February 12, 2008 to September 10, 2021

I did not want a dog. I already had two kids who kept me in a perpetual state of exhaustion. But, my 8-year-old daughter found a weak point in my armor and exploited it in a brilliant masterstroke. She started with, “Mommy, can we have a dog?” “No,” was my oft-repeated, easy answer. But she was and has always been absolutely relentless in pursuing something that she really wants. She was the Colorado River to my Grand Canyon, and one day in exasperation I responded with “If you go to the library and learn all about dogs and write me a detailed report about their care, then you can have a dog,” instead of just saying “No.” Huge mistake.

At the time, I thought that I was outsmarting her. I would no longer have to hear the constant requests for a dog, and knowing that she was great at asking for things but not so great on doing the follow up work, I smugly thought that the problem was solved. I should note here that she had already outwitted me at age 4 regarding a guinea pig, so my smugness actually reflected an inability to learn from my mistakes.

When the stacks of library books about dogs showed up, I didn’t worry. I figured that she would start the project, but writing the report would be her Achille’s Heel. I realized just how much I had underestimated her when the 8-page, double-sided report detailing every aspect of canine care was delivered to me.  The school librarian later told me that I was one of many parents who had tried that approach and failed. Clearly school libraries should ban books on pets.

So being an honorable person, I was now obligated to get a dog. Taking into consideration many, many factors, we decided on a West Highland White Terrier, or Westie, puppy. I picked her out myself. I picked the smallest puppy of the litter somehow reasoning that size would correlate with work load. In retrospect, size might be inversely proportional to workload.

Her name was Daisy.

The first year was rough. It started on the car ride home. Halfway down the driveway, as if a switch had flicked, she must’ve realized that she had been separated from her mom. She transformed from a happy, waggy puppy into a whining, high pitched barking, scrambling mess. I held her and tried to comfort her without much success for the exhausting five-hour trip home. Then there was giardia, roundworm, and coccidiosis followed by a narrow escape from a German Shepherd attack. Potty training her alone was enough to be a dealbreaker. With the exception of nighttime, she peed every 10 minutes all day long for the first nine months. People asked me if I had gone to Florida for the winter because of my tan. I was tan in January because I was outside all day with the dog. My Mom thought that I was exaggerating until she babysat one day and experienced it for herself. And it wasn’t like Daisy wasn’t trying. She would run down the steps and jump like a flying squirrel and land in the peeing position right in the grass. She clearly knew what was expected of her but absolutely could not hold it for any reasonable amount of time. And then the magic happened. Right around her nine-month birthday, she finally was able to hold it for longer and longer periods of time. We made it.

I think that it helped that I was starting to understand what kind of a dog she was. Daisy was like me, very anxious. Her anxiety manifested itself in obsessive water drinking. When she worried, she needed a stiff belt from the water bowl. Once we ruled out any medical reasons for the obsessive drinking, I started restricting her water intake to fixed times of the day. That worked. It broke the cycle of constant drinking and peeing, but for the rest of her life, an increase in drinking would always be an important signal that she wasn’t feeling well.

And when I say anxious, I mean extremely anxious. Everything was fraught, and everybody had an opinion about what I was doing wrong. The vet commented. The vet techs commented. Everybody commented. It was embarrassing. So, I signed us up for obedience training.

Daisy was also smart. Her fears made it hard for her to be the best in class at obedience, but the training gave us a language to communicate. I learned to talk to her in a way that she clearly understood, and the bond that we had grew into a sturdy link. When the time came for our final test, she held her down-stay like a rock and kept her sparkling brown eyes laser focused on me as I walked around the corner and out of sight. I knew that we would stick the landing, and she knew it too.

We took agility next, and it was a joy to watch her learn. She mastered the weave poles, the jumps, the tunnel, the tire, but the teeter and the dog walk were the plank on the pirate ship to her. She trembled all over and flattened her Yoda ears in fear. She trusted me enough to do both, but there was no joy. We were never going to be the agility team that you see on tv, but we were good enough. Doing the weave poles and jumps made her feel like a champ, so that’s what we did.

