Those of you who follow us on Instagram or know us personally probably already know: Our pack of four lost an integral member a week and a half ago, leaving behind three grieving members. I am not ready to write about it yet, at least not in any sort of meaningful, comprehensive way, though I have been writing about it in a very personal, rather disjointed way in my diary just about every day. I am still processing. (If processing this is even possible, which I am not yet convinced it is.)

What follows is a narrative essay I wrote about Jack in 2011, when I was about halfway through my graduate degree in creative writing and Jack had been part of our family for close to four years.

I should mention that since this writing, we learned Jack was actually closer to two years old when he joined our pack, as opposed to the not-yet-a-year detail mentioned in the essay below. He was roughly 14 when we said goodbye last week.

Lucky Dog: A New Leash on Life

It is 4 o’clock in the morning. November. Just starting to get cold outside. Feels like the middle of the night. Yesterday, my husband brought home a new dog. We already have one. A little beagle. Sadie. She likes to sleep later than 4 o’clock in the morning. But this new dog, Jack — he doesn’t know any better. He bounds up, wide awake, as soon as he hears me stir. I open the bedroom door to step out into the hallway that leads to the family room. Jack bounds out ahead of me. He stops in the center of room. Looks at me. I look at him. He is a cockeyed sort of dog. One of his eyes has a brown spot around it. The other eye gazes out at the world through short white hair. His nose is crooked. His back is crooked; he stands in a sort of “C” shape most of the time, looking a little like a cocktail shrimp on a plate. One of his ears stands straight up when he’s listening; the other one flops over no matter what. Just as I begin to think how endearing this inherent asymmetry is, he suddenly bends down slightly, bracing himself. I wonder what he is doing. Then he begins to pee. A lot of pee. Right there on the family room carpet, in the middle of the floor. It is four in the freaking morning. I don’t know how to potty train a dog.

I clap my hands. He looks at me blankly. Cocks his head slightly, wondering, probably, why I am applauding his piss. I clap harder. Maybe the noise will startle him into not peeing. Maybe it will distract him.

“No!” I say. “No!” As if a dog that just last week was a wild dog  picked up by the dog catcher in the foothills of New York has any idea what the word “no” means.

He continues to pee on the carpet. I swoop down upon him mid-stream, scoop him up into my arms, and rush him to the back door. I set him down outside. He has stopped peeing, but I can tell by the way he is sniffing around he isn’t actually finished. I follow him around the yard for a while. It is not fenced. Jack makes a break for it. Down the driveway. Down the road. I am chasing him in my pajamas in the dark in the cold. Luckily, he is distracted by something he smells in the bushes of my neighbor’s yard. He stops to sniff. He lifts his leg. Pees some more. I wonder if this adventure is going to make me late for work.  

“Good boy,” I say, hoping I am reinforcing the concept of pissing outside and not the concept of running away. When he is done, I pick him up and carry him back home.

***

It took Jack a while to learn that he was now, actually, home. We had to teach him how to sleep under the covers with us at night. That he didn’t need to be afraid of towels or of walking across bridges. How to take a treat from our hands without taking one or two of our fingers with it. How to pee outside, and that the fact that the family room was outside the bedroom did not qualify it as outside. How to walk on a leash, and that while he was out for a walk on his leash, he no longer had to eat road kill and trash off the street to survive (we are still working on that). He even knows how to smile now, though he won’t on command – only when he is genuinely happy. When Jack first came home, he had a lot to learn. So did I.

