The Ballad of Lucy Dog
In November of 2012, I had to put down my beloved Ali, a dog I loved more than any other dog and who had seen me through the ups and downs of my post-college years. At the time, when friends asked if or when we would get another dog, I (truthfully) expressed how much I had loved Ali and (untruthfully) said it would probably be a while before I could have a dog again. I meant what I said but in the back of my mind, I knew that I am not built to be dogless and soon I would begin to feel a gap in my life without a canine companion. Before long, I started looking on apps and websites and talking with Lindsey about what kind of dog we might want “someday” and the writing was on the wall.
And so, in January the following year, Lindsey and I went to a local shelter and adopted a sad little five-year-old beagle named Sophie. Sophie had been given up by her family because the parents were going through a divorce and neither could (or would) care for her. We later discovered that she had been given up on her birthday which I’m sure does not matter to a dog but only added to her sad story for us. Lindsey and I didn’t like the name Sophie and the dog seemed to have no clue that her name was Sophie, anyway, so we changed it to Lucy.
We brought Lucy home and later the next day, she started wheezing and coughing and couldn’t catch her breath. Since our normal veterinarian clinic was closed, we took her to another clinic that shall not be named. We were told that Lucy had kennel cough and pneumonia and that she needed medication, overnight care, and possibly a surgery. The clinic staff member looked at me and my six-months-pregnant wife and told us we would need to pay $1500 to keep this sad little dog alive. We didn’t have $1500 to spend, honestly, let alone on a dog we had known for less than 48 hours but we also could not stomach the idea of just returning her to her shelter to die. In a rare moment of wisdom, I told the clinic we’d follow up with our regular vet and took Lucy home.
Over the next two days, Lindsey sat in our guest bathroom with the hot water running to create a steam room, continuously performing chest percussion on Lucy to help her breath. This is when the two of them bonded and, though I always remind the pair of them that I am the one who found Lucy and chose to adopt her, Lindsey was forevermore Lucy’s favorite, a shadow attached to my wife for the rest of the dog’s life. When finally we got Lucy in to see our vet, he politely stated that while he could see why another clinic might suggest that aggressive plan of care, he thought we could get by with just medication and some rest. The overwhelming burden of “go broke or the dog dies” was replaced with relief, some pills, and a couple more nights in the homemade steam room. Soon, Lucy was well and active and we got to know the extent of her personality.
Lucy was nervous and anxious but once she decided you were okay, she was loyal to you for life. The greatest example of this was her unyielding love for our friend Emily who she would curl up with in the first few months of Cooper’s life when Lindsey and I were busy tending to an infant. For the rest of her life, even after Emily moved to the UK, when she came home for a visit, Lucy would lose her mind and howl with delight in a way she never did for anyone who actually lived with her.
She was a creature of comfort, stealing virtually every blanket or pillow that made its way into our home and claiming them for her own. The second you got up from your spot on the bed or the couch, she would move in and stake her claim to whatever warm comfort you had just left behind. She found her way into laundry baskets (the cleaner the better), guest bedrooms, and the like. Even if you left a shirt on the floor, you could bet that she would lay on the shirt before ever relegating herself to her nice, fluffy bed. Anything that was made for dogs was beneath her and she let you know of her disdain in no uncertain terms.
At first we thought Lucy was kind of dumb but really she had just never been talked to in her previous life or treated like a member of the family. In reality, once we broke through, it turned out she was perhaps the smartest dog I’ve ever been around, though she channeled almost all of her intelligence into attaining human food. Once, when Lindsey sat down at the coffee table for a quick lunch, Lucy purposefully pushed a ball under a dresser in our bedroom, howled until Lindsey came to get the ball out, and then, with Lindsey down on the ground reaching under the dresser, dashed into the living room and ate the entire lunch. We have ENDLESS stories of Lucy and her affinity for her “Trigger Foods”, namely tortillas (and really, any bread product), pizza, and bacon.
She was a natural born rascal who let nothing stand between her and whatever she decided she wanted. After months of routinely losing food that had been placed on counters well out of her reach, we finally discovered that she was opening drawers and using them as her own private staircase. When I came home with half a cookie cake after a work birthday party, the cake lasted about as long as it took me to walk into the bedroom and take off my shoes, during which time Lucy got up on the counter, knocked the box to the ground, and absconded to her crate with 5000 calories worth of sugar cookie.
