Goodbye, Catherine.
When I first moved to Nashville to live with my future wife Deborah I entered a home with three dogs; one old black Lab who was a rescue and two purebred puppies not even a year old, one Australian Blue Heeler and one Great Pyrenees. The Great Pyrenees was named Catherine, and if I have to point out the joke to you I want you to stop reading my web site and go stick your head under a truck, you do not deserve to live. Catherine was a living, breathing drool factory with ridiculously heavy white hair that piled in huge shed heaps in springtime. The best way for me to sum her up was to call her "Baby Huey"; if you don't understand the reference you need not commit seppuku but you should Wiki it and watch a cartoon sometime. Big and stupid with a heart of gold nicely summed up Catherine.
Two things really stick in my mind when I think of Catherine as a young dog. The first one is of us playing on a grassy field of a nearby school, or trying to anyway. Catherine was big on enthusiasm and short on brain cells, so one time when I threw the ball she just kept going right past it, past the edge of the field, past the edge of the school, past the edge of the next block... and still kept going. Having seen her do this before I broke into a really good run, and she was at least two blocks away by the time I had to stop. It took another 20 minutes of trolling the neighborhood to find and catch her in the car. The second one is of a morning that my wife was gardening in the back yard and I was keeping her company while I sipped coffee. The back yard's gate was shut so Deborah decided to let Catherine in from the side yard. Catherine took one look at me from across the yard and charged right at me, smacking me square in the junk and dropping my sorry ass to the ground. I remember Deborah laughing while asking me if I was OK, but at the time I couldn't see so I just laid there a while until my vision returned. Both of these may seem like episodes that would sour one on Catherine, but when you understand what a "Baby Huey" she was it makes a little more sense. Both episodes perfectly sum up aspects of Catherine's personality. Despite what any onlooker who knew me might have assumed was a doomed relationship I actually grew to love her a lot. Deborah had not spent any time diciplining the puppies, so I think that Catherine and I sort of grew into each other as I gave her rules and consequenses and she came to regard me as the top dog. 13+ years ago I NEVER EVER would have believed I could be so comfortable with such massive amounts of dog spit on me, running down my arms and face and hair and clothes, but I somehow came to accept it as part of having Catherine, and as I became her almost sole source of human contact we grew even closer.
Fast-forward about 12 years.
Back in late May I was watching my 13-year-old Great Pyrenees playing in our yard, and as she came up to the porch I noticed she seemed a little "gimpy", a bit slow and stiff in her movements up the stairs. I had previously observed that she was sometimes a bit slow (and apparently stiff) to get up from lying down, so I started to think about the possibility of giving her a joint supplement. We didn't try this with our last elderly dog and I always wished we had, so I decided to look up some basic info on 13-year-old Great Pyrenees dogs to see what special care you might take in their later years. This was when I found out that Pyrs have a life expectancy of 8 to 10 years! Catherine was already 3 years past that but doing pretty damn well, so I decided I would get her checked out by the vet since she had not had a need to see a vet in quite a few years. She checked out quite well, with the vet noting that she was definitely stiffer but apparently not in any discomfort, so we agreed to try her on joint supplements in the form of dog treats, and basically keep doing what had been working for 13 years. I was a bit alarmed that she weighed about 65 pounds when she once was nearly 100, but the vet seemed to think this was not outrageous and suggested keeping an eye on her weight.
In early June I was brushing Catherine out, as she had just gone for a romp through some especially annoying weeds in our front yard that leave behind amazingly clingy seed-thorns, those ones that are half the size of a Tic-Tac and utilize the natural power of "hook-and-loop" fasteners (the original Velcro!) to stick to socks, pant legs, and stupid longhaired white dog fur. As I was brushing her tail I discovered a rather large lump, and when it only got worse after a few days I decided to take her to the vet. They suggested surgical removal and a biopsy to see what the hell it was, and they said it looked like they would be able to save the tail. $400 I didn't have to spend later and Catherine came home with a big bandage around her tail. We went back for a bandage change just 3 days later and they said the wound was soaked and had begun to rot, so now they felt the whole tail had to be amputated except for about 3-4 inches at the base. Another $400 later and I had a dog with just a stub of a tail where she once had a gigantic curly thing all covered in fine white hair, but by then the news came back that the lump was cancer but they felt it was a clean operation... made cleaner by the near-total loss of the tail due to the second surgery. We rechecked her every 2 days to make sure she didn't have any more problems, and all looked fine, except for one thing; they noted that from the time I had her "routine check" to the time she had her last surgery she had lost over 4 pounds, taking her just under 60 pounds. We agreed this was a problem and made plans to increase her weight by switching her to puppy food. I fed her Purina Dog Chow her whole life so I tried Purina Puppy Chow first, but she didn't seem very happy. I tried Petsmart's house brand Authority (chicken flavor) and that was very well received, so I felt hopeful we would reverse this trend and put some weight back on this dog. After about a month I began to realize I wasn't packing on the pounds like I had expected, but we were going through the worst heatwave I could recall in the entire time I have lived in Nashville, with daytime temperatures hitting 90 by 9am and over 100 by afternoon so I chalked it up to the same reduced appetite the other two dogs were exhibiting. It was in late August that I began to get fearful that my wife's longstanding prognostication that Catherine would not live til Xmas might in fact come true (although Deborah had said this for about two years), so I really paid attention to making sure they had food and water, and even rigged up a forced-air ventilation system to keep her as cool as I could. And still I was worried.