Don’t let me fool you. In spite of our success at obedience and agility, Daisy was never an obedient dog. She was sassy and naughty and loved nothing more than the chase game. She was an expert in the game like the African San hunters who wear down their prey, except in reverse. She was uncatchable, and she knew it. The sheer joy of the game increased exponentially with my complete exasperation. One day after I foolishly let her hear me open the cabinet where we keep the dog shampoo (yes, she was that smart), the game was afoot. After what seemed like an hour chasing her in the backyard, I have a video of her carefully pushing in her doggie door flap and looking around before deciding if it was safe to come inside. Of course, she spotted me.

All of the training didn’t make a huge difference in other areas as well. Things were much better, but everyone still commented. It wasn’t until the last 2 years of her life that she stopped frantically whining and crying for every minute of every car trip that we ever took. She had to take a tranquilizer to be groomed. I had tried grooming her myself, but even the tiniest accidental hair pull resulted in her screaming such that I feared that the neighbors might report me. Her baths were pure torture. It was more like bathing a feral cat at first and then it mellowed into a fearful submission. As she got older, she started to appreciate the warm water and the gentle massage of the shampoo, and the bath turned into something that she grudgingly appreciated, but it took years.

And Daisy, in spite of her name, did not smell like a flower. Actually, she always had kind of a fishy odor. That, plus her love of digging, skunks, and rolling in feces meant that she needed baths. A lot of baths. I can still hear the sound of our remodeling guy’s laughter when he happened to be working at our house during one of her escapades. He heard me scream as I let the dog in after she had rolled in some sort of foul dung. After I spent at least an hour bathing her, disinfecting the utility sink, and starting all of the laundry she went right back outside and re-applied her “perfume.” When I went ballistic after letting her inside the second time, I heard him laughing as I tried to catch her for another bath. It was Mother’s Day.

Daisy was not an affectionate dog. She was a bite-y, growly dog, but she wasn’t dangerous. Delivery people liked her. The neighbors liked her. Other dogs liked her. She only bit me or threatened to bite me, usually when I was trying to help her. After having a procedure to help heal an ulcer in her eye, applying the medicated drops was like sticking your hand into a tiger’s cage. For her small size, she could sound like a rabid dog. And yet with all her ferocity, I knew that she knew that I would help her. She always came to me after getting herself into trouble. Once, literally 5 minutes before we were supposed to leave for the airport, she came running inside to me frantically pawing at her face. Our adult kids were going to dog sit, but we couldn’t leave her, and them, like that. I tried to look at her mouth, but she was in such distress that she was snarling and snapping at me, even as she kept coming toward me for help. I could see some blood on her gums, but I couldn’t see where it was coming from, and I thought that we would have to miss our plane to take her to the vet. Finally, I knelt and locked her between my legs and firmly, but gently pulled her jaws apart. She had a pointed stick jammed crossways in her mouth that I was able to dislodge. She absolutely melted with relief. Over the years she had always come to me in her proverbial thorn in the lion’s paw moments, and I always could tell how grateful she was for my help.

That’s not to say that she ever wanted to cuddle with anyone. At least not until she was about six or so. We had all always wanted to hug her and love on her, but she wasn’t having anything to do with that kind of nonsense. Finally, one day, I was trying to find a better way to trim her nails, so I scooped her up and cradled her on her back in my lap like a baby. I fully expected her to claw me to shreds as she tried to right herself, but we were all shocked when she threw her head back and completely and utterly relaxed. It only lasted for a few minutes, and she actually groaned with pleasure as I itched her neck and stomach. Then as soon as it had started, it ended. She decided that she had enough and then clawed me as she scrambled to right herself. But it was an opening. From that point on, she occasionally let me know that she would be willing to let me love on her for a little bit. Those were unicorn in the forest moments, and I loved them. She never let anyone else cradle her like that, but she did start to let everyone know that giving her belly rubs were now okay, and it opened a door to affection that made us love her even more.

