The Best Girl

My dog died the other day.

Riley had been dealing with at least mild levels of pain for a few months,
since it was clear to the doctor that she was experiencing soreness and stiffness
in some of her joints, due to arthritis in her back and legs. I say “at least
mild levels of pain” because we can’t of course be sure; a vet studies that
type of thing in med school, but our pets can’t actually tell us how much pain
they’re feeling. We guess, based on their reactions to touching and probing,
but the reality is that we don’t know how much pain they can take. We can use a
pain scale when we have a medical issue; we can tell them the pain we feel is a
7 on a scale of one to ten, and the doctor can prescribe pain medication that
will appropriately manage that pain for us so we can heal. But what if our 9 or
10 is like a 3 or a 4 for a dog? The doctor can guess, but that guess could be
wrong. We did the best we could to determine how much pain she was dealing with
and put her on some medication in those last months, augmenting it with another
pill that was supposed to help with joint pain, too. She seemed to get along
better for a while, though we knew it couldn’t last.

A couple of days before we took her to release her permanently from that
pain, she started to really slow down. It was harder and harder to rouse her to
go outside before bed, and she stayed closer to the door when she relieved
herself; it was obvious that the pain and discomfort was growing. The day before
we had to say “good-bye” to her, she didn’t get up to have breakfast with the
other two dogs, at least not without a lot of calling her name. Corgis never
miss a meal; on the contrary, they do anything they can to have more meals.
When you find that your Corgi is not all that interested in food, you know that
you’re near the end. It was already becoming more and more work to get her to get
her up to potty and then go to bed, and the night before she had remained in
the living room when the rest of us went to get ready for sleep; when she wasn’t
jumping up for her morning meal, we realized that we couldn’t be far from the
end. She finally got up and ate, but she was moving slower and slower as the
day progressed. When we called her name, she didn’t seem to hear us very well,
and she nearly walked right off the top step of the stairs. When she began to
have difficulty even drinking, we knew it was time.

Others have told me that they prefer their dog to die naturally, in their
sleep; this is a great idea, but as the veterinarian confirmed for me, that
rarely happens. Both of us were afraid that she would suffer some kind of seizure
or other serious medical event, and did not want her to suffer in any way. The
vet told us that no one had ever told him that they had done it too soon, but a
number of people worried that they’d waited too long. That idea made me feel a
little better, but I still was greatly saddened that it was a necessary step.
If you’ve never been there when a doctor euthanizes a family pet, there is nothing
easy about it; the first shot might merely slow them down and cause them to
drift into a sound sleep, the knowledge is still there that this is only the
first step, and there is nothing worse than watching the eyes of your dog or
cat when the last shot is administered, and the life seeps silently out of
their eyes. As much as I didn’t want that ending, it was still far better than
a painful end that might come otherwise, and we made the hard decision to put
her to sleep forever.

My Introduction to Welsh Corgis

All dogs sleep a lot anyway, and my Corgi was no exception. I had never
known a Welsh Corgi, and she was different from every other dog I had ever
known. Ever since I met her late in 2014, I could see that she was smart and
quirky in the way that she behaved. She seemed to be either eating, pooping, or
napping, all the time that I knew her. If she heard the refrigerator door open,
or even a drawer—any sound from the kitchen, actually—she immediately stirred
from wherever she lay, and she went in search of the food. One of my earliest
memories of her was the first time that I fed her; she did a little leap like a
pogo as I poured some food in her dish, and then she commenced to eating ravenously.
I’m told that she reacted the same way every time, even if she had just eaten
her meal; my wife’s mother watched her quite often, and Riley ended up being
very overweight because “she always acts like she’s hungry,” in the words of
Lenora Webb. My wife would pull into the driveway, and there they would be,
waiting for her: the tall, slender frame of her mother and the portly shape of
the Welsh Corgi. Riley didn’t believe in diets, even though Lenora apparently
was an early believer of portion control for everyone else.

