In Memoriam: Gerard ~ May of 1993 to March 18th, 2005

I wouldn’t normally feel comfortable sharing something like this over the web, but I need to get this out there. So you all can skip this one if you feel like it.

I mentioned before that my dog was terminal with cancer. Well, I lost him Thursday night.

Back in 1994, I was driving home from work in the urban jungle when I spotted this dog trotting down the train tracks. It was hard to miss him, he was red. Bright flaming “red-head” orange. With cream points (chest, belly, lower legs and face). He also had a big splotch of blue paint on his side and a leather collar. Being near a major thoroughfare, I pulled my car over and opened the door. That was all it took, he hopped right in. I placed ads in the papers for the one year old, but no one called and since my keeshond (who passed away last year) liked him (she was pretty picky), he stayed. It took me a long time to realize how lucky I got that day.

Gerard (as he was named after Tommy Lee Jones’ character in The Fugitive “It ain’t over ‘till the big dog howls…” Gerry’s…was my big dog.) wasn’t just a dog, he was a Dawg. Big enough to command respect (75 lbs.), but cuddly enough to make the biggest hard cases melt. He was a Siberian Husky/ Shar Pei cross (though Chow-Chow might have been the second parent). His body, tail, coat and color pattern was Siberian, but his thick neck, fleshy muzzle, square ears and eyebrow wrinkles were Shar Pei. The best way to describe him would be as a cross between a lion and a bear dipped in russet orange paint. Intelligent, quietly willful and self possessed, with a mellow, roll-with-it personality, but by no means a push over, Gerry was the kind of dog you could put in your pick up and drive across country with (had you the pick up and the time, which sadly, I had neither.)

Perhaps the people that dumped him were looking for an aggressive dog, for I never saw an aggressive bone in his body. Only twice he got in the faces of aggressive dogs. The first time I was walking he and Kuluk when a german shepard jumped his fence and came running at us growling. Gerry stepped right in his path and growled. The dog turned on a dime and hopped right back over his fence. (As we continued out walk, I swear to Gawd, Kuluk stuck her nose into Gerry’s muzzle and I heard a “smacking kiss” sound.) The second time was when Gerry was much older. A foster dog I had, a pit bull that had been used for fighting, she kept pushing at him, trying to establish her place in the pack when he finally snapped. (The pit left the house immediately and went to live in Seattle.) But that was it, somebody reeeeeally had to push Gerry for him to get his dander up, the rest of the time…the rest of the time I’d say Gerry’s most dominant character trait was ”Scamp”.

Trash cans were a favorite, he liked to pick out the egg shells and take them between his huge snow-paws and delicately lick the inside of them clean, without breaking them amazingly. And then there were the 1 ft+ diameter holes dug through the drywall. The first time it was a baby bird that had fallen out of the nest under my eves he was trying to get to, the second it was a cat that had gotten under the house. But his favorite thing was to play “running away”. If you had missed a walk, say you went out for New Years, when you got home that morning Gerry would bolt out the gate as soon as you opened it. You would run after him screaming of course, that was the fun part. He would then run around his regular walk-route and right back home. I figured out this was the way he was going because one time when I lost sight of him I hopped in my car to look for him and drove out to the nearest major intersection and who comes running up to the cross walk? Happy as a clam? “Hiyas!” He made the corner and started running for home and I whipped a U-y and followed him back, swear to Gawd that dog was looking at me as if to say “I’ll race ya home!” I should have looked down at the speedometer because I know we were both going around 15 to 20 miles per hour. I stepped on the gas and pulled into a drive way ahead of him and opened the door. ”Get in the car!” He hopped right in, panting and happy. And you could tell he was thinking “I know she’s really mad, but damn that was a lot of fun!”

“Gerry, I outta…you little….*hug* Oh, thank God you’re alright!”

More famous among my family is the “fake out incident”. Gerry did the same thing to my sister while she was house sitting for me. Completely panicked she was running all over the neighborhood when she spots Gerry running towards her. She sets herself up to catch him, ready to grab…when he faints right, goes left and runs straight back into the end zone: home.

