date: 10.11.2002
entitled: "For Emily..."

My favorite canine friend has been laid to rest today. We bought our puppy for $50 from the Humane Society in Shelby Twp., Michigan, when I was eleven years old. We chose her because she had sad eyes, and licked our fingers through the cage bars. During the car ride home, and for a few hours afterward, my mom, sister, and I juggled names back and forth, but none of them seemed appropriate for this black and white, cow-spotted animal. Alas, my dad came home from work, and chose to name her Emily, after Simon & Garfunkel�s �For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her�. She looked just like an Emily.

We attempted to give her our own obedience sessions, relying on positive reinforcement through raw-hide bones, milk bones, and praise. It didn�t work. We had found that, prior to our adopting her after a mere three months of her life, she had been abused and returned to the Humane Society. She was deathly afraid of men, to the point where she would trickle urine while cowering under tall men with loud voices. Poor girl. Consequently, while trying to keep her off the sofa, and other random furniture, we became helpless. She frequently had what we termed �brat attacks�: she would hop onto the sofa; we would scold her and tell her to get down; she would bare her teeth, and snap at us if we tried to physically remove her; we would sometimes be successful at booting her off, after which she would tear around the house, running back and forth between adjacent rooms, barking and snarling, Tasmanian Devil-style. This eventually ended up becoming a twisted form of play-time, after which she would lie down and let us rub her belly. She also won first choice of a spot on the sofa for TV viewing.

Along with her brat attacks, Emily quickly became THE DESTRUCTOR when we would leave her alone in the house. She shredded newspaper laid down to catch her poo, and tossed it throughout the house. She uprooted the houseplants, leaving piles of dirt everywhere. She chewed up my mom�s folk art, which was normally freshly painted wood laid out to dry. My parents questioned the end to her fury, and threatened to take her back to the Humane Society many times. But my sister and I swore we�d train her.

We finally trained Emily. She became a calm and affectionate dog, especially after her spaying surgery. But the one concept she couldn�t seem to grasp was that her bathroom was outside. It took us over a year to train her, and she would still leave pee spots. One winter day, while taking her to the park with us to go ice-skating, we noticed how frequently she was peeing, and her urine was actually blood. Bladder stones! She quickly had surgery, and was miraculously house trained. Imagine how terrible we felt that we�d been scolding her all along, and questioning her intelligence.

Emily took turns sleeping on my sister�s and my bed, every other night throughout our teenage years. When my sister went away to college, she slept at the foot of my bed until it was my turn for higher education. She also used to come over to me when I was sad, and lie down next to me, as if she knew what I was feeling.

We somehow figured out some of her ancestry. Her bark was a long, drawn-out �boooowwwll�, so we figured she was part beagle. She also had some basset hound and terrier coursing through her veins. And imagine our surprise when we stepped out into the back yard, only to find Emily in a pointer-stance, calmly observing a squirrel climb the fence. Okay, so she was part pointer, too.

Within the past two years, she bloated up to double her original size, began to have flaky skin problems, drank a lot of water, and started losing her fur. She was a mess. It troubled me to see her this way, so in a way, I am relieved I won�t see her again in that condition.

My Uncle volunteered to watch her this week, while my parents travel around Vermont (they also visited Joe and I last weekend). By this morning, Emily had lost all control of her bodily functions, and my Uncle had to make the difficult decision to take her to the vet to be put to sleep. He loved our dog. He even built her a ramp to ease her egress and ingress, to go to the bathroom outside. And my parents don�t even know yet! There is no way to contact them. I feel terrible. But this email from Joe this afternoon made me feel quite a bit better:

katie,

it's very hard to lose a pooch, especially one of the late emily's merit. you should look through the picture books, definitely -- and revel in the good times spent, not the thoughts of what was lost. she's in a much better place now.. and even though we don't really believe in heaven, pers�, her energy is floating around somewhere probably frolicking or whatnot.

xo,

-joe.

It is true. She is much happier now, I�m sure.

song stuck in my head:

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