As I re-read what I’ve written, I realize that a reader might wonder why on Earth we loved such a dog. Daisy gave me a much deeper understanding of the term watch dog. My husband has always traveled for work, and when the kids were little, I found it hard to sleep when he was gone. I was always hyperalert at night in case of trouble. After we got Daisy, I realized that I had started to relax. She took over a portion of my worry department. She alerted me to everything. I always knew ahead of time if anyone was approaching the house. She would also alert me if the neighbor’s had a bonfire, so I knew that she could smell smoke better than our detector. She would patrol the house touching everything with her nose as she went past making sure that nothing was out of place. When my son went to college, I noticed that she started including his room in her daily rounds. She went up the stairs, into his room, touched his desk chair and his bean bag chair with her nose and came back downstairs satisfied that everything was ok. When the kids were younger, she waited for the bus to come, and rang the bell to go out to greet them as they walked down the driveway. She showed her deep love for us with protection, not affection. It was impossible not to love a dog who loved us that much. The kids loved her even more for how she was always giving me the business. Even when they had to behave, they could always count on her naughty defiance. As they got older, they gleefully referred to her as my arch nemesis.

She was also my gardening buddy. Somehow, she always knew when I was getting dressed to work in the garden. I have no idea how she could tell, but she knew. She would herd me with her nose at my ankles and bark excitedly to hurry me on my way outside. She loved it when I did any type of work in the yard, but her favorite part was the carrots. Carrots were cookies and cream ice cream to Daisy. She would do anything for a carrot, so I grew carrots. At the beginning of the pandemic we found out that her kidneys were starting to fail. The vet said that she was compensating really well, but by the spring of 2021, I was worried that it might be her last summer with us, so I planted an entire raised bed full of carrots. She was less energetic in her old age, so I didn’t think that she could get into the bed to dig them up. One morning while I was brushing my teeth, I looked out the window to the back yard, and there she was pulling up each newly sprouted carrot and eating it as she stood in the bed. I ran down the stairs and into the back yard, and when she saw me, she bared her teeth and growled. It made me so happy.

But my instincts were right, she was fading. We started cooking her sweet potatoes to encourage her to eat We held her bowl for her. We carried her down the stairs. We made trips to the vet. We watched and waited. You just never know how things will go and that’s what makes it so hard. In Daisy’s case, she went from ok to very bad overnight. Even though I knew that her kidneys were failing, I couldn’t imagine any creature that ferocious actually dying. I guess that’s denial.

The vet gave her IV fluids all day and sent us home for the night. It’s hard to remember details, but the thought was that if she had a kidney infection, multiple days of IV fluids and antibiotics might allow her kidneys to recover. Everything was fine until we got home. She drank just the smallest amount of water and began to cry in pain. I rushed her back to the vet, and by the time that we got there, she seemed fine again. The vet gave her a morphine injection and taught me how to give her more if she needed it, so we went home. I was completely torn up inside about whether or not it was time to put her down, but she wasn’t in any pain and made it through the night without needing any more pain medicine, so I decided to see how the second day of fluids went. On the second day, the vet did an ultrasound. The results were all bad. Morphine in hand, I decided to bring her home to say goodbye to everyone and put her down first thing in the morning. One last best day. Ironically, she felt great. She had a huge appetite, so I slowly fed her sweet potato. She loved every bit of it. We went out in her yard. She went on patrol. Doubt started to creep in about my decision as I went to bed.

Daisy slept until about 5am. At this point, I truly felt like I had made the wrong decision. She seemed absolutely fine. After she went to the potty, she had some water and that’s when things fell apart. Shortly thereafter, she began whining in pain. I was horrified, but I had the morphine and knew what to do. I gave her one dose and waited. Previously, she had completely relaxed after one dose, but not this time. The vet told me that she could have two doses, so I gave her the second dose. If anything, her pain seemed to be increasing. I picked her up and started walking the floor rocking her in my arms like a colicky infant. We weren’t due at the vet’s office until 8am, but we just couldn’t make her wait. She was suffering. My husband called the vet’s office as we paced, and she said that she would meet us there.

As I held her in my arms trying to comfort her on the way to the vet’s, all I could think about was how similar this car trip was to the one where we brought her home for the first time. I was so glad to be there for her whole life. There has been so much wrong in the world that is out of our control: the pandemic, civil unrest, wildfires, war in Ukraine, school shootings. It may be one very small thing, but I wanted to let you know that one fierce little dog had a whole life full of love.

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