Her reaction was about the same.

Truthfully though, my sister was Gerry’s favorite person. He loved it when she came over.

He was just sweet, just wanted love. All of it. Every single ounce to be had. If anyone else was getting attention, you would be confronted by this fuzzy orange wall that was worming itself in between you and whomever. Hell, you could call one of the cats and he would come over with this look on his face as if to say “But I’m cuter!”

He had a very interesting relationships with the cats, specifically with my eldest cat Bastet. They would play at the typical dog-cat relationship. He would run up to her and pretend to pounce at her and she would take off running. He would chase onto the table and she would just wail on him. His fur was so thick all he had to do was close his eyes. The next thing, they would be curled up together and she’d be cleaning him. What was even more amazing is that she would let him clean her. The playing stopped when Bastet accidentally scratched his eye. The emergency clinic I took him too botched the surgery completely and my vet had to remove it. She felt soooo bad, edged around him for weeks afterwards. But they patched it up and though the play didn’t resume, the cozying up did.

But he was just a great dog. I really didn’t know how great until Kuluk passed away and I could focus more attention on him. (He had a hard time when Kuluk passed. Kuluk had a habit of “fluffing the floor” despite the fact that my entire place is tile and hard wood. Two days after she passed, Gerry walked up to me and fluffed the floor for the first time. “Where is she?” ) He was trained fine already, but he just opened up so much more. Became more responsive, more affectionate, more trusting, just showed more of his warm doggy soul. He wasn’t just my dog, he was my pal. I felt bad because I realized how much I had shortchanged him by having so many pets, not to mention the foster dogs. We started visiting a dog park so that he had a chance to play with other dogs. He loved it from day one, became his favorite place in the world. He was too old to keep up with the running, rolling packs of younger dogs, but he would ambush them as they went by. He also liked to get I the middle of to dogs wrestling as if he was a referee (“Break! Back to your corners!”) so much I got him a zebra striped collar.

He also had an embarrassing tendency to pick dogs to “fall in love with” and follow around yelping plaintively became they wouldn’t play with him. That was about the most noise I had eve heard him make, he wasn’t much of a barker, though he would try to talk to you. Early on he realized that humans communicate verbally, so he would walk up and point his nose the air and grooooooowl. I called it his “groawly voice”. Freaked a couple folks out.

“Your dog is growling at me!”
“No, he’s just talking to you…”

About the only thing Gerry didn’t like was vet exams, not that he didn’t like going to the vet, he did. He loved the attention, but he hated being man handled. I once dropped him off at a grooming salon first thing in the morning and when I came to pick him up right before they closed, Gerry was still on the table yelping and squirming and crying and oh, you’d have thought they were trying to kill him.

“I’m so sorry,…” I told the groomer as she handed me his leash.
“No, really, he was wonderful…” She replied through gritted teeth.

We had baths at home after that.

Once when he had to have a skin scraping at the vet they led him into the back and suddenly off he went, *YELP*YELP*YELP*WHINE*WHINE*WHINE*YELP*YELP*YELP* And I’m standing there turning beet red as all the vet techs are running into the back slamming doors behind them, thinking “Yes, that’s my dog...” Turns out they hadn’t even started, they were just trying to get him to lie on his side. After they had me come with him into the back, not that it helped, but “No, we really aren’t trying to kill your dog…”

Late last summer Gerry developed a skin infection on his belly and legs, but it hit him hard, much harder than it should. We did blood work and X-Rays and found cancer that had spread from his anal gland into his lymph system. Two oncologists later and he was diagnosed with an inoperable carcinoma that had spread to his lungs. Six months on the outside. Chemo would have simply frozen the disease in place, there was no chance of true remission. A human understands why they go through chemo. They understand that the day in the hospital with an IV stuck in them and the days afterwards feeling sick will most likely result in their felling well again in the future. Dogs don’t understand that. They just know that the person they love and trust is dropping them off for 24 hours of hell twice a week. I decided that the best course of action would be to just make his life as happy as possible for the rest of it and amazingly, that’s what it was.

