You must understand, I didn’t know dogs could swim.
It was the summer between my fifth and sixth birthdays and we were spending our summer vacation at a cabin on the edge of a lake nestled between Lake Arrowhead and Big Bear Lake in California’s San Bernardino National Forest. Our lake was called Arrowbear, claiming half the name of the two bigger area attractions. We had our Dalmatian with us, a dog named Stripe who was exceptionally well trained by my Dad, tracking my sibling and I everywhere we went.
The Arrowbear Lake of my childhood memories was enormous, containing a pier at one end where people fished, a rocky beach area where you could wade in for swimming, and a dam which stopped or slowed the runoff from the snowy season from flooding the little valley. We spent our time there in swimsuits which became increasingly dirty as the week wore on, my Mom’s insistence on daily baths suspended for the only time I can recall. Looking back, I imagine she was trying to carve out a little vacation of her own which didn’t involve wrangling filthy children into soap suds and combing tangles out of my waist-length hair.
While my Mom read a novel on the cabin’s deck and my Dad grilled up dinner, we were allowed to explore. Stripe was our companion, sticking to us like Velcro. We walked to the dam to collect rocks and sticks and decided to cross along the top to get to the other side where fallen pine trees lay surrounded by pine cones and mushrooms. Halfway across the top of the dam, our big dog slipped over the edge into the lake. I screamed in absolute terror, certain our dog had just fallen to his watery grave.
Years later deep nostalgia would propel me to drag my husband and children up to Arrowbear for a weeklong stay in a cabin, once in summer and once to introduce the novelty of snow to my suburban beach-dwelling offspring. I was shocked to find the giant Arrowbear of my memories was not much more than a pond, the pier roughly the size of a single mattress, the dam no more than three feet tall and roughly six feet across. But when Stripe slipped into the water, it was like watching him plummet from the top of a thirty story building.
My scream summoned my Dad, who had to repeatedly point out that not only was Stripe not dead, he was dog paddling his way to the shore, shaking the water off, and then jumping right back into the lake once again. We lived in a city at that time and didn’t have a pool in our backyard, so it had never occurred to me that even though I could swim the length of the municipal pool and back with ease, other non-human mammals might be able to do the same. Our beloved Dalmatian probably didn’t slip off the dam so much as jump into the lake. And even though my Dad was right, Stripe could not only swim but he actually loved being in the water, what seemed like a near-brush with death shook me. A fundamental truth was birthed in my world that day:
Pets do not live forever.
Growing up we had a regular menagerie of animals sharing our home and property. We always had cats and dogs, but once we’d moved from Los Angeles to a few acres of land in California’s high desert, we expanded to horses, chickens, pigs, and even two horrible geese we’d inherited from the previous owner, who honked and viciously chased and bit me every time I stepped into the backyard.
My Mom loved animals and sacrificed a ton of her time and resources to their care and upkeep, but she was surprisingly practical and unsentimental about them as well. They had their place as pets, but humans always came first. I suspect this attitude came from having the mother she did, who put a prized purebred Weimaraner dog named Schatzi above every human relationship, including the one with her husband, daughter, and grandchildren.
Schatzi was a huge grey dog that could do anything it wanted, unlike me. Visiting my maternal grandparents a few times per year was an exercise in the old adage of “children should be seen and not heard.” While in the house, I was expected to sit calmly on the davenport and behave like a lady, with my best, most quiet manners on display. Schatzi had run of the house and every single thing that dog did earned praise and treats from my grandmother. I could be sitting there with an audibly growling stomach, politely ask for something to eat, and my grandmother would tell me snacking will ruin my appetite, even while giving treat after treat to Schatzi.
In the evening, my grandfather delighted in taking our family to his favorite restaurant, an expensive, dimly lit steakhouse where the waitstaff wore ties and greeted my grandfather by name. My grandmother would inevitably order the largest, priciest steak on the menu, eat a single bite, declare herself full, and ask to have the rest wrapped up to take home to Schatzi.
Dinner conversation was never far away from what the dog, left at home, might be doing at that very moment. Was he lonely? What if some neighborhood kids were pounding on the door to upset him? Could everyone please hurry up so we can get home? It was weird, and my Mother would steam with anger after we left, complaining to my Dad there was no point in bringing us to spend time with the grandparents while Schatzi called the shots… we might as well have been invisible at best, and annoying at worst.
