Go, Dog, Go

I usually don’t write obituaries for dogs. Maybe I should. Might be a good side gig.

Nevertheless, this week I had no choice but to give the final send off to our old dog, Tilly.

So what made Tilly so special that I would waste 1,200 words on her? I guess the answer to that is nothing.

Tilly was just an old mutt who did what she was supposed to do. Nobody really noticed her much.

She was just an old a mutt trying to make her way through the world.

Kinda’ like most of us.

We have always had an ‘outside’ dog at our house. They’re different from our ‘inside’ dogs who are pampered and sit around all day, watching television and getting scratched behind the ears.

The outside dog had one job: to be the first line of defense in case the bad guys attacked.

Because of that, most of our outside dogs were mean.

We had a couple of bull mastiffs years ago. I don’t know if you know what that is, but they are big, nasty looking things.

Anyone who dared come to our house without permission was putting their life in serious danger.

What the bad guys didn’t know was that to us, they were big fluffy babies who would be more likely to slobber you to death rather than tear out your throat.

But those big dogs don’t live very long so a few years ago, we found ourselves without a yard dog.

The bad guys were not going to give up trying to breech our perimeter, so we needed another dog.

Somehow, I convinced my wife that we didn’t need to spend thousands of dollars on new purebred dogs. We needed a junkyard mutt.

So off to the Humane Society we went. We had one goal in mind: get a dog who will kill everyone but us.

That’s what I told to the lady at the Humane Society.

“We need a killer,” I said.

She smiled and nodded.

“We’ve got the perfect dog,” she said.

We followed her into the big kennel where there was row after row of dogs that people had just thrown away. There were cage after cage of dogs.
Some were barking their heads off. Others were huddled in the corner, trying their best to avoid eye contact.

Some dogs just lay there. They had long ago given up on ever leaving this place.

The woman stopped in front of one of the cages, pointed and said that this was the one.

“She’s came here as a puppy. That was five years ago.”

I was shocked but more than that, I was saddened. How in the world had this dog spent five entire years living in this cage?

We looked through the wire and saw a little dog lying on what looked like an old bath mat. She was all different colors- grey with white and brown streaks.

It was pretty obvious that Tilly had come from what we would now called a ‘blended family.’

We asked the lady what breed she was.

“Who knows? But I believe there is a wolf somewhere in her lineage.”
I could see it.

Tilly looked like a cross between a Belgium Malinois, a husky and a wolf. It was quite intimidating.

I made eye contact with Tilly and could see such sadness and despair in her eyes. It was pretty obvious that she has gone through this many times before.

People had stopped and looked at her it but since she had such a wolf-like expression, they just moved on. In to the younger, prettier, more purebred residents of this room.

Just by looking at her, I could tell that she had given up. She knew she would die in this cage.

Well, not if we could help it.

We signed the papers, paid the feed and loaded the old girl up.

When we got Tilly home is when the magic really began. She jumped out of the car and just stood there for a moment on the grass, looking down.

I wondered if in the past five years, she had ever felt grass under her feet.

From the way she was looking down, it was pretty obvious that this was an unusual feeling for Tilly.

She finally looked up to us as if to say, “am allowed to run?” I waved around at the yard and told her to enjoy.

And boy did she.

For the first couple of days, all Tilly wanted to do was run. It reminded of that part of the movie where Forest Gump says, “I had run for 3 years, 2 months, 14 days, and 16 hours.”

Tilly would have probably run for three years if we hadn’t stopped her.

Slowly, the shy dog from the kennel who would not let you touch her began to open up and act like a real dog.

She started doing the things that real dogs do like digging holes in our flower beds, chewing on lots of hambones and chasing cats.

She was finally living her best life. Well, at least until the UPS guys started pulling up to our house.

I don’t know if she had been run over by a delivery driver in her previous life.

Maybe that was why she has been at the pound so long.

Or maybe she didn’t like the color brown.

Whatever the reason, she really came to life when those big brown vans pulled into our driveway. That’s when Tilly turned on ‘wolf mode.’

She barked and howled. She nipped at their feet and chased a few back to their trucks.

She HATED the UPS guy with a passion. But I also think that maybe she felt like ‘well, these people adopted me to be a watch dog. Time to earn my keep.’

It got so bad that UPS drivers began to just pull into our driveway and ‘toss’ our packages out the door. I’m fairly certain that there was a note on our address that said ‘crazy dog.’

We had many a broken and dented Amazon delivery during the Wolf Years.
Then Tilly started getting old- just like the rest of us.

At first, she just sat around in a hole she dug in the flower bed. Then she started just wandering around like a dementia patient.

Can dogs have dementia?

I don’t know but for the last couple of years, Tilly has just been lying around.

She still barked at the UPS guy but didn’t get up and chase him anymore.

We would see her walking around aimlessly. Sometimes in the backyard, sometimes in the front yard, sometimes in the Christmas tree farm.

After all those years in a cage, I guess she just wanted to be free. And after all the times being passed over, she finally had somebody who loved her.

I found Tilly lying in the flower bed a few days ago. She looked like she had passed away in her sleep.

She had lived in a cage for five years. And with us for eleven years.

We had given her a decade of freedom to just be a dog. And she relished every moment.

My lovely wife tells me that when she was little, one of her dogs died. She insisted on having a proper burial for the puppy so she had her father dig a grave and put the dog on a nice ‘coffin’ (a cardboard box).

As they stood beside the grave, her dad decided to say a few words. He was a tall man who didn’t mince words.

Her dad looked down at the dirt and recited a line from one of her favorite children’s books.

“Go, Dog, Go!”

That sounded like the perfect eulogy for Tilly.

She had lived in a cage without anyone to love her for a third of her life.

She was now up in doggy heaven where she would spend most of eternity just running. She was finally free.

Go, Dog, Go.