I prayed daily that Gerry remain as happy and comfortable for as long as possible. And remarkably he was, even as the cancer went into his spleen, his liver, surrounded his spine, shut down one of his kidney’s and swelled his lymph nodes to the point they were compressing his lower GI tract, he was in no pain and only in the last couple weeks of his life was his mobility effected. The vet kept saying he was amazed that Gerry was so happy whenever he came in, that he asked for affection and smiled and wasn’t just curled up in a corner trying to get comfortable with a “leave me alone glower”. He was a trooper, went through various exams and was taking seven different medications by the end, yet still a happy dawg. I know he didn’t like being monkeyed with so much, but I think he understood I was doing it with good intentions. We went to the dog park every day I had off and he just loved it, even when the extent of his activity was just making a round of the people there for pats and then finding a quiet patch to lie down and suck up the ambiance. He just enjoyed being there. He was still interested in being here. And as long as he was interested, I would help him stay.

But he went through a decline in the last couple weeks. The prednisone he was on is an immuno-suppressant. He got abscesses that burst on his elbows that refused to heal and he had trouble standing on his own. Our morning walks turned into very slow ambles that only took us half the distance in the same amount of time. I knew things were running down, so I also began praying for a death that was quick, clean and comfortable as well as the strength, wisdom and insight to make the right choices for him.

Thursday evening I came back from class, helped Gerry up and let him outside and back in again, fed him some cold cuts (his appetite had dipped and it was a matter of getting anything down his throat willingly) and started on his regimen of medications (they couldn’t be given all at once or he would throw up) when I noticed he was having difficulty breathing. Not major, he just kept his head out straight and if you listened very closely you could hear a slight wheeze. The way he gobbled up the cold cuts made me first think that he had accidentally inhaled a piece, but when he didn’t cough it up and the problem continued, I took him to an emergency clinic. His airway was clear and they said his lungs sounded clear and recommended that he have an x-ray and a white cell count done to figure out what was wrong (as if Gerry’s white cell count wasn’t elevated already). Well, I had little to no money and my own vet has payment plans for regular patients in situations like mine, so we headed home ready to go to the vet the next morning.

I helped Gerry out of the car, he stood in the street looking up at the night sky as I locked the car up. He preceded me up the walk and as I unlocked and opened the front door, he just fell over. No breathing, no pulse. Just gone.

It was almost comical. He fell like a tree. Straight over. His limbs didn’t buckle, there was no struggle, he just…checked out. I actually managed to resuscitate him for a few breaths, but he wasn’t there anymore, his eye didn’t react and his body was just mechanically taking breaths. So I let him go. I held him in my arms and told him it was o.k. to rest now. He could go play with Kuluk. That I loved him and that he was a good boy…

My vet thinks it was probably a pulmonary edema brought on by the mets in his lungs and even if they had caught it, given the state of Gerry’s health, there wasn’t anything anyone could have done. Whatever it was, it really was the best way out. It was quick, the look on his face was one of surprise rather than pain or fear, and there was no struggle. There as only a few hours of moderate discomfort leading up to it. The only way it could have been easier is if it had happened in his sleep. I just wish I could have gotten him inside and sat with him for a while before it happened. As it was I spent hours sitting with him afterwards, just petting him in his favorite spots, on his belly and chest and scratching his eyebrow wrinkles. Calling someone to let them know and the petting him for while, then call someone else.

Having the body there overnight I think helped a great deal for my other pets. When I took Kuluk in to be put down, they wandered around wondering when she was going to get back, Gerry especially. This way everyone got a chance to come up and smell his body and realize he was dead. He wasn’t coming back. They probably have come to grips with the situation faster than I have. Gerard was a very large, very warm, very orange, very furry, very funny, very unique, truly a one in a million dog, and very strong presence in this house…and I miss him so much. :’(