Back in 1974, my sister-and-law (and best friend) and her husband took home an adorable puppy from Animal Rescue and named her Jessie. Joe and Kathleen were recently graduated from college and their work that year made it possible for at least one of them to be with her throughout the day and night; and they are outstanding parents, raising the nicest kids you can imagine, as well as one of the most incredible dogs I’ve ever known.

 

Jessie was a mix of something—we guessed malamute from her beautiful markings, black lab from her soft, floppy ears, warm brown eyes, and shape of her body and head. And someone once ventured there might be some beagle in there, insisting she had a beagly butt. She was a little smaller than either one of the large breeds, about 70 lbs, and a smart, sweet, and playful dog. Kathleen and Joe and Richard and I formed a loosely organized living unit for several years, so Jessie became Richard’s and my dog as well. She was devoted and fiercely loyal, one time managing to worm her way out of Kathleen and Joe’s fastened-up tent on a camping trip to park herself in front of the tent where Richard and I were sleeping. I was suffering from encephalitis at the time and very sick. Another time, when she was getting old and a bit arthritic, and going up and down the stairs in our house had started to be something she rarely did anymore, I awoke from a particularly nasty nightmare to find her curled up on the floor on my side of the bed.

 

She loved fetching sticks (the retriever in her), but she also apparently liked to make humans laugh. So one day when we were hiking, she started bringing bigger and bigger sticks for us to throw, getting an amused and delighted response from us each time. At one point, I heard a really strange noise behind me on the trail, some sort of unfamiliar animal sound, and I turned around to find Jessie dragging a log that was about six inches in diameter and eight feet long, growling and grunting from the effort. This totally cracked us up, of course, but eventually the big stick shtick got old and we stopped responding the same way. When that happened, Jessie disappeared into the forest and then came bounding out, ears and tail held high, and planted herself in front of us. She spit out a twig the size of a small caterpillar. She got us all to laughing so hard, we were staggering around, clutching our stomachs and unable to breathe.

 

She was great company and under stellar voice command, wanting to please us and be a good dog. One time when Richard and I were camping with her, we ended up sitting at a picnic table that was at the foot of a big pine tree. A squirrel had its nest in that tree, so it was upset, chattering and barking at us. It started charging down the trunk of the tree then running back up, becoming bolder with each charge. Curious, Jessie took up a station at the bottom of the tree and we told her to stay so that she wouldn’t go after the squirrel. She sat there like a living statue, her nose pointed upward, while the squirrel got closer and closer. Jessie did not move a muscle. At one point, the squirrel stopped, close enough to touch her, then reached out its paw and patted Jessie gently on the snout. Jessie still didn’t move! Satisfied that we weren’t going to bother its babies, the squirrel mellowed out.

 

Jessie lived to be seventeen-and-a-half years old. For seventeen of those years, she had a wonderfully happy and robust existence. But the last six months were tough. Kathleen and Joe and their two boys were moving from California back East at that time and didn’t think Jessie would make the trip well. Her arthritis had gotten very bad and she was in pain. Richard and I were moving back to northern California, to the house that we had all built together eleven years’ previous, so they left Jessie in our care. Richard left soon thereafter to work on a long film job in NYC, so I was the one who looked after Jessie, with the help of some good friends in the mountains.

 

We found out later from the vet that she was probably suffering from stress fractures every time she got up, her bones were so brittle; so she hated to get up off her dog bed and relieve herself outside. When she did, vultures would somehow know she was out and they would start cruising the skies above our place. Jessie would crane her neck to spot their whereabouts and make as much of an effort as she could to hurry back to the house, while I glared at the vultures and tried to look large and vigorously alive. Little by little, all the small pleasures that had thrilled her in the past—the bottom tip of an ice cream cone, a nugget of cheese, a tummy rub—seemed to produce no response. I kept hoping I would wake up one morning to find that she had slipped away in her sleep, but I never did.

 

I knew that she was suffering, but I couldn’t bear to deal with putting her to sleep without Richard, so I waited until he got home. When he saw how much pain she was in and how unresponsive she was, he agreed that we needed to take her to the vet. We held her and stroked her while the vet administered the drug that put her down, tears streaming down our faces, and we felt her tremble as her spirit left her worn-out body. We were utterly bereft but we were also thankful to know that she was no longer suffering. The sweet vet and his staff sent us a really nice, hand-signed sympathy card a few days later. They clearly loved animals—including humans.

 

I loved Jessie as much as any person I’ve ever had the privilege to know and love. And I thought it was the right thing to do to put her to sleep when she was suffering every minute of every day and was never going to get better. Everyone (and Jessie was adored by everyone who met her) thought so, in fact. No one tried to talk us into keeping her alive any longer. No one suggested artificially prolonging her life.

 

I’m building up to something here, obviously. But I’ll save that discussion for the next post.