Randi Kreiss

Saying goodbye to Zoe, my sweet old girl

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And the breath left her body. Just like that. Easy. And then, curled in my lap, still warm, she wasn’t any more. After nearly 16 years as our friend and fellow traveler, Zoe had become sick and frail and we had to let her go.

I have shared my life with readers for so long that this is the second time I am writing an obituary for a beloved old dog. First we had Sheba for 18 years. She died 21 years ago.

How different life would have been without our girls.

We often talk about our dogs’ lives in human years. Zoe was 103. But the relative brevity of a dog’s life is both a template and a foreshadowing for human beings. I was 54 when we got Zoe, our post-child child. Over the years she became the heartbeat of our home, watching in the window, racing up the steps, jumping into our bed — and in these last years, moving wearily up the stairs before we were even ready to go to sleep. She handled my heart with great care and my secrets with absolute discretion.

Our house, every room, each comfy sofa, fairly hums with the memory of her.

Zoe had a proud sense of herself. The offspring of show dogs, she had a much finer pedigree than I. A Coton de Tulear, she pranced when she walked, with her beautiful tail swept up into the air. I don’t mean to imply she was a foo-foo dog. She dug holes in the yard and munched bones with the best of them. She was small but brave, and perhaps foolish. If a friendly German shepherd came sniffing around, she was likely as not to bark, “Put up your dukes!”

She was a roadie in her day. She flew back and forth to Florida so many times that JetBlue made her an honorary person and gave her and me a free flight. This was before their frequent-flyer program for dogs. She loved airports, where she could make eye contact with folks and play them for a word of praise or a pat on the head. She knew she was irresistible.

In the past year, I misplaced her carrying case, but no matter. Her last trip was in my arms.

She went with us to North Carolina one summer. That was the two-week interlude when she refused to poop outside, and it wasn’t until we saw bears playing in the yard that we realized why.

She traveled with us to Rhode Island when our daughter lived there. One time, in a strange Providence neighborhood, her collar fell apart and she just took off. I was holding my 2-year-old grandson in my arms and I took off after her, running, five blocks and then 10, and then I thought I would drop on the spot. I spotted a jogger, who agreed to chase her with the piece of cheese I was waving in the air. He got her back for me.

As my husband says, she was a great kid. She never asked for much. She didn’t talk back, and when we called, she always picked up.

Then, when she was 12, she bit me hard one day as I reached to pick her up. I collapsed to the floor, not from the pain or the sight of blood, but from the shock of the betrayal. We had her checked out, the aggression passed and never returned, but something had changed in her, and she began to drift.

Last year, when she was 96, she got sick and was in the hospital for a week. When she came home, her decline was apparent. She stared into space. She sometimes forgot why she was out on a walk. And she couldn’t see very well. Still, on some days she had brilliant moments, summoning her inner puppy and taking off, running through the house after her “stuffy.” Up the stairs and down, up and down.

And so, we had brilliant moments, too. In truth, I thought it would last forever. After she was gone and I looked through old photos, I realized that I never saw her as the arthritic, unsteady elder she had become. I looked in her eyes and saw what I wanted to see — in both of us.

I’m not sure I’m comfortable with talk of rainbow bridges and such. However, the day she died, I spotted an unusually large, bright red bird in the tree behind my house, and I thought about her spirit and where it might alight.

Such magical thoughts give comfort, but then there is this: Nothing is more real and more grounding than holding your beloved dog as she dies. Her heart beat against mine. It was the sound of her life, still there. As her breath slowed, I said what came to mind in the moment. I whispered, “I love you, sweet girl. Wait for me.”

Copyright © 2016 Randi Kreiss. Randi can be reached at randik3@aol.com.