My maternal grandparents visited my childhood home only once that I can remember. It was the Christmas I was missing one of my front teeth, and it was extraordinarily brief because the dog couldn’t tolerate the car trip and my grandmother couldn’t tolerate being away from the dog. My Mom talked about it for years.
I suspect it was Schatzi who influenced my mother to forever keep pets in a lower spot than those occupied by the full-fledged human family members of the household. My Dad, on the other hand, cooked full gourmet meals for our dogs, simmering meat, vegetables, and rice in broth on the stove for hours, while my Mom served us frozen fish sticks and tater tots, or mac n’ cheese with hot dogs. We often joked over how the dogs ate better than us.
When I moved out of the family home for college, I eventually ended up staying in my grandfather’s house, the one that still had Schatzi’s prickly grey hairs sticking out of the seams of the davenport. Both Schatzi and my grandmother had passed away years before, and my grandfather was lonely in the big house. I was engaged to be married while still working and going to school full time, so I worked out a deal with my grandpa: I would move in and keep him company, with the promise that the money I had previously paid in rent each month would now go directly into my savings account as a gift for the wedding.
It was a brilliant and generous plan, which was foiled the day I moved in. My grandfather was rushed to emergency for a health crisis and then moved in with my uncle and aunt, never again spending another night in that house. He lived just beyond my wedding day, and my last memory of him is me in my bridal attire listening to his advice on how to stay married.
The eighteen months leading up to the wedding had me experiencing exactly what he did after his wife and the dog were gone: loneliness.
My fiancé had proposed and then left on an animation tour for six months to promote a new Disney film. I was going to school full time as a theater major which included lots of rehearsals and working full time in retail. Coming home to this enormous house by myself was sad. I couldn’t have a human roommate, so I did the next best thing and got a kitten.
Bruce-the-Cat was the first pet that was truly mine, not the family’s. I loved him an enormous amount. He was sweet and funny, grey and white with enormous blue eyes. He was full of personality and I adored him completely. Having had pets my entire life, he was exactly the right fit for the loneliness I felt. I was the proudest cat mom you could imagine, taking great care and responsibility for him. I was excited to return home from rehearsals or long shifts filled with cranky customers because I had a fuzzy little buddy waiting for me.
When my fiancé returned from the tour, I was thrilled to introduce him to the other ‘man’ in my life. It did not go well. He had proposed four months after meeting me, and then left for six months. It was during the time before social media and text messages and even emails, where long distance calling from one state in America to another cost an outrageous amount. The only way to make a phone date affordable was to buy a prepaid calling card and enter forty digits to have a twenty minute call that cost twenty cents a minute instead of a dollar. Mostly, however, we wrote letters back and forth. None of my letters included a mention of Bruce-the-Cat because I wanted him to be a surprise. But I was the surprised one.
“I am extremely allergic to cats,” my soon-to-be husband told me upon entering my grandfather’s home after six months away from me.
This was not something he’d mentioned in those four months of getting to know each other, and it certainly hadn’t come up in our weekly twenty minute phone calls or the long letters we wrote each other. I knew he’d grown up without a cat, but there was mention of his sisters having had small dogs in his childhood. Because I’d never known a moment of life without a pet in the home, it simply never occurred to me that there were reasons beyond not having time, money, or space for someone to not have an animal friend!
I was absolutely devastated. We got into a huge fight which just went round and round until I told him to please leave the house. I realized I was going to have to make a choice between a cat and a husband-to-be and being just shy of twenty years old, I wasn’t equipped with any kind of equanimity to appropriately deal with the situation. Instead of my Mom, I called my Dad, sobbing.
I begged my Dad to take Bruce-the-Cat into the fold of other cats and dogs my parents already had. Even he, decades older than me with far more lived experience, couldn’t comprehend someone being allergic to cats. None of us had ever known anyone with asthma, which seemed like a made-up word for someone who gets short of breath when they are out of shape, and therefore easy to dismiss as not being real.
Side note: call it poetic justice or karma, after five years of living in China I developed Adult Onset Asthma and never leave the house without my inhaler because it’s very, very real.
My Dad agreed to take my sweet adolescent cat but I still cried and cried.
