Feb 1, 2019 4 min read

Some of my happiest memories have dogs in them.

The day we brought our newborn daughter home, the neighbor’s dog came over to have a look. Those photos show a furry black snout hovering over a pink bundle. The first time our son came home from college, he was met at the door by three dogs. The photo shows him on the floor, enveloped in dog.

And there’s another favorite memory. The first time I visited the farmer in Argentina, we walked across his wide, golden acres with a few of his dogs following behind. Lucy, the Shetland sheepdog, ran ahead.

She was pulled along by her nose, dashing between holes in the ground, sniffing out whatever critters were hiding there. She never caught anything. For her, the joy was in the hunt.

Lucy, our beautiful sheltie, went for her final ride yesterday. In the end, she’d grown senile and mostly blind. Her decline had been slow, with occasional spurts of youthful energy. Like a line graph of the stock market, her energy would slide downhill for weeks, only to spike without warning. Last summer, I wrote a column about the day she ran from me, sending me chasing after her across the gravel driveway in my nightie and bare feet. Just the day before, I had to carry her into the yard.

Over the past several months, the farmer had been tracking her decline, questioning whether Lucy was in pain, or was devoid of any pleasures.

“She still likes a treat,” the farmer said. “And she still likes being petted.”

And she loved when he would sing to her. I’ve heard the song a million times.

Lucy dog is a loopy dog

She’s a funny little loopy dog.

Her ears would perk up every time. She still enjoyed us.

But recently, we noticed there was no rebound in her decline. A few days ago, her hind legs splayed and she could no longer stand or walk. It was time.

It’s true that farmers often have a practical approach to the life cycles of animals. But the calm that the farmer exhibited yesterday wasn’t about a chilly detachment; he had been preparing for Lucy’s death for a long time.

Maybe the preparing starts that first day, when we know we will probably outlive our dogs. She was a puppy with the farmer in Virginia, and then traveled with him to Argentina, where they lived for another seven years. I never knew Lucy the puppy, but I knew her for many of her best years, when she was active and strong. Lucy was the haughty, regal older sister to the two younger dogs in the family. When they annoyed her, she’d snap – like any older sister would do.

People always commented on how beautiful she was, with her silky black hair and white markings. We could tell she enjoyed going to the groomer, because she would strut around to show off her new neckerchief. She never lost her good looks.

Among all my memories, there’s another favorite. When the farmer moved back to the states in 2011, I picked him up at the airport. There they were, he and Lucy, waiting at the curb, all smiles and wagging tails.

Our younger sheltie, Smoothie, is the lone dog in the family now. He seems a bit lost without Lucy. And her death is probably harder for the farmer than he’s letting on.

She was with him all those years on the farm. He has happy memories, and Lucy will be running through all of them.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.