My Visions

Snippets and snapshots, that's all we really remember of our lives. As I get older, all the days become blurred together, so crowded with interactions and moments, most of them trivial and meaningless,but some not. But certain moments from many years ago I remember with clarity. I grew up on cowboy shows. There are old black and white pictures of me. I can't be more than two years old, wearing a cowboy hat, holster and gun over my jammies with the gun out and ready for action. At the end of the tv miniseries of Lonesome Dove, the reporter asks Captain Call, “They say you're a man of vision, Captain Call. Are you a man of vision?” It made me pause. Would I have lots of exciting adventures to remember if someone asked me? Then I realized that Captain Call's response was, “Yeah, a hell of a vision.” and the screen reflected his thoughts, the flood of memories of his visions, but they were not visions of great adventures, they were the faces of the people with whom he had shared his life and who he had loved.

“Here lies Wag. She was a good dog. Born May, 1986 Died February , 2003”. That's what I wrote in permanent marker on the pine casket before my son buried our family pet in the backyard of our home under a young pine tree. This was the home where I had brought her from the Southwest Animal shelter when she was only six weeks old. She was just two months shy of seventeen years old when she died, a long and happy life for a black lab mix. The ground was frozen in Maine in February but the local funeral home built her a plain casket and stored her body till spring when my son could dig her grave. A plain granite stone with her name engraved marks the spot which the pine tree has obscured as it has grown in the years since.

My daughter was only one and a half when I brought the puppy home. My husband and I aren't good at coming up with pet names – Marquisa de Rascal was one. But all Hayley called the puppy was “Waggy” so that's what stuck. She had a long life and a good one I hope. When she was still a puppy, she was sniffing an empty plastic food container shaped like a stalk of celery and got her snout stuck in the opening. She couldn't shake it loose. I started to worry about suffocation and was going to cut air holes when we got her free. My Dad came to visit and hid silently behind trees while he took her on a walk up the spring road. She always found him. “She's a good dog, Annie.” Dad said before he left. Hayley and her friends still talk about the time when they were three to five years old and they wandered too far in the woods behind our house until they were hopelessly lost. Hayley and Meghan began to panic then Danny said, “Let's follow Waggy” and Wag led them home. I remember the year I took off from work, every day while the kids were at school, I walked a mile and a half down to the park and back with Wag. She loved to lay down in puddles and rub her belly in the mud. She lived a long and healthy life and was active right to nearly the end. The last few months, she finally succumbed to age but she was over sixteen years old and had pushed her mortality to its limits. At the end, I had to help her finish so she wouldn't suffer. I had prayed she would die quietly in her sleep but it wasn't to be so I stayed with her as she crossed from this life to the next and brought her body home.

She died in February. In the spring I started hearing ads on the radio from the Cherryfield animal shelter. I tried not to listen. I told myself I should wait until I was no longer working so I would have lots of time to spend with a dog and I could get a beautiful pure bred black or yellow lab puppy. But those darn ads kept playing every morning as I drove to work. I thought about those gorgeous pure bred puppies and I thought about all the older dogs in shelters who didn't have homes. I'm a teacher. I don't work in the summer, but am very busy away from home the rest of the year. A new puppy should have lots of exercise and I knew I didn't have enough time for that. But I knew many older dogs had difficulty finding homes. I would give them more time than most owners and if their alternative was finishing their days in a shelter I could give them a better life than that. Those ads kept haunting me. Then they started mentioning an older dog who was a black lab mix. I went onto their website to see a picture of “Zeus.” I mentioned the dog to my daughter who was a senior in high school. She encouraged me to go look at the dog. I called ahead and told them I would like to take Zeus for a walk. He was skinny, only 55 pounds. His fur was thin but soft. The shelter told me his family had owned several pets. They lived in a trailer in the woods in the Cherryfield area. When their trailer was declared unfit to live in the family had to move to the homeless shelter in Ellsworth, forty miles away. Of course, animals were not allowed so the father went back to the trailer every few days to let the dogs and cats out, give them some food and water then close them back up in the trailer. The animals lived like that for some months. When the authorities found out they sent the animals to shelters and Zeus had arrived at the shelter four to five months earlier. He had some issues, a major one being separation anxiety. When he was enclosed, he panicked. His first night at the shelter, they had left him in a cage. Somehow, he gnawed his way out of the cage, then somehow managed to get the door to the cat room open and slept in the room with the cats. One of the reasons he was so skinny was due to diarrhea. The shelter thought it was from stress. They had him on a special diet of canned food that was less abrasive to the intestines. They thought Zeus was two to four years old. They had been told two but they thought he was older based on his teeth, many of which were broken from chewing on rocks. 'One other issue he had I was not aware of until much later. He smelled bad. Baths did not help much. I did not know until later because I have a very poor sense of smell so his odor never affected me. My sixteen year old son had been away the weekend I decided to bring Zeus home. He didn't take the news well. He never liked the dog. He said, “Why did you go to see him? You knew no matter what kind of a mangy beast it was, you would bring it home once you saw it.” My son didn't want the dog in his bedroom so he rigged up a pulley system that automatically closed his bedroom door. One day when we were all at school, somehow Zeus got into Danny's bedroom. The pulley system closed him in and the panic attack began. He chewed up the woodwork, went poop on the carpet and chewed a hole in the door trying to escape. My son was the first one home and found him there. He told me I was lucky he didn't shoot the dog.

