Skip

Some people say there is no love as pure and generous as the love between our dogs and us. When I first met Tom he was cohabiting with a dog named Skip, a terrier of mixed ancestry who Tom adopted from the humane society. Skip tipped the scales at 15 pounds and was just tall enough to scavenge for snacks left on the coffee table.

Skip wasn’t sure about me at first. I seemed to be moving in without spending that required time in the pound. He looked at me as if to ask, “Do you have all your shots?” When I sat next to Tom on the couch Skip would bare his teeth at me and growl… grrr. But with time and cookies and walks, we won each other over.

I disrupted their idyllic life when we moved to Ventura, then we moved to that awful little two bedroom apartment in San Diego, and finally to a home that was worthy of Skip’s lineage. By the time we moved downtown Skip was getting pretty old. Cataracts obstructed his eyesight; his gait was uneven and wobbly. But then I was in the early stages of MS so my gait wasn’t all that commendable. I had a walker and found that the easiest way for me to take him outside was to put him on the shelf in my walker and push him in front of me. After a while, he began to lose his orientation and just wandered around the apartment bumping into the walls like the pinball Wizard.

It was hard for us to know if he was suffering. It sometimes took him a long time to stand up. And he would stop and stare, for many minutes at a time, as if in a trance. Tom and I had long talks about Skip’s quality of life. He had been such a vivacious and adventurous little dog; the contrast with this lame, old Skip was disturbing.

We took him to the vet early one morning.The Doctor met us at the door and ushered us to an examining room. He was very kind and reassured us. “ It won’t take long and it won’t hurt him”. It was just one injection and his breathing stopped. The tears ran down our cheeks and we sobbed out loud. The vet left us alone in the room with Skip while we cried. We hugged him and kissed him goodbye and hugged each other. Is it their innocence and loyalty that makes their passing so painful?

We wrapped Skip in a big beach towel, and carried him out through the waiting room, now filled with people and their dogs, cats and birds. They all silently watched our solemn procession go by.

We placed Skip on the back seat of the Volvo and began our funeral cortege through the places he had lived and loved. San Diego, (Beverly Hills, he liked the window shopping there), Thousand Oaks, Ventura, Santa Barbara and finally back to the humane society, where he started.

A month later his ashes came back to us in a wooden box, and it sits now on a shelf in our home, next to his picture and some of his teeth. It remains a wonder to me that such a little fellow like Skip could have such a big heart, and could so effectively fool us. All the while we thought we were taking care of him he was actually taking care of us.