As my mother taught me, “a child with many names is loved”; the same must be
true of dogs, as Riley had many, one of which was “Poopers T. Corgi.” She came
by this nickname honestly, though, as she could drop a deuce with such
regularity that one could set one’s watch by it. I fought this propensity early
on, as I had taken control of Riley on my own for a month or two, early in my
relationship with Riley’s mom. Riley had a set schedule and process, and to attempt
to operate in a manner contrary to this operation was to do so at one’s peril.
She was dependable, and she could be relied upon to evacuate her bowels once in
the morning before breakfast, once in the middle of the day, and finally again
before bed; she could go for quite a while without being taken outside, but woe
to he who neglected to give her ample time when the time had arrived! One
morning, early on, I took her out for her morning ritual before leaving for
work, but I must have rushed her; she didn’t get everything out. We went back
in, I grabbed my bag, went out to the car, and realized that I had forgotten
something, returning to my apartment just in time to see Part Two of her
morning Number Two being deposited on the carpet of the living room

When I first met Riley Roo in California, my then-girlfriend had her
sleeping in a small basket next to the bed, even though that dog could sleep
anywhere, and any time. When I say “any time,” I’m completely serious; she
could sleep with her eyes open, and was often observed to be snoring on the
floor at my feet, her eyes wide open. Sleeping in the basket was fine at that
time, but I prefer my dogs to sleep on my bed with me, so I found a way to make
that happen when we moved in together. I tried a set of stairs at first, but
Corgis have a long body with short legs, so steps are difficult at best, even
for a younger Corgi. They worked well enough, but I found a ramp instead, and
that made it a lot easier for her to get up and down into the bed. The other
dogs could pretty much jump up and down at will, but Welsh Corgis can easily
injure their backs doing such things, so we were happy with the arrangement.
She slept a lot, whether up on the bed with me, or under the footrest of my
recliner, or in the doorway of the bedroom when I was napping—she could see both
of us from that position, which suited her sense of loyalty. She wanted to make
sure she could follow both of us no matter where we were, even if only with her
dark, round eyes.

The Most Loyal Friend

Welsh Corgis, I have come to learn, are some of the most loyal members of a
species that is known for their loyalty. While they normally latch on to one person
on whom to bestow this great gift, Riley Roo the Hȕsker Dȕ remained loyal to
the end of her days to both of us; I’m not sure how I managed to cause this to
happen, but she was almost as loyal to me as she was to my wife. Perhaps it was
because we spent four or five months together without Maureen, and we were able
to form a very strong bond. It took a while to be sure, for both of us; I had
to get to know her and her idiosyncrasies, and she in turn had to understand
that I was not the same kind of boss that she was used to. In the end, she and
I formed a very special bond, and I did everything I could to make her as happy
and as comfortable as I could. When they rebuilt the deck around our house, I
had them add a ramp so that Riley could make it outside in the snow without
having to fight her way up and down the steps. She preferred to be with us so
much that I even had the workmen build a little platform on the other side of
the yard, with a very short run of steps down from the deck, just so she could
hang out with us down there if she wanted. While she didn’t get to use it, I
was always looking out for her comfort and happiness.

Fighting did not make her happy. She was uncomfortable with physical violence,
whether it involved the people in her house or the ones on TV. If her mom and I
were goofing around, wrestling, Riley would begin to bark and jump up, and even
nipped at my fiancée once, which we both thought was funny. Riley was more
loyal to my fiancée than she was to me, but it still wasn’t me who felt her
teeth! She was even more animated when she saw people fighting on television.
If there was any kind of physical altercation in what we were watching, she
would jump up and begin to bark loudly at the people on the screen to stop
fighting. She was also protective of my fiancée, and if Riley didn’t like
someone who was at our house, we trusted her judgment; she was generally
friendly and sociable, but could be aggressive if she sensed that the person
did not mean well. She was similarly outspoken whenever she saw horses on
television, which I can only guess was some sort of throwback to her working dog
roots; either that or they looked like big dogs to her. She was the leader of
the pack, and could even nip at dogs who challenged her own authority or who
acted aggressively toward the other dogs in her pack. Riley never backed down,
even when she was outmatched.

