My girlie

I’ll get this out of the way so those of you who are prone to avoiding sad subjects can just skip this post: Katya died Saturday, July 31st.

She died as she did everything in life: in a manner guaranteed to give me even more gray hairs. As a puppy Katya never chewed on shoes or furniture or the carpet. She preferred electrical wires – the higher voltage the better- or the AA batteries from my pager. As a teenage mutant dog she would dig under fences, eat my plants, and randomly disappear for hours at a time on some weird “walk the neighborhood” journey of doggy discovery.

She humped pillows.

Really that previous sentence doesn’t need further elaboration. Any mental picture you’ve currently conjured isn’t 1/10 as disturbing are the actual event.

She was, however, 13 years old. She slowed down. She was quite mellow in her old age, content to lie on the floor and watch the goings on of the boys and the other humans with disdainful ennui. Granted, she always picked the most inopportune spot on the floor to lie. I said she slowed down, I didn’t say she developed courtesy.

Our house has a walk-out basement. This is wonderful for the boys, for us and for the ( hopefully far in the future) re-sale value of the home. For Katya, though, it sucked. She had to go up and down stairs every time she needed to go outside. Since she was an older female dog, she had to go out quite often. Those stairs were really hard on her hips.

Friday, June 30th Katya was her usual self in the morning. She stole a waffle from Ian, as she did every morning, and followed me around while I cleaned the house. When the boys and I sat down to lunch, Katya suddenly stood up, walked a few feet onto the carpet and relieved herself. I was quite shocked and yelled at her. I put her outside.

Typically she would have returned within a few minutes begging to be let back in. She didn’t. A few hours later Ethan had to coax her inside. She curled up by the island in the kitchen and didn’t move. She didn’t lift her head when Mark came in the door. She didn’t so much as twitch when Ian dropped most of his dinner on the floor. When I opened her food bin she opened her eyes but her head still rested on the floor.

Something was very wrong.

The next day I took her to the animal hospital where the initial examination indicated she might have a bladder infection or perhaps some sort of doggy virus. Sadly, an ultrasound of her abdomen showed something much worse. Katya had a very large cancerous tumor on her spleen. The tumor was rupturing and causing her to bleed internally. She was extremely anemic, thus the lethargy.

Mark and I discussed our options, but in the end it was horribly clear that we didn’t really have any other choice. We couldn’t put our 13 year old sweetie through the pain of surgery from which she had less than a 20% chance of recovery. Even after surgery there was a less than 10% chance that she would survive longer than 3 months, as the cancer was almost definitely spreading to her other organs.

Mark brought the boys to the vet’s office and they got to say goodbye. Mark and I cried and held her and then I stayed with her at the end.

I miss her every day, though I’m doing better about not bursting into tears at the mere thought of her. I’ve put away her bowls but her bed is still on the floor in our bedroom. I still turn around every night to check her now-absent bowl for food and water. I check the yard to see if she’s out there before I go to bed.

She was a spaz, a rug, a nuisance, a smelly hairball, in the way, making a mess, driving me insane. She was also my constant companion, a tangible link to the past. She laid down beside me on the floor and licked my face the night Adrian died. She watched over my boys, followed me through all the major life changes of the past decade plus.

I hope there really is a beyond, a better place for my darling girlie’s soul. I hope balls fall from the sky, that her bed is made of downy pillows, her bowl filled with waffles and chicken nuggets, and her yard filled with toddlers to bowl over.

I miss her.