Stella, My Dear

Martha my dear, / Though I spend my days in conversation, / Please remember me.

At roughly 12:30am this morning, the fog and pain and confusion and frustration that Stella, our pet for over 9 ½ years, has been moving through since at least last October was taken away. She’s gone.

I have an old and dear friend, who is both far more adept at all things technological than I (I mean, he builds robots for a living), but also far more adept at connecting with the flora and fauna of God’s creation than I am as well (despite my pretension to being an actually skilled gardener). Not long ago, he and his family lost a beloved family pet to cancer, an English Sheepdog named Mieka. (Martha, the nominal inspiration for Paul McCartney’s composition “Martha My Dear,” was also an English Sheepdog, who lived to the ripe old age of 15.) Mieka, my friend wrote, despite her pain and weakness in her final days, would still try to lick the hands of those who sat beside her, “reaching across vast distances of brain architecture and genetic selection to make a direct emotional connection.” Mieka, my friend wrote, “is teaching me how to die....We were created to leave our mark on the hearts of others and for them to leave their marks on us....When my time comes, I hope I'll be strong enough to follow her example.”

Stella, unfortunately, was not blessed with a death that allowed her the cognitive power to follow through on whatever buried instinct, the fruit of perhaps 40,000 years of social selection and evolution, had previous impelled her to love and want to connect with her humans. She was a rescue dog, so we never knew for certain how old she was; when we brought her home on December 4, 2015, her handlers put her age at 2 or 3 years old. So when her end came very early this morning, she was perhaps around 12 years old. She’d been slowing down some for a few years; she couldn’t jump up on our bed any longer, and her hearing may have been far enough gone that the summer fireworks no longer terrified her as they had every year before. But she was still mostly the same animal we’d known and made part of our lives for most of a decade.

But then came her first seizure last September, which terrified us. Then came another, and then came the anti-seizure medication (phenobarbital) which dulled her senses even further and completely changed her personality. She became a dog that slept frequently, didn’t respond well, and wandered the house, following the same circular path over and over; she still ate, but she couldn’t control her bowels very well any longer, and when we’d get her to take walks outside–once her favorite thing, but increasingly harder as the months went by–she’d often be listless, leaning to one side and going in circles if we didn’t pull her along. The last walk of her life, last Sunday, she moved so slowly, her hindquarters often giving out underneath her, with even stepping up on a curb posing a challenge. And then yesterday afternoon, when I helped her outside to do her business after work, it was almost impossible to get her to move; she seemed to have no sense of her location, and she tumbled down steps and walked into walls as though she could no longer see. In a single evening, she had three seizures, and her breathing was labored. She struggled to stand, and couldn’t; she had no interest in food. We decided it was time, and called the emergency hospital after 10pm. We waited until Kristen returned from work, and then off we went, after first allowing our other children, in Wisconsin and New Mexico, to Facetime with her; I hope she could at least hear their voices. In the end, at the hospital, she lifted her head and turned toward us as we hugged her goodbye; I want to believe she knew we were there.

She was, from the beginning, a hyper-territorial and defensive dog. We didn’t know what breed she was until one day when she–after I foolishly left the backyard gate unrepaired and capable to being pushed open by a strong 60lb. animal–heard a lawnmower in the field behind our house, jumped against the gate barking furiously (her barking was always furious!), pushed through to the field, and attacked (though, I suspect, never actually broke the skin of) the man on the mower, which resulted in a visit from animal control and Stella having to spend a week in the city pound, during which she got a genetic test. A Pointer and Australian Cattle Dog mix, it turns out, which explains some of the aggressiveness. What a hysterical, overflowing creature she often was back then! Her licks, her insistence on getting the right number of pets, her ability to go completely still and focus entirely on whatever squirrels or bicyclists or dangers lurked right outside our living room window, ready to explode in deafening barks if any human being or rabbit or loud car or, sometimes, anything, came into her sight. Having guests over to the house was all but impossible for years.

Perhaps in retrospect we should have always suspected that something just wasn’t quite right with the poor creature’s brain. We would laugh at and take delight in her strange way of thinking (or unthinking, as the case may often have been). If we had been a different family–a wealthier one, perhaps, or a more disciplined one, or one that managed our time better, or a dozen other things–maybe our too often desultory efforts at discipline and training in her early years with us might have stuck better. But then again, perhaps not. She quickly figured out a job–protecting the house from intruders, meaning everyone who wasn’t us–and sometimes including us, as Caitlyn, who slept in the downstairs bedroom during these years, discovered; she was convinced Stella forgot who she was overnight and accordingly responded defensively whenever she came upstairs in the morning. When we’d load her in the car to take her on walks or expeditions elsewhere–Buffalo Park, Swanson Park, Pawnee Prairie Park, even El Dorado Lake–she’d calm down slightly, but only slightly. Holding on to her leash tightly, to prevent her from leaping out at passing cars or charging other dogs (or, of course, any other small mammals) became necessary, both for her own safety and to save us from lawsuits. When we first brought her home and Kristen was the one who most often held her leash, there were times when Stella would win out, and nine-year-old Kristen would be dragged along behind her.