Zeus was always difficult but he improved. The intestinal problems apparently were due to the stress of living in a shelter. He wouldn't eat the expensive special diet when I got home so I switched him to Purina and scraps and he dug right in. His intestinal troubles disappeared. When my daughter came home from college at Christmas she exclaimed, “What happened to Zeus?!” He had gained 15 pounds. The vet said 70 was a good weight for him and he didn't gain any more. Ninety five percent of the time he was okay even when left home alone as long as he wasn't shut into one room. He had an elaborate “nesting” ritual that he went through where he slept. Sofas and beds had to be blocked because he would tear apart cushions or mattresses when nesting. Only extra strength LL Bean dog bed covers survived but he insisted on sleeping on a bed preferably with a pillow for his head. Hard floors were not acceptable. On the occasions that he was allowed to sleep on a bed next to me or my daughter, he would snuggle in such a way that his back was securely lodged against you. I took him for runs at the horse track every day after school and swimming in the ocean. He loved to eat seaweed. He loved to ride in the car and was almost an alternate personality there, calm and content. He would patiently wait in the car while I went on errands, never barking, no panic attacks. Sometimes he would refuse to get out when we returned home and would sleep contentedly for another hour or two before he would agree to disembark. He was my buddy. I guess I became more attached to him because no one else liked him. I knew I was all he had.

The spring of 2008, Zeus was nine years old if we assume he was four when he entered our lives. He started to limp. His back right leg was bothering him. AT Zeus' annual checkup a couple months earlier I had mentioned to the vet that his back end was weak. The vet looked at him then and said he should exercise more. This time the vet looked worried. He said he was afraid it was either severe arthritis or bone cancer. His x-ray equipment was out of service so he sent me to another vet for xrays. This vet said the xrays indicated the worst hips he had ever seen on a dog. Both hips would require surgery. He said since Zeus was nine, we would expect him to live at least another four years so hip surgery was a better option than pain pills. He performed the surgery on the right hip but said Zeus still might not regain use of that leg. He may already think of himself as a three legged dog and not feel a need to learn to use it again. All the muscle had withered. I was instructed to encourage him to use the leg and exercise the other leg to try to build more muscle before we had to perform surgery on that hip. Zeus did not regain use of the right rear leg and within a week or so I could see the other leg was weakening but the vet assured me Zeus was doing fine. Soon however, he could not use the left leg either. Then he began to have neurological problems with his penis and became incontinent. I began researching obtaining rear wheels so he could be mobile but held off ordering them until I could see if the incontinence could be addressed. I asked the vet if there was a possibility of a sudden collapse of his life system. The vet said no. I took Zeus home, carried him outside and tried to help him walk by holding up his rear end with a towel while he walked on his front legs but he still sometimes dragged himself across the floor in the house. I had him blocked in the kitchen because of the incontinence but knew how he hated confinement. Just before my daughter left for New Orleans, she said “Zeus watches you all the time. He never takes his eyes off you.” I had told Zeus since the ordeal began that I would never leave him. Hayley's vacation time was over and she was gone. I put a tarp over the carpet in the living room so that Zeus wouldn't have to be confined and put a doggie diaper on him at night. He became upset when he urinated on the floor. He knew that wasn't right but had no control. I brought down a sleeping bag and slept on the floor on the tarp. Zeus snuggled right up against me and stayed calm, sleeping through most of the night. I told him I would never leave him. That was our one last good night together. The next night he was very anxious and kept jerking himself up as if a sharp pain had come upon him. He kept trying to drag himself. I was up all night with him. He was panting and I was feeding him ice chips. Then suddenly at 3 or 4 in the morning, he seemed to suffer another sharp pain and began dragging himself as if in an epileptic fit. I called the emergency vet in Brewer for directions, carried him to the car and made the hour long trip arriving around 5 AM. The vet on call said he had damaged his spine and was certainly in pain. I asked if he could be given pills to stop the pain. She said yes but I knew that was a temporary fix and he would have to be taken and put to sleep as soon as possible regardless. I held my Zeussie while the vet administered the injection and took his body home. From the time of his surgery till his death was only about a month. The only blessing was that it was summer so I could be with him every day.

As I drove home, I thought about the pieces of Zeus' life. I think he must have suffered from those hips from before I ever met him. When he ran, he hopped with his back legs. I have been told that is a sign of bad hips. They run that way to relieve the pain. It explained Zeus' maniacal insistence on having his bed cushion. When I adopted Zeus I had been looking for an older dog and felt a little guilty that he was so young but I didn't realize how little time he would have on this earth. I''m afraid he suffered from those hips all those years and I never knew. Ever since, whenever people annoy me I often think of Zeus and remind myself that we never know what pain others suffer.

I felt depressed for several days after his death. I had forgotten what depression felt like. It is way beyond sad. All the activities that normally appealed to me held no enjoyment. I did not want to do anything at all. I hoped it would pass in time and it did but still I think of Zeus often. There were many times when even I did not like Zeus but I remember that last month when his eyes followed me wherever I went and how he pressed against me on his last good night so that he knew I was there and would not leave him. I couldn't save him. I couldn't make his legs work again but he wasn't alone, he wasn't in a shelter or a cage. He was with his buddy who loved him.

I put a pillow in Zeus' grave and buried him at the edge of the pond that he loved right at the spot where he always jumped in. My friends, Peter and Ruth, planted a weeping willow at the site. His cross reads
Zeus, King of the Dogs
Born Date Unknown Died July 31, 2008
Annie's Best Buddy
God be with you till we meet again