning. He felt a little better, ate a tiny bit. I held him all night long until the morning when we could go to his regular vet.
We were there for hours yesterday as she tried test after test to see if there was a Hail Mary that might work. But it was that damned fluid that was unexplainable, or rather, was the answer I didn’t want to hear.
Stephen’s friend, Dean, called me, asked if he could cover over. He knew. I am so grateful he did. In the fourth hour, our vet, tears in her eyes and syringes in her hand, got down on the floor with Dean and me, and did what we had to do.
I kissed his nose over and over and over, telling him how much I loved him, how Dean loved him, how much Eddie would miss him. And I thanked him for taking such good care of me these past eight years.
Stephen, you could never have been Bob Slobbers, but you were something just as good. You were my Stephen.
WRITTEN 04/19/2014