She was as stubborn as a being could be and would not listen to reason, even when it would have behooved her to do so. She licked bald spots into her feet and scratched incessantly, partly because of allergies but partly because it was her hobby. When you begged or demanded that she stop, she gave you the side eye for 90 seconds and then went right back to it. In 2019, she busted a blood vessel in one of her ears, inflating her ear into an IV bag full of fluid and requiring a three-week recovery that almost did her in. Six months later, she did the exact same thing to the other ear, this time requiring surgery and rehabilitation. She turned her beautiful beagle ears into what we affectionately referred to as her “crinkle cut ears”, mostly because she was bored.
And Cooper loved her so much. Born three months after Lucy arrived in our home, he was immediately infatuated with his Puppy Sister. As a toddler, he chased her and tried to hug her (against her will) and shared his Cheerios with her. He cackled endlessly when she caught a burst of energy and zoomed around the living room. (For some reason, Lucy HATED it when Coop got on my shoulders and doing so in her presence would instantly send her into a frantic case of zoomies.) He built Dog Hideouts for her when she was younger and over the last few years, he wrapped her in his blankets so she’d stay warm. He begged us to throw birthday parties for her which we did in her later years and which many of our friends indulged us in attending. Never have I seen a boy love a dog more than Cooper has loved Lucy.
In turn, Lucy loved Cooper, though in her own way. She was often too nervous to cuddle with him and when this bothered him, I told him, “You have to love things the way they want to be loved.” I said this a lot as Cooper wanted to cuddle Lucy wayyyyyy more often than she was willing to cuddle with him. Yet she always needed to know where he was. When he was a baby, if he was asleep when we got home, I would have to present him to Lucy before putting him in bed; otherwise, she would run all over the house trying to find him. In the last two years of her life, she suddenly became an early riser and was very insistent on taking him to school every day. Cooper has spent his entire life with this dog, this rascally, nervous, formerly sad little beagle and I am eternally grateful for the way she has loved him, not always in the Velcro Puppy way he has wanted, but always, steadfastly, seemingly eternally, there for him. He is a better person for having loved this dog.
I write this and send it off into the internet ether because today is our last day with our sweet Lucy. A heart so strong that it caused our veterinarian to laugh out loud at her check up in January has finally slowed down. She can no longer jump up onto the ottoman next to our bed with any consistency and she often has to be picked up to get into the car, an indignity she never suffers quietly. She is completely deaf, though she responds remarkably well to gestures and sign language. But more importantly, she has developed a tumor in her eye that is growing by the day. She hurts. And, though we struggled to believe that she was done three short weeks ago when we received her cancer diagnosis, she’s let us know since then that it’s time. And so, it’s time.
Friends, I confess I struggled to truly love this dog in our early years with her. Maybe it was her notorious stubbornness or the many crimes she committed against our home or the aforementioned cookie cake she stole from me. Or maybe it was just that I loved my previous dog so much and I wasn’t yet ready to fully let another dog into my heart. I treated Lucy like family because that’s what this family does with dogs, almost out of obligation more than anything else. But over time I became mostly fond of her rascally, stubborn ways and telling tales of Lucy’s latest ridiculousness became a favored pastime. As a family friend is fond of saying, “You don’t train a beagle, a beagle trains you.” Well, she trained me well. I struggled to love her early on and yet over the last three weeks, I’ve found myself sobbing, frequently, over a very near future that does not include her demands for more food or her crinkle-cut ears or trash cans turned over and voided of their treasures.
When I wrote about Ali’s passing in 2012, I noted how surreal it was to be the one who had to make this huge decision. In the past, there had always been an adult around to stand in the gap and take the dog in for his or her final vet visit but now that adult was me. I thought that was about as hard as it gets with a pet. Now, I’m experiencing that same phenomenon again; I’ve done this before, made this difficult decision before, but now I’m doing it on behalf of my own little boy who is so soft and sweet and kind and who loves his dog more than anything else. I’m the adult once more and some days it really sucks to be an adult. We will move on and survive, because there are many things worse than losing a beloved pet, and someday, probably very soon, we will open our home to another dog who we will love and treat like family. But today we are sad and heartbroken and we miss our little beagle who made our lives so difficult.
In moments like these I start to wonder why I do this to myself and yet, I know that the answer is that the depth of our hurt on this awful, cruel day reflects the depth of the love we had for this stubborn, rascally dog. We have had over ten great years with Lucy by our side; or, more accurately, in our bed, snoring loudly and refusing to move to literally anywhere that would be more convenient for us. And I am so thankful that all those years ago, we picked her out of a shelter and we got the opportunity to have the life we’ve had with our sweet Lucy.