A few days before Jack came home, my husband Matty and I had an argument about whether or not we should add a second dog to our household. We were just starting out in our careers and were pretty poor (some things never change). And dog supplies can be costly. A second dog would mean buying double the food, double the treats, and paying double the vet bills. Today, three years later, I am Jack’s human of choice and whenever he feels jealous, Matty likes to remind Jack, “Mommy didn’t even want you, buddy. Remember who brought you home. Daddy had to fight Mommy to bring you home. You’re lucky Daddy won.” While this isn’t entirely true (it was never that I didn’t want Jack), I am glad that though he tries, cocking his head from one side to the other and lifting his mismatched ears (we call the ear that never lifts up his “broken ear”), Jack cannot understand what Matty is saying. There are, however, many words and phrases Jack can now understand. This is a list of them: sit, stay, wait, leave it (selectively), down, doggy practice, ride, walk, dinner, breakfast, dessert, treat, up, jump, here, Jack, daddy, mommy, who’s here?, hungry, and outside.

***

My sister-in-law is the one who essentially saved Jack’s life. She was working as a vet in the hills of New York when the dog catcher brought him in to be spayed and get his shots before going on to the pound. Jack was a little, emaciated, big-eyed wild dog that had been living off acorns (which to this day he carries home and drops on our deck after autumn walks) and dead things. He wasn’t even a year old. She couldn’t let such a sweet dog go to the pound and, lucky for Jack, told the dog catcher she would keep him. Jack spent the next several months living between the vet’s office and a crate at my sister-in-law’s house while she tried to find a suitable home for him.

During that time, Jack learned very little. The problem was this: The first thing Jack did when he got to my sister-in-law’s house was climb to the top of the stairs, squat down, and poop. She already had a black lab, two cats, a husband, and a toddler. She didn’t have the time or energy to potty-train her son and Jack. Thus, Jack was relegated to a plastic dog crate – the travel kind with nothing but a caged front and little holes in the side that usually spell out something like “DOG TAXI” and serve as ventilation. There he stayed, except for a couple potty breaks a day, while home after home fell through for one reason or another. Then one November day, Matty drove up to New York. When he came home, Jack came with him.

***

It wasn’t long before we knew something was wrong with Jack. I came home from work one day and, as usual, Jack and Sadie came running to the door to greet me, Sadie howling and barking and Jack wagging not just his tail, but his entire body — wriggling around the way a worm does when a curious child pokes at it with a stick. Then, suddenly, Jacky’s little eyes were stone and his body, stiff. He tottered for a moment, back and forth, and then, he tipped over. Sadie sometimes had seizures, and while this episode wasn’t quite the same, I thought maybe it was a seizure. I did like I do for Sadie. Knelt down beside Jack, rested his head on my lap, talked quietly to him. After a minute or two, he stood up, shook it off, and went about the rest of his doggy day. I didn’t think much of it. But then it started to happen more and more frequently. Sometimes multiple times a day. Jack quit eating. Quit playing with Sadie. Eventually wouldn’t leave the bedroom at all. Matty and I had to carry him to the backyard to go potty and carry him back in again when he was done. We frequented the vet’s office, setting appointments for every two months for over a year. No one knew what was wrong with Jack. They put him on meds that made him vomit. They took him off. They put him on meds that would work for a few months, and then lose their effectiveness. We drove to the vet over and over again. Each time, Jack would curl up in the passenger seat, a look of heartbreaking resignation in his puppy eyes. I would stroke his back with my free hand as I drove, praying and praying and praying.

Everyone always likes to talk about how lucky Jack is. Really, I think, I am the lucky one.

After maybe five or six months, the vet told me Jack may need to see a canine cardiologist. That his red blood cell count was low and perhaps there was something amiss with the valves in his heart, as well. After paying several hundred more dollars in vet bills, I got in the car with Jack and drove quietly home. About halfway there, I called my husband. Told him the grim news. As we talked, I looked down at Jack now and then. When he was awake, he would look up at me out from under his sleepy eyelids. So much trust in those eyes. He had implicit faith in me. I couldn’t imagine a world without Jack in it. I was prepared to do anything to keep him here. I would spend any amount of money, go to the vet every day if I had to.