My fiancé came back the next day, having called his doctor and talked with his own mom. There were things he could do to better tolerate life with a cat, like allergy shots and maintenance antihistamines, and not wanting to be the person who makes a girl choose between a cat and a husband-to-be, he made the choice of jumping into treatment to desensitize himself to Bruce’s dander. I added a vacuum cleaner with a HEPA filter to our wedding register and became obsessive about vacuuming and cleaning our floors every day.
When we moved to Tokyo four years later, Bruce moved in with my Mom and Dad. He was their lone experience with an indoor city cat, who couldn’t be trusted to keep himself safe from the rural predators of birds of prey and coyotes in the great outdoors. When we moved back to America he joined us in our urban apartment life once again.
At age five, he developed digestion issues. He would gag and vomit regularly which was startling and sent me flying to the veterinarian’s office. We spent thousands of dollars on special food and medicines to help him digest. He had been a huge cat, but over time he lost weight, teetering on the edge of being malnourished. We paid for test after test, which became more and more invasive, showing nothing at all which could be “fixed.” I noticed his diminished size, but because of his relative youth we just continued with the plan of feeding him the vet’s recommended high-calorie food with added roughage and a medicine which mostly stopped his nausea, or at least kept him from vomiting so much.
When Bruce was seven my husband worked for a theater in the San Francisco Bay Area. Every time he’d load in a new show, he would work eighteen hour days in the theater for a week. I had a toddler and was experiencing a high risk second pregnancy, so we got in the habit of sending me and the firstborn to stay with my parents during these busy times. My husband would stop at home long enough to shower and change clothes, feed and medicate Bruce-the-Cat. I returned feeling rested and refreshed thanks to the TLC from my Mama, who adored my energetic firstborn and let me sleep as long as my pregnant body wanted.
But after so much time away, I saw my kitty with fresh eyes.
My previously large, proud cat was shrunken and miserable. At not even eight years old, he was less than half of his normal body weight, and still losing. What I had taken as him being snuggly and staying nearby while I was on semi-bedrest for my pregnancy, was actually lethargy and discomfort. We made a trip to the vet with this new perspective. Labs were taken, his weight compared to previous visits. She gave us devastating news. There was nothing more that could be done. He was suffering without any obvious way to fix him. It could be anything, from stress to an internal injury from ingesting thread or string at some point in the years before.
The special food and medicine were not bringing Bruce-the-Cat closer to health. He was becoming more malnourished while his organs were working harder to keep him alive than the calories we were feeding him could keep up with. The only option the vet offered was opening him up for exploratory surgery to simply take a look around, not actually fix anything. The risks of the surgery were great. The quote for the surgery was a full month of salary at the non-profit theater company where my husband worked at the time. Our credit cards were already maxed from the vet visits and special diet and medication. There was no way we could swing it. But even if money was no problem, my gut resisted subjecting my beloved kitty to a surgery that wouldn’t even fix what was wrong. It would hurt, and might harm him even more.
I begged for other options, but nearly two years of trying everything recommended by two different veterinarians brought us to what I did not want to hear.
A compassionate option, she gently told us, would be to euthanize Bruce. To purposefully stop the suffering in a controlled way. I was bereft at the thought. Accidents happen all the time. Perfectly healthy pets dig their way out of yards and get hit by cars or choke on special treats that are marketed as being safe or get bit by snakes or fall off dams much higher than the one at Arrowbear Lake. And we curse the accidents in anger and we grieve our pets. But how do we deal with it when we ourselves make the decision to end a suffering animal’s less-than-healthy life? Do we curse ourselves?
We took Bruce home with us, as I certainly couldn’t make a decision like that in the moment. I needed time to really think about this. He was my first pet as an adult, and I needed to be sure I was making the best decision for him. In the weeks that followed, he slowed way down, unwilling to climb the stairs to our bedroom without being carried, refused his food, and began vomiting yellow fluid. We visited a second vet’s office who had seen my cat previously, only to be told the same thing. He was suffering without an obvious cause and the options we had to make him more comfortable were losing their efficacy.
The American Humane Association website lists the reasons a pet owner might be faced with a decision to euthanize their animal:
He is experiencing chronic pain that cannot be controlled with medication (your veterinarian can help you determine if your pet is in pain).
He has frequent vomiting or diarrhea that is causing dehydration and/or significant weight loss.