While she was not afraid to stand up to a challenge, she would not leave our
side when we were outdoors, even when challenged. She was always close by and
would drop the short distance to the ground to lay down next to us if were sitting
on the porch or the deck, often placing her muzzle through the rails of the
porch to look out on the world. When we had a pool for short time in Florida,
she loved to have me splash water at her from the pool while she barked at me
and sprang toward the water open-mouthed, eager to play. She loved playtime,
and would always try to bite the water, whether I was splashing her, spraying
her with the hose, or even shooting water at her with a super soaker from the
pool. If she got too close to the edge, she occasionally slipped over the side,
and swam to the steps with a little guidance. We often found that she had
plopped down next to us and gone to sleep when we were sitting anywhere for any
length of time, and I would see her lying next to me many times when I woke up
from a nap. She was always up for play or a nap or a snack, and I almost always
had her at my feet when I was eating a meal.

Saying “Good-bye” to My Sweet Girl

“When someone leaves us at the end of their life, it’s hard to regret not
getting the chance to let them know what they meant to you before they went.” I
wrote that line for my dad, and you may have read it in another post I called “Daddy
Friend,” but it occurs to me that the same can be said for my good-bye to
Riley. I was there when they administered the first shot, it’s true, but I
stepped out once she was asleep. She was most likely unaware when I left, but
how do we really know? Every once in a while, I feel guilty again for not being
able to stay in the room until the very end, for not holding my face against
her fur until she stopped breathing and was no more. I’m aware intellectually
that she was most likely no longer aware of what was happening around her at
the end, and that we did the most humane thing we could think of as she began
to experience more and more discomfort, but it almost feels like I abandoned
her at the end; I know it’s not the truth, but I continue to agonize over it
from time to time.

She quieted down gradually after that first shot, and we sat and cried
together, or laughed at some of the goofy things she had done in the past. I
think my favorite memory of her is playing in the pool with her, but she had also
made us laugh when she discovered the bowl of cat food a neighbor had left out
for the stray cats in the area. There was never enough food for our Corgi, and
she assumed that the bowl of cat food was there for her if she wanted it. Of
course, she wanted it, and began to uncharacteristically wander away when we
went out; we found her eating the cat food as quickly as she could, often despite
being yelled at by the woman who had placed the dish there. Her back end looked
a lot like a loaf of bread, and I remember watching that bread loaf trot off in
the direction of that other apartment, and no amount of calling or cursing
would bring her back; she only returned when the food was gone or at the end of
a leash. Stubborn as the day was long was our Riley Roo, and once she had
something in her mouth, it was next to impossible to get it back. That was why
it seemed clear that it was time; when she stopped being eager to eat, we knew
the end had to be near.

We’ve relied on the other two dogs a lot since then. They are both goofy and
lovable, so we’re lucky to have them to love us, now that Riley is gone. Both
dogs were a bit odd in the days that followed, trying to figure out what had
happened. They knew Riley had been sick or weak, and now she was gone. The
tapping of her nails which had once woken me, or made me worry that she was
needing to go out before having an accident in the house, were silent now, and
I find myself missing the sound. It’s nice to be able to sleep in, but I miss
that tapping sound, and the wide-open Corgi smile as she watches me eat. All of
the dogs like to eat, especially treats or snacks, but they don’t do the pogo
as I pour the food in the dish, or bark at me if I’m too slow in doing so. They
don’t start bugging me at 4PM, pushing me to feed them early; they don’t bug me
at all, really, until I get up around five to feed them. They get all excited
then, but it’s not the same. It’s funny how the things that drive you crazy are
the things that you find yourself missing, and I can only wish she was still
her, licking my shin after I work out; it used to gross me out, but boy, do I
ever miss it now.

What a great dog.