Our beautiful black lab has passed away.
I can’t believe it’s true. I still can’t. I see her everywhere. The house is so quiet. I keep thinking that I need to get her dinner or take her out for her walk… She loved her walks. She could barely see and barely hear, but her nose worked very, very well…
I have tried to write this so many times. I’m grateful for a public way to remember her. But when I try to write… I get lost in my grief. My mind goes to the smell of her fur, the sounds she made, her velvet ears… Our beautiful girl gave me more love than there is a way to measure. I know that it is a sacred responsibility to care for an old dog. They give us their youth, their boundless energy, their unconditional love. She did. She carried Jodie through the hardest times of his life. She carried me through missing Jodie these last few years. She was always joyful. I have never known such a gentle soul. I think she would have stayed with us forever… just to try to make me happy. I’m grateful that I could try to ease her old age, rub her ears and massage her back, and scratch her butt to stretch out those hip muscles. She loved everything. And everyone.
My mind wanders these days. We have all cried for days. And been so touched by the outpouring of love from everyone who knew Emma. She had a lot of second families and they all have joyful stories of ‘Crazy Emma’ destroying the inflatable whale swimming pool, ‘Sweet Emma’ riding shotgun in a friend’s truck with her hot pink stuffed pig toy gripped in her mouth. She was such a girl. She bounced up and down to greet you. Couldn’t hear much but always knew the word ‘walk’. Suffered her insulin shots lightly in order to get to the prosciutto or bacon or cookie or carrot that came after. Every day as I scooped the gross wet food she loved and fed her a little bacon treat her vegetarian mother would tell her, ‘Only for love dear.’ I must have told her how wonderful she was and how much I loved her a thousand times a day. It was the last thing I got to tell her. I still love her. I’ll never stop.
I feel so blessed that she was here. I can’t believe that I got to love and be loved by this beautiful soul. I will never be the same. Our dear friend Lori wrote to us that our sorrow is our love… and to talk to her, she can hear us. Somehow through days and oceans of tears, her words were a beautiful comfort.
Love your dog tonight. And if you can, please light a candle for Emma and the beautiful souls who give everything they are to us. Nothing will be the same without her.
And… somehow… we will learn how to miss her.
And this from her loving dad…
The Dog With a Thousand Names
Friends and family have referred to Emma as many things. “Sweet ball of furry love”. “A gracious old lady”. “The best car wash dog ever”. “Relentless”. “The dog with a thousand names”.
She was all of those things…and then some. She was a lover, and a giver. I have never known a dog that was as intuitive or expressive. She seemed to know your mood, and whether or not your mood needed her to give, or to simply stand by at the ready.
She was a gift…literally and figuratively. My brother and sister presented her to me in Galveston on Christmas Day, 1996. I brought her to Denver the next day, and though a South Texas dog, she absolutely love, love, loved the snow. And she’s loved the snow, and been with me, ever since.
But not constantly. My work travel at the time had me flying all over the world, and I had recently separated from my first wife. Consequently, Emma led something of a transient existence, with a small group of helpful, caring friends providing dog sitting services, often for a couple of weeks at a time. Her primary “home-away-from-home” was with my friends Chris and Rachel. Chris’s initial attempts to keep Emma from trying to sleep in the bed with them proved both frustrating (for Chris) and unsuccessful. Never mind that Chris and Rachel’s two dogs, Bowie and Kabel, were not allowed to sleep in the bed. Emma tended to win the battle. And when Chris and Rachel eventually moved, they bought a new bed…king sized. Why? So that there would be room for Emma.
Rachel gave Emma her first of many nicknames: Bemmy Boo. Over the years, those morphed into literally dozens of offshoots, created by the myriad of people that came in and out of Emma’s life. Bem Bem, Emma Kabemma, Bammy, Bemma Lemma DingDong, Bemmy Lou, Crazy Emma. I’ve always viewed nicknames (for adults, at least) as terms of endearment. And a dog with so many nicknames most certainly had a coterie of people that considered her dear.
Our friends Jess and Sue were also on the dog sitting rotation, and after “The Whale Head Incident”, their daughter, Jade, quickly nicknamed her Crazy Emma. You see, Jade had a new, inflatable wading pool, with a whale’s head sticking up in the middle. For whatever reason, Emma took exception to the whale’s head…and attacked it…proceeding to kill both the whale and the pool. I will never forget when Jess told me about it, the part of the story with Jade screaming in glee, “Do it again, Emma! Do it again!”
For a time, Jess was in the car wash business, and would take Emma on his rounds. As with anyone she loved, she was a faithful companion, and loved riding shotgun with Jess in his truck. One of Jess’s favorite Emma moments was when he had her in the passenger seat of his truck, driving down I-25, Emma proudly sitting up, surveying the world, with her pink stuffed pig in her mouth. She loved her toys.