He has stopped eating or will only eat if you force feed him.
He is incontinent to the degree that he frequently soils himself.
He has lost interest in all or most of his favorite activities, such as going for walks, playing with toys or other pets, eating treats or soliciting attention and petting from family members.
He cannot stand on his own or falls down when trying to walk.
He has chronic labored breathing or coughing.
This time it was my Mom who got my tearful phone call. She was the one who had carried the burden of being with our animals at the vet in their last moments for my entire life. I explained everything from the beginning with all the updates and options, reading the notes and lab results from the vet. And then I asked her to just tell me what to do.
She was absolutely no help to me whatsoever. This is a decision you will need to make on your own, Heather. I will stand by you in your choice and hold you while you cry but death is part of life. No one else will love that cat more than you do, so you have to make this decision or else you will grow angry and resentful with the person who does. Bruce has relied on you to care for him all these years. He depends on you. You can’t stop caring for him just because the decision of what to do next is hard. You’ll figure it out. She told me she loved me and hung up the phone.
I spent the next week watching Bruce-the-Cat carefully. He stopped eating and would hide in hard to find spots. I let gravity take my hugely pregnant body all the way down to lay on the floor next to my desk when I found him crouched behind it and couldn’t reach him or compel him to come out. I told him how hard this was, while crying and crying into the synthetic rental-beige carpet.
My husband held me and told me he would support whatever choice I made. It was agony. For me yes, but also for my cat. After two years of battle with his digestive tract, he was tired. It felt like he’d just given up, and what right did I have to ask him to continue on, just for me?
By the end of the week, my choice was clear.
I called for an appointment to take Bruce-the-Cat in for a final visit to our vet. A friend took our toddler son for the day and my husband and I went in together. Bruce put up no fight at all when we put him in the cat carrier, which was heartbreaking in and of itself.
The experience was awful, there is simply no other word for it. We stayed the whole time, through the entire process. He had been there for me in my loneliest moments, and I did not want him to be alone for even a second. I never took my hands off Bruce-the-Cat until he took his last breath, and then I wailed and wept and was generally inconsolable.
We sat in the car afterwards, me unable to catch my breath through the tears. When I was finally drained enough to speak, I turned to my husband and angrily vowed I would never again have another pet. It was too great a burden on my heart to love something so much which you know will be gone too soon. Seven years was not enough time, not even close.
We buried Bruce-the-Cat on my parents’ property next to one of the family dogs. My mom picked out a rose bush called Sterling Silver to plant above him. She picked it because of the beautiful and fragrant greyish-purple blooms which reminded her of him, but also because it is a virtually thornless species of roses. Bruce is no longer in pain, and this won’t add to yours, she said. It bloomed like crazy, far more than any of her other rose bushes and she brought me clippings for years.
I asked her how she did it… raising a multitude of animals knowing right from the start she would later have to say goodbye to them. It felt so heartless! Why open yourself to the pain? She said it was always worth it, every minute. But I just couldn’t see it the way she did at the time.
Our life following the birth of our second child was a very transient one. We moved from the San Francisco Bay Area to Los Angeles for a year, and then to Hong Kong. We returned once again to America and lived in three different homes before leaving for Asia a third time, settling in Macau. There was no possibility of a pet, even if I was to go back on my vow in the vet’s parking lot that I would never again have one. It didn’t stop the kids from asking regularly, however.
My husband’s job in Macau was meant to last five to seven years. We’d never stayed in any one place longer than two years, so we tried to settle in as deeply as we could. So many friends in the expatriate community in Macau had pets, which had surprised me. It didn’t seem like having an animal was all that compatible with a life where you moved every few years, but they showed me it could be done. One day after we’d visited our friend Liam’s cats, my ten-year-old firstborn made a casual observation which felt like a punch in the gut.
I never thought, he said, that not having a pet would be what I remember most about my childhood.
I know for a fact he was not trying to guilt me into getting him a cuddly little plaything, he isn’t well versed in that kind of manipulation. It was merely a thought which crossed his mind, like so many others. He changed the topic to something else he’d been mulling over, but my brain was stuck on not having a pet. The gifts of a childhood filled with pets are many, including a rich mine of stories, discovering sacrificial selflessness, and yes, lessons about loss.