In September I started to notice something was wrong when I realized there was vomit in Puppyland at least two days in a row. I couldn't be sure who had done it, so I just filed it in the back of my mind. I began to suspect it was Catherine when I found vomit on the porch, and once I even saw her huck a little up but I didn't think too much of it since it was such a small amount of fluid and Catherine was so prone to being a drool machine I figured such a tiny quantity was fairly normal for her. After a couple more days of finding small puke patches on the porch I started to take notice when there was an appreciable amount of dry dog food in it. Again, nothing terribly surprising there as big dogs like Catherine sometimes have slightly upset stomaches and yak a little. Well, the vomiting got worse so that almost every morning there would be a small pile, and I finally noticed Catherine seemed torn by her usual dog food; one the one hand she would go to the bowl and look interested, but on the other hand she would often walk away not having taken a bite. I finally started to realize she had been vomiting for days and was now substantially off her feed, so I started to offer her more dry dog treats and more of her soft "joint formula" treats, which she accepted. The day I really knew there was something seriously wrong was the day she shunned both the dry bone treats and the soft joint treats.
We tried nicer foods, such as canned cat food, and this seemed to get her to eat. Good sign, right? Not once I started to realize she was throwing up after EVERY meal. We started giving her OTC allergy medicine, as it turns out the diphenhydromine was used not only for appetite stimulation but also as a sedative, and we were not sure if she was in pain or not at the time. We gave her canned cat food, and she stopped eat it. We switched to premium ground beef, she'd eat it once, and then a day later refuse it. Each time she would throw up most of what she ate, which added to my concern since I knew she wasn't retaining enough food to live on. Finally, she stopped eating anything. We bought all sorts of little things to tempt her, but by then it was too late and she refused things that would have sent her into fits of joy just days before. We dissolved the allergy pills in water to make a liquid that could be squirted into her mouth since it seemed like conventional pilling was getting too hard on her, but I don't know that it ever made a difference. I'd like to think they made her more comfortable.
During all this "food fussiness" we found out that dogs will often drink more water if it is quite cold, so we started adding ice cubes to her water, and only using bottled water. That may sound stupid to some readers, but trust me when I say that Nashville water is the very worst I have ever had, anywhere. Anyway, she did like the cold clean water... but it didn't last too long. She stopped drinking water regularly, and it got to the point that she took in maybe a cup a day. I really thought that she had stopped going potty, but once I saw her going so after she was done I went to "inspect" and I almost wish I hadn't. Without going into TOO much detail let me just say it was similar to the sludge at the bottom of espresso machines, and that was when I was pretty sure she was dying. Yeah, call me thick or call me optimistic but it took that for me to finally give up on the hope that this would all SOMEHOW work out.
Catherine lingered like that for almost a week. Every night I would say goodbye, and every day this improbably shambling wreck of a dog would be alive to greet me, even if sometimes she was too tired to even lift her head. She maintained what appeared to be full awareness right to the end, and for the life of me I have no idea how she could do it but even as late as the night she died she would still get up and walk around for a minute before returning to the porch to collapse for hours at a strech. The night she couldn't get back up on the porch was to be her last night, and as I carried her inside and laid her down at the open front door I noticed she had finally lost bladder control and had started to pee herself, probably while lying on the porch in one position for so long. Maybe because of this I sat with her an extra-long time (this was Saturday night around 11pm, just over a week into this ordeal), and when I got up around 1am on Sunday and said goodbye to her I had a feeling this time was the last time. I had the worst night sleep in a long time, and when I woke up unusually early (for me) at 8am I went to Catherine and could see from a distance that she looked odd. She didn't appear to be breathing, and she was growing cold. I checked for heartbeat and found none, and I even tried the stupid old wives trick of looking for breath condensing moisture on a glass. She was gone.
It took me about two hours to dig a grave that was 50" x 26", and due to the hard terrain and some very heavy root structures I only got between 10-14" down. In fact the terrain was so bad toward the end I ended up making the grave fit the dog and vice versa, with Catherine being laid to rest with a tenacious tree root between her front and back legs. Catherine's rigor had already set in, so changing her final position was out of the question, so I just dug around the limitations. Somehow I wish I had done better, but it was one hell of a hole that didn't compromise Catherine at all so I know I have nothing to feel bad about. Once the hole was dug I asked my wife if she wanted to come out for the burial, but she told me she had already said her goodbyes days ago. I would have liked the company, particularly once I had Catherine in the ground, but I guess that she was too upset to face it so I buried Catherine alone. The spot is marked by a 1" x 1" piece of wood sticking up from the center of the grave, and here occurred one of the sappiest things I did during this whole ordeal; I originally painted the top few inches of the wood marker in black, as I wanted a contrast to the color of the wood itself and that was the color of spray paint next to me at the time. Well, once I buried her I sat on the porch for a long time, almost an hour, when I finally got up to go inside. As I looked at the marker I suddenly realized what would make it a lot better, so I grabbed a can of white spray paint and redid the marker until all the black was gone and it was allwhite...like Catherine. The great white spoo dog.
In case there is a doggie heaven, and they get internet up there, and dogs have these really cool computers that read out loud to them:
Catherine,
I love you a lot. You're a good, good girl.
(C) 2007 Don Stratton
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