Emma also loved her tennis balls. I have never seen a dog that was as relentless about chasing a tennis ball. Over, and over, and over, and over again…to the point of exhaustion. She had no quit. My friend Dallas knows this all too well. He and his wife, Dru, kept Emma one weekend, and they had a dog door (as well as a black lab named Greta). Dallas is a tennis player, so there was no shortage of tennis balls on the premises. Once Emma mastered the dog door (which was, apparently, no small feat), she proceeded to find tennis balls in the backyard, then bring them inside so that Dallas could throw them across the living room. Unfortunately for Emma, Dallas and Dru were trying to watch a movie, so the ball got old…quickly. Finally, Dallas picked up the ball and put it in the trash. Undeterred, Emma went right back out the dog door, and found another one…which Dallas proceeded to put in the trash. Twenty minutes and roughly a dozen tennis balls later, Dallas had a trash can full of tennis balls, and a backyard with none. Relentless.
Did I mention she loved the snow? Oh. My. God…she loved the snow. And she could run, to the point that when chasing a ball, she was so hell bent on getting to it as quickly as possible that more often than not, when she hit the brakes to scoop up the ball, I fully expected her to go tumbling ass-over-tea-kettle. But she never did.
She was a lady. She actually walked while she poo’d. I maintained that it made complete sense for a dog with her sensibilities. I mean, who really wants to hang around their own poo? Best to get away from it as quickly as possible. It did, however, make clean up a complete pain in the ass. If she was outside and wanted in, she’d let out a short, high-pitched, lady-like yelp, as if that is what decorum dictated. If a few of those didn’t work, she’d finally let out a full blown bark, like a Manhattan socialite finally giving up on the gloved-arm-in-the-air and breaking out a huge fingers-to-the-mouth whistle to hail a taxi.
She was a sweet ball of furry love. And her shedding was epic. More than once, I unpacked a suitcase in a far away place to find an Emma hair among my clothes…and it always made me smile. And sometimes that fur was of great help. The first time I had Paige over to my house to meet Emma, she was wearing cream colored trousers, and Emma proceeded to brush up against them. Did Emma know it was going to give me an opportunity to touch Paige’s ass for the first time, in order to brush off the black dog hair? I think so. And though I had promised Paige when we married that I would be diligent about vacuuming the house…I wasn’t. Paige told me yesterday that she may not vacuum for a very, very long time.
Over the last year or so, and in anticipation of this moment, I’ve said more than once that Emma gave me far, far more than I ever gave her. But the greatest gift I ever gave Emma was Paige. Those two girls loved each other unconditionally. As Emma grew older, Paige was the most thoughtful, compassionate caretaker an aging black lab could ever want. Frankly, in the last couple of years, Emma became Paige’s dog…and I was perfectly OK with that. Paige, thank you so much for making the last 5-1/2 years of Emma’s life so special.
I also want to thank everyone, including the people mentioned above, that ever touched Emma’s life or cared for her, either by taking her into your home, or by simply indulging her need for a thrown ball. She loved all of you. Don, thank you so much for building her ramp. It made the last 1-1/2 years of her life much more tolerable. Karen, thank you for the baths. They made living with Emma much more tolerable. ;-) Andria & Terry, thank you for moving your lives into our house so that our feeble old girl could remain in the comfort of her own home. The rest of you know who you are, especially those of you that allowed Emma to sleep in the bed (I’m talking to you, Lori M.), even though you, and she, knew that wasn’t allowed. ;-)
And I want to thank Emma. She got me through some of the most difficult periods of my life, and was there when Paige and I got married. She never judged, and was always there to greet me with her dangerously happy tail. She actually did this “hop” when you walked through the door, as if she literally wanted to jump up and wrap her arms around you, but somehow knew that was not lady like. She came to learn that the phrase, “Do you wanna…?”, always ended with something along the lines of “go outside”, or “go for a ride”, or “a treat”. You couldn’t get past the “wanna” without her jumping up, cocking her head, and giving you this hilarious look that said, “Hell, yeah, I wanna! But ‘wanna’ what?!?!? C’mon! Finish the sentence already!” I can’t say this enough: Emma was a gift.
She was diagnosed in May 2009 with diabetes. On the first Friday of that month, at our annual Spring Friday party, was the last time Emma really ran like Emma for her ball. A few days later, the diabetes hit, and there were a handful of moments prior to our getting her blood sugar regulated that we really thought it was probably her time. But she powered through, and she has been a champ about her twice-daily insulin shots…probably due to there being a treat at the end. Her eyesight started to fade, then her hearing. And Paige was there for her, every step of the way.
Emma turned 14 on Nov. 11th, so she was, effectively, a 98 year old diabetic. It was probably her time, and we should not have been surprised. But we’re crushed, and there is a giant hole in the house and in our hearts.
We will miss her terribly, but will see her again. And I’ll have a tennis ball.
Our darling Emma… We love you. We hope you are running as fast as the wind and that the balls are all wonderfully smelly and the walks are long. We will miss you… and look forward to your bouncy greeting again someday…
A few notes to add more than a few days later…
We still miss her terribly. And love her. And haven’t vacuumed her bed. She’s still teaching me things about love and kindness and what’s really important.
The photos without me are by me. The wonderful photos that I got to be in are by my amazing friend Julie Harris. And the brilliantly talented Christy Lea Payne is designing a special necklace for me to carry Emma memories with me. I promise to photograph it for the blog.
And Emma is a little famous too… her story was picked up by Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic. Thank you and a huge thank you to everyone who stopped by from his blog. Your kindness and stories of love have touched our hearts more than we can say.
Want lovely photos of your own? Contact Paige
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