When the opportunity to move to Macau had come up, it was a pinch me I’m dreaming moment. My wandering heart had been hoping to live abroad once again, but felt guilty sharing it beyond private late night talks with my husband because friends and family were so relieved we were home for good this time. The job itself was a cutting edge project, pushing the boundaries on technology and story. In the months before, my husband had made a wish list of things he wanted to do in his career. The new role ticked every single box. He was offered the job on a Monday and less than two weeks later he was on a plane, while the boys and I stayed behind to dramatically downsize and finish the last two months of the school year.
When my firstborn made the not having a pet statement, I gave it serious thought. Our nomadic existence was one created by our career choices and chance. It wasn’t something our children had any particular control over. Why should they be deprived of something I’d had in abundance when we’d already taken other things away, like having the same address for longer than eighteen months…
Cats were out of the question, so I quietly began researching dogs. We lived in a high rise building along the waterfront. It would have to be something small. We entertained frequently, so it would have to be something that wouldn’t cause any of our guests’ allergies to flare. Macau was filled with these small, curly-haired teddy bear-looking dogs, and my research showed that any dog with longer, curly hair tends to be more hypo-allergenic. I was surprised to learn they were poodles, having only previously been aware of the large, white, somewhat prissy standard poodles. We started searching in all the rescues and shelters, taking our time because this was a big decision.
One day, a few months into our casual search, we popped into a room filled with every small breed of animal you can think of. Dogs, cats, birds, even hamsters and gerbils. It was nightmarish - smelly and noisy. I could barely stand it, all those animals shoved together in cages, making a cacophony of sound when they saw human visitors. Overwhelmed, I was about to herd my family right back out when I caught sight of a tiny red-haired fluff ball, quietly sitting there staring at us. I asked what kind of dog it was. A poodle, the attendant told me, would you like to hold her? She has no name, we think she’s about four months old.
She opened the cage and thrust this small creature at me. I held her to my chest, and the dog exhaled deeply, nestling her tiny chin between my neck and shoulder. She closed her eyes, perfectly at peace. I tried not to cry.
My husband’s eyes grew big. Did we just find our dog, he asked. I don’t know, I said.
But I knew.
I passed her to my sons, and she snuggled against each of them as well, not making a sound despite the uproar of the other animals in the room. Finally my husband held her, and she nearly fell asleep, so content to be in his arms.
We signed some papers, paid a fee, and the boys picked out a purple collar and leash for her. I asked what we should call her, and they tossed names around. I thought of the song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds by the Beatles and tossed out Lucy, and they shouted YES! When we got her home, our tiny three pound puppy raced from one end of our flat to the other, a very quiet speed demon. She’s a Rocket, one of the boys said. And so it stuck, Lucy Rocket.
On that first night with us, I told my husband that the life expectancy of healthy toy poodles is 12 to 15 years. This dog is still going to be with us after both our kids have graduated high school and left the house, I said. We laughed because it was so far away. Unfathomably far. Forever really.
This month my firstborn left home to continue his education abroad, two years after he graduated high school. Our youngest entered the workforce, remaining with us awhile longer, after graduating high school last month. And Lucy Rocket, as tiny as ever but now a nine year old lady with fading strawberry blonde curls where her bright red hair used to be, developed a little rash on her belly.
It’s hot right now in Hong Kong, the fourth country Lucy Rocket has lived in. The humidity is miserable and the air conditioners in our new flat have been unreliable with keeping us cool. The little rash didn’t seem to itch or hurt or bother her at all and the individual spots would fade a day or so after they appeared, so I chalked it up to the heat we’re all struggling with. I scheduled the soonest appointment with the groomer for a bath and short summer haircut.
A few hours after she came home from the groomers, it appeared the rash was worse. A lot worse. The flat red spots were multiplying and with the new shorter hair, it was easy to see they weren’t limited to just her belly. I immediately called the vet, who asked me to bring her in the next day. Her appetite was normal, she wasn’t acting strange, and didn’t seem to be itchy or in any pain at all.
The vet drew some blood and it was immediately clear there was a problem when they withdrew the needle and she would not stop bleeding. The vet told me it was not a rash, but actually tiny bruises called petechiae. Any slight contact was causing injury, and the groomer, as gentle as they are, had caused major damage in just an hour of brushing and trimming her. I watched in horror as these bruises appeared just minutes after I gave her the gentlest scratch behind her ear.
