I met her on the Saturday after we elected this president. I needed her.

She was the Chocolate Labrador Retriever I’d wanted for a couple of years, and Maureen surprised me with her. The first time I laid eyes on her, she was this tiny brown puppy with sad, soulful eyes, and she curled herself around my foot on the floor. It wasn’t long before she was jumping up into my lap, and lying there for as long as we both could stand it. She got along famously with her mother/big sister, Riley the Welsh Corgi, and they enjoyed making quick escapes to gobble up the food put outside for random cats by one of our neighbors. (Our neighbor clearly did not enjoy this.) Gracie was faster, and so she often got to the dish first, but she was always willing to yield to Riley, the clear Alpha female of the pack.

The two dogs had the run of our tiny apartment, such as it was, but lived for those moments when that imperfect gatekeeper known as “Maureen” would open the front door for some reason, and Gracie and Riley would be off to the neighboring apartment to chow down on some free cat food, prompting the shouting of the crazy cat-feeding neighbor off in the distance. Riley was used to being left alone with our cat–first Lucky, and then Vader–so she was even-keeled when we had to go out and run errands or head to work. Gracie, though…Gracie would tear the place apart, even with Riley to keep her company. (It makes me wonder now what Riley must have thought to see Gracie going to town when we walked out the door.) There was no chance we’d be getting our deposit back on the apartment after she tore the carpet from the floor in her anxiety. It didn’t even seem to matter how long we were gone, either, because the damage would be done in ten minutes or two hours, and she’d be jumping up on us uncontrollably when we walked in the door.

The jumping was the worst of it, as I never managed to break her of that habit. We told everyone she was harmless, that she was very, very friendly; she just jumped up on people no matter what we did. Perhaps it was an issue because I let her continue to get in my lap anytime she wanted to, and there are many pictures of her curled up on my lap, or nestling along my neck and head. She was quite the cuddler.

But she wasn’t a Chocolate Lab. People told us, “She has some pit bull in her.”

“No,” I said, “no way. I’ll betcha!”

I lost that bet. She was scared of everything, especially water—some “Labrador Retriever.” When we had a wisdom panel done on her, it turned out that they were right: she was not all Labrador; in fact, there wasn’t a drop of Labrador blood in her; she was 50% American Staffordshire Terrier, and 50% Boykin Spaniel. Half pit bull. No wonder she didn’t like water. As irritated as I was at the person from whom we had acquired her, however, I justified it in my mind that she obviously had more of the spaniel in her temperament, and heaven knows what kind of rednecks we had rescued her from! She was sweet and affectionate and she was my girl. You could tell she was my girl because I had a ton of nicknames for her: Gracie Lou, Graciella, Lou, Gracie Girl, Poochinella, and the ridiculous Louly-Lou. A child (or a dog) with many names is loved.

When we moved into a house a year later, we had a good bit more room, and there was a nice yard for her to run around in, chasing squirrels and birds. She loved to lounge outside by the pool unless someone was in the pool, in which case she would disappear into the house so that she wouldn’t possibly get wet. Some Lab! She didn’t like men coming into the yard, or even people working nearby with any kind of power tools, but we learned to keep her inside when the gardener was due, or if the pool man pulled up to the curb.

And then she bit the neighbor.

He was a nice older man, and he was simply reaching over the fence to pet her right in front of us. Whatever set her off, she nipped him on the hand, so of course it bled like crazy, even though it was just a superficial wound. Our neighbor was gracious, explaining it away by saying he had dogs himself, it happened sometimes, and he put his hand into her territory when she was already barking. But I was already thinking that she had crossed a line. You can’t have a dog that bites people; you just can’t. It’s bad enough if they bite adults, but if a child happens to come into the area, you have to be able to trust your pets not to take a bite. Again, though, we rationalized that he had been running a power tool, and he had reached across the fence into her yard.

A few months later, a friend was moving out of the country, and he couldn’t take his dog with him. Having no reason to suspect it would be a problem, especially as Tilly was such a small dog, a Cairn Terrier, we wanted to help out our friend, and thought that adding a dog would work out all right. There were a few skirmishes, but dogs learn to adjust, and Gracie was used to deferring to Riley as the Alpha anyway, and Riley had no problem with the new dog. Things seemed to settle down for a while. The school year came to an end, and we prepared to move out of the state and back to my home state. We packed a big truck, put a few things in the car, loaded all the animals in and took off. The only problem we had was with the cat; the dogs were getting along fine.

But Tilly is a terrier–a mouser–and so she is kind of yappy. Still, everything was fine.

We moved to a town on Torch Lake in northern Michigan, a place with five acres of woods and meadow. Gracie loved it, and it was so much fun to see her racing at top speed–she was super-fast–leaping like a gazelle as she came up the hill like a shot. She loved exploring the woods behind the house, and she and Tilly were often hard to get back into the house, preferring to chase each other through the trees. There were a few dogs at the house next door, but they were friendly, and Gracie seemed to like their Australian Shepherds, even though the male, Ziggy, was a bit aggressive. He was still friendly, and they would chase each other around the meadow. Life was good.

And then we got our own Australian Shepherd. Maybe it was our fault…maybe there were just too many dogs in one place, especially as Shasta, the new pup, turned out to be something of an Alpha herself. But we knew the breed and their temperament, and Riley was getting on in years, and we loved the dogs next door. So we picked one out. She was very young, and yelped the whole way home. I remember thinking to myself that we would have to be careful with her around Tilly, as the Cairn Terrier is known to be somewhat aggressive, and as the latecomer to our menagerie, I assumed she would be the one that would take the longest to get used to the new dog. Gracie will love having a new friend, we thought! A dog that could keep up with her, and keep her company in her runs through the woods; a dog that could help keep Gracie safe, as dogs in groups are less likely to have trouble with wild life.