Stella was always, first and foremost, Kristen’s dog. She had begged for some sort of pet for years; it really almost didn’t matter what (at different times, she was infatuated with gerbils, rats, ferrets, and more). Once Megan had moved out, Melissa and I became a lot more receptive to the idea that the family had passed its peak in size, and as it shrank the youngest, Kristen, would always be tagging along behind her older sisters. So one December, despite our resistance–mostly because of the expense–we finally responded to her pleas; we would get a dog. And Kristen was (mostly) great as Stella’s companion; she was responsible for her food, and she and I would walk her together around the neighborhood, twice a day, so regular that on a couple of occasions folks whom we didn’t know would call us out while driving by the house or seeing us walking home from church, complementing us on how good we treated Stella. Kristen attempted to teach Stella tricks, with very moderate success (she would put together obstacle courses for Stella to navigate in the backyard; with the appropriate treat incentives, she would). She stayed in Kristen’s room for years, frequently joining her on her bed (in some ways a frustrating choice, since Stella, when she spread out, could take up a lot of space, and Kristen got used to sleeping curled up in a ball).

Time changes everything, of course. The Covid-19 pandemic upended our household, and then changes in daily schedules–Melissa working full-time, Kristen in high school and then working herself–upended them further. In later years, it was far more common that she’s sleep on our bed, especially if there were a storm or people blowing off fireworks or anything else that made her nervous or concerned or scared. Stella truly became a family dog, one more of our children, rather than, as she had been originally, something of an appendage to our youngest. Melissa had always been the Alpha, the one most capable of getting Stella to respond and obey, particularly when her behavior got really egregious. Stella mostly respected that (though getting her to stay behind an invisible line and not enter the kitchen or dining area until we were finished eating was a constant struggle, one that, for some years, resulted in a successful detente between Melissa and our garbage dog, though even then her waiting behind the line or beneath the table, staring at us, waiting for permission–or for us to waver in our attention, which was really the same thing–to start eating any scraps she could find on the floor or, when we weren’t looking, on the table or counters themselves, was a constant as well.

Over the last few years, it was basically I that was walking Stella once a day, feeding her, taking her to the vet. I actually don’t think I was ever her favorite, assuming she even had one, but we got along well. I was the goofy male in the household–well, the only male, actually, which I guess allowed me to be ridiculous with her whenever I could. She was relaxed around me. When we walked, she no longer pulled at the leash to chase squirrels or threaten to leap into traffic to confront some noisy garbage truck or innocent cyclist; instead we would just walk together, wandering all around our neighborhood, following the Cowskin Creek runoff or intruding on the Rolling Hills County Club’s golf course. It came to be an important part of my routine, in humid summer heat and bitter winter cold. Like I did with the cows I milked long ago, I would talk to Stella, run through whole conversations with her as we walked. I could never tell if she was listening, but the whole arrangement felt agreeable to me. I hope she felt the same.

Sitting here, writing this, almost exactly 12 hours after we’d decided that the time had come to ease her out of her misery, I’m sad, as I think everyone in the family is, but also content knowing that her life, which had been irreparably changed by a tumor or synapse or congenital defect that could only be controlled by medication that could calm her mind, but not prevent the continued deterioration of her body, had run its course. It was terribly, terribly hard last night, as anyone who has ever put a pet down knows. But this morning, after waking with a headache, and feeling drained from our late night, I wandered the neighborhood, following some of the same paths that Stella and I (and Kristen, and Melissa, and at one point or another everyone in the family) had walked hundreds of times before. I was listening to some somber music, when to my surprise Chuck Mangione’s “Feels So Good” came on, with its long, slow, mellow sax intro. And though the songs have nothing to do with each other, I thought of McCartney’s simple ode:

Hold your hand out, / You silly girl, / See what you've done. / When you find yourself in the thick of it, / Help yourself to a bit of what is all around you, silly girl.

Stella was a silly girl, a dog who, when she was in the thick of her life, would happily, aggressively, determinedly, with a complete lack of guile or reservation, leap in to help herself of some of it. For nearly 10 years, we were able to give her a home to live that life in. She may not have been as brave or kind or wise as some dogs, like Mieka, have been. But she was ours, and we were hers, and for a good long time, that arrangement felt just great. Everyone needs a silly dog; thank God we had this one. I hope somewhere, while chasing a squirrel, she agrees.