But that wasn’t working. Months and months and still not working. Still the tipping over. Still the lack of appetite. Still the gums in his mouth too white – indicative of anemia. Still the sadness. I prayed. I prayed every day for Jack. I prayed with Jack. I read him pieces of the Bible while I stroked his velvety, mismatched ears.  I held him always in my thoughts.

Then, he got better. For several days, I came home and waited for him to tip over. No more tipping over. After a week or two, I learned to stop expecting it. I started taking him on short walks with Sadie again. He regained his energy. He was more playful. He was eating. I took him to the vet for one more regular, two-month check-up.

“Jack,” the vet said after checking his gums, taking his temperature, listening to his heart, “you are a mystery. And you are one lucky dog.” She took him off the meds. Before long, Jack could join Sadie and me on our regular, longer walks. It was as if nothing had ever been wrong. The vets still don’t know whatever was.

***

Matty likes to say I am “at least 60% happier” because of Jack. He is convinced that since Jack came home, I am in general a cheerier person. I can’t really dispute this. Jack makes me smile more times a day than I otherwise would. He gets up with me every morning at 5 and romps around the house with a squeaky toy in his mouth, wide awake and energized – ready for the day. Without his shennanigans, I can safely say I would not be smiling at 5 every morning. But with Jack chasing me around the house wagging his tail and chomping on a toy, how can I not crack a grin? He looks at me with his goofy, cockeyed ears, and how can I help but smile? And one of my favorite feelings is Jack curled up against my stomach in bed every night. When I am away from home overnight, I get cold without his fuzzy warmth beside me and I miss him. When I return home, he is there – where he has been all along – waiting for me with love and joy and the ever-enduring faith that I was coming home all along. It just took me a little longer this time.

***

It is January. About 4 in the afternoon. A Friday. My mom and my brother’s dog Baxter, a furry husky/akita mix, meet Jack, Sadie, and me at the state park near my house for a late afternoon hike. The dogs have been cooped up all day while I was at work. Their energy and exuberance is evident in the way they spastically sniff and cry and tug at the ends of their leashes like they’ve never walked on a leash before. Sadie, in fact, jumped around my little car the entire ride here, hopping from window to window, seat to seat, front to back.

We walk, stopping now and then to let the dogs sniff and to listen to the quiet that is the woods on a cold Friday afternoon when most everyone is either still at work, or keeping warm inside. We talk about our days, the family, weekend plans. When we come to the old mill site, we cross over the bridge where once, Jack fell into the creek and I had to heft him back over the side of the bridge. We walk up a steep hill with trees to our left and a drop off down to the creek below to our right. As we round the corner to the boardwalk that will allow us passage through the wetlands that surround Beaver Lake, my mom says, “He really is lucky.”

“Who?” I say.

“Jack. He might not be around anymore if he hadn’t ended up with you guys. Whatever he had would’ve killed him.”

“Yeah,” I say, still unable to imagine a world without Jack.

After about an hour, we have walked the entirety of Beaver Lake Trail and it will soon be dark outside. Mom loads Baxter into her car and he curls up to rest on the back seat. I tell Sadie and Jack to “go for a ride” and they readily hop into my car. Mom and I hug goodbye and head home, she turning right at the park exit and I turning left. I smile as Sadie assumes her habitual position behind the headrests of my backseat where she can watch the road behind us peel away and stare at the drivers of the cars that follow us. At times, in my rearview mirror, I have seen such drivers wave at Sadie, even talk to her sometimes. They are always smiling. I look down at Jack, sitting up in the front seat like a little man, looking out the window. My whole heart smiles. That night after a late dinner, Matty stretches out in bed to my left. Sadie jumps up and pushes her way under the covers at his feet. A heartbeat later, Jack is standing at my side of the bed, looking up at me. I lift the covers up. He jumps up on the bed beside me, curls up at my belly button, sighs. I rub the space between his eyes. Everyone always likes to talk about how lucky Jack is. Really, I think, I am the lucky one.