But Gracie was slow to warm up to her.

Did we change things too much too soon? Was Gracie always going to end up being a problem, and our action had no impact on the situation? We’ll never know. And it’s not that they didn’t get along; Shasta just likes to stick her face in your face, and is really just looking to play, albeit roughly at times. Tilly loved her right away, oddly enough, and they got along great from the very beginning. Riley didn’t like having the pup in her face (spoiler, she still doesn’t), but she got along with her fine anyway.

Not Gracie, though. I was really surprised. Gracie was skittish around her, though she would play with her a little. Again, she was a little rough with her, but I thought it would pass.

The real problem was the sleeping arrangement, once the puppy had been in the crate for a few weeks. Gracie was very reluctant to even lie on our bed with Shasta trying to come up. Tilly growled and faced her off, but Gracie would move away and eyeball Shasta until we moved the puppy off the bed. My thinking at that point was to instill them with the idea that they were all together, so it was my idea to move the three younger dogs behind a barrier in the living room to sleep each night. We let Riley sleep with us because she’s a very mature dog, but we confined the other three to the living room, where there were ample places to sleep. It seemed fine, but it might have been the last straw. I’m sure Cesar is reading this and shaking his head in agreement with that last statement.

Two days before Christmas, we had just gotten home from a trip to Philadelphia for a funeral. We had taken two of the dogs with us, the original two (Riley and Gracie), and had picked up the other two the previous day. Maureen was out cutting branches from an evergreen to make wreaths for the door, and Gracie was running around in the woods. She got back to where the other dogs were, and they began to play near Maureen.

Gracie snapped. My sweet dog grabbed Tilly by the throat and began to shake her like a rag doll. She lost it. She was trying to kill Tilly. Maureen did the thing you’re not supposed to do in a dog fight; she tried to stop them. Fortunately, she was not injured, and she was able to separate them. I was in the house; with the doors closed, I couldn’t hear a thing. I started wondering what Maureen was up to, and opened the door, immediately hearing Maureen crying for Gracie to stop. I tore out of the house without even stopping for shoes, running the length of our driveway in my stocking feet through the snow, and got there just after she’d been able to pull them apart. I grabbed Gracie by the collar, and began steering her up the driveway to the house, a good hundred yards away. She growled at me once, but must have come back to herself once she realized it was me.

We were all shaken.

After taking Tilly to the veterinarian–she had a puncture wound in her throat, but was otherwise all right–we returned home, trying to decide what to do. I felt like we had no choice: after she had bitten our neighbor in Florida, I was already leaning toward putting her down. Now it seemed we only had one choice. We could try to re-home her, of course, but that seemed difficult to manage at best; anyone who took her into their home would think as we had that she was sweet and docile, but would she turn on them at some point? Bite a child? There weren’t a wealth of places anyone could think of that could take her, either. While we tried to make a decision on what to do, we adjusted our nightly sleeping arrangement; adjusted all our arrangements, actually. We obviously couldn’t keep Tilly and Gracie together unsupervised, so we had to separate them quite often.

I blame myself.

I brought another dog into the situation when everything was good, and then I did it again when we got the puppy. I moved us to a new place that had a completely different terrain to live in. It was my idea to make the dogs all sleep together, rather than on the bed as we’d been doing for several years. Whether that’s true or not, I decided that we needed to make sure Gracie felt loved, like she had the prime spot alongside Riley in the household. We let her sleep with us again, so it was just Riley and Gracie in the bed with us at night. We took the puppy with us or left her in the crate when leaving the house, and put Tilly in another area behind a gate.

And we had peace. Things got better, and we hoped that we’d managed to get past it. But hope isn’t enough sometimes, and our hopes were dashed a couple of weeks ago.

She did it again.

Maureen was taking the dogs out for their morning ablutions, and there was the usual growling and barking of excitement, the anticipation of that dog food going eagerly into their mouths. There was no sign that anything was any different, that any of them had been any more loud and obnoxious than any other morning, but Gracie attacked poor Tilly again, though thankfully not doing as much damage to her; saved once again, perhaps, by her collar, and the fact that I was there this time to jump in and stop it.

It was time. We both knew it, and all I could do was look at Gracie in the crate, looking out at me, and I had to chole back some tears. This time, there was nothing to justify it outside of the fact that she had done it before. And we had no choice. It breaks my heart, but I really felt like we had no choice. We called the vet to make an appointment to have her destroyed. Even now, it brings me near to tears, though several weeks have passed. We loaded her into the car for the last time, and we drove sadly through the snowy streets to the doctor’s office. I held her as they gave her the first shot, the one that was meant to quiet her body and put her to sleep. After plying her with a number of treats, and stroking her soft fur, whispering to her how I loved her, she settled down with a few shakes of her head as the drugs took effect. My sweet dog was asleep, and I wiped my eyes as I stepped out, unable to bear being in the room for the last part.

But it broke my heart. I miss her every day. The other dogs are calmer these days, and it seems that there was a lot more tension lying underneath than we realized; it’s gone now. There’s very little growling, though of course there are still moments when a dog has something that another dog wants. There are barks delivered at horses, at the dogs next door, or even dogs on TV, but the feeling of worry is no longer there. They are all getting along well without Gracie; they seemed anxious at first, but they have all seemed to relax into being a three dog house now.

Doesn’t stop the fact that I miss my good Gracie every day.