The lab results were shocking. She had no platelets in her blood at all. Platelets are the things that rush to the site of injury in our bodies to clot the blood and start the healing process. Lucy Rocket was in a dangerous state where a sudden jolt from jumping off the couch could cause uncontrollable internal bleeding in her brain or organs, and a hard dog treat could make her gums and mouth a bloody mess.
The vet put us in a taxi so we could rush to the emergency animal hospital. I was in such shock over this information I interrupted my husband in a meeting at work and told him he needed to get in his own taxi and meet me at the hospital immediately. They whisked her off to the Intensive Care Unit without us, to begin a transfusion of immunoglobulin to try and build up a few platelets in the hopes that her body would start making more, and began the careful search for what might have caused this to begin with.
They told us the initial treatment would be roughly the cost of one month’s rent (in Hong Kong… the most expensive place on the planet), asked us to sign a paper with all the risks, including death, and to tell them if we wanted the vet to try and resuscitate her if she should stop breathing or if her heart ceased to beat. I began shaking and didn’t know if I was going to throw up or pass out if I opened my mouth, so I’m grateful my husband was there to say yes, save her, save our dog.
We left her there, and I texted the family and friends and Facebook and Instagram and Twitter to ask everyone to send all their love and prayers and good wishes to a tiny four pound poodle in Hong Kong. I texted my sons, one in another country and one at work, to tell them the fullest of details. And I cried on the train and the bus back home, because even with my husband’s arms wrapped around me, I just wanted to call my Mama and have her tell me again and again why this is all worth it. But she’s gone. And when she died, it was Lucy Rocket who didn’t leave my side while I laid in bed for days and ugly cried over the horrible loss of my mother and the continuing dreadful aftermath, so what in the world was I supposed to do if we lost Lucy?
Blast that horrible Alfred, Lord Tennyson who wrote that stupid poem In Memoriam A. H. H. with those awful last two lines that go:
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
Our pets really are here just to love us. They give us everything they have and ask so little in return.
Stripe never let us out of his sight, he tolerated everything we did to him and always casually put himself between us and strangers. Bruce-the-Cat was my teammate, patching up my lonely heart, hiding all his pain from me until he just couldn’t mask it any more. Lucy Rocket has grown up with my boys and loved every member of my family with an unfailing preternatural sense of who is hurting or in need of snuggles to the point that we often called her Nurse Lucy because that’s what she does, she nurses our wounds and never for a minute lets on that she has any of her own.
Lucy Rocket is back home, diagnosed with an autoimmune disease, on heavy meds, some level of which will likely continue for the remainder of her life.
She’ll turn ten in September and it’s a privilege to carry her down the stairs and place her gently on the ground outside where she can do her business, and then carry her back up again and set her on her special soft cushion where she can watch us and doze the day away.
It’s an act of love to clean up after her as the medication both greatly increases her thirst and also causes her to unexpectedly lose control of her bladder.
We feel honored when she rolls over and allows us to rub her new rounder belly, a side effect of the drugs and the increased hunger she’s experiencing.
It’s the greatest joy to still have my lil’ coworker here by my side or in my lap, the spots she’s occupied for every word I’ve written for almost a decade.
Because of her condition and the contraindication for any further vaccinations, she won’t be able to get an exit permit to leave the country. This definitely shapes and forms all future decisions: Hong Kong will be home for as long as Lucy Rocket is with us.
A friend of mine from high school sent me a long text at the height of this crisis, when I was so sure the news was going to be the worst. He said, “If you make them happy every day then you’ve done your job no matter what happens.” If making Lucy Rocket happy was a job that paid, then my family would be kazillionaires. There is no happier dog on earth.
On Lu’s first night back with us, my husband and I sat and held hands as we watched her sleep. I reminded him of what I’d told him nearly a decade ago when Lucy Rocket first joined our family: healthy toy poodles have a life expectancy of 12 to 15 years. And we cried because that’s no time at all. It’s unfathomably short. Just a breath, just a blink.
But I’m so grateful, even knowing the world of pain that awaits us, some other day down the road. Right now, in the absence of having my Mama here to tell her she was right, I will tell you…
Love you, love Lucy Rocket. Love our life
I didn’t grab a tissue, dang it!!