His Person

FYI: Tomorrow I will be blogging over at http://bookendslitagency.blogspot.com/ about writer's block and muses. All you writers, pop over and visit.

Crime Scene Christie


WINNER, WINNER, WINNER!

Christine's Bowe's is the winner of the "Pamper Me Like A Bride Contest."

Sharon Berger and Michelle are the HM.

I will be getting those prizes out to you soon.

Crime Scene Christie
***

Can someone tell me who wrote: To love and lost is better than to have never loved at all? If you know, I’d appreciate your sharing the information because I need to kick his $%&! Seriously, he needs to have his writing license revoked.

Okay . . . I know that saying has a powerful message, and I know I’ve used it in the past to offer condolences to others. I’ve even used it as my premise in my books and in essays. Deep down, in some place inside me that I can’t reach right now, I even know it’s true. Problem is, I’m in the lost stage right now and I’m hurting like the dickens. Grief will do that to you.

Jake entered my life about six years ago. Funny thing was, I was dealing with grief at the time. Only six months earlier, I’d witness my eight-year-old Boston Terrier get run over by a car. I swore, never again. I even laid down the house rule. No more dogs. If you find a lost dog, don’t even bring it home unless it has a tag so you can contact the owners.

Then, while I was away doing travel articles in California and I get this call. “We got trouble,” my husband said.

My son had been followed home by a stray dog—a labish-cockerish looking big black dog with a gray muzzle. Not that my son had broken the “no-tag” rule. The dog had two tags. One for a Great Dane and another for a Lhasa Alpso. No way, was this dog either one.

“Find it a home,” I insisted to my husband. “Find it a home before I get home.”

A week later, I show up and there’s this big black dog waiting for me. “He’s old, mom,” my son insisted. “If we took him to the shelter, they’d kill him.”

I frowned.

“He’s smart, too,” my son said, trying to sweeten the deal. “I said sit and he sat.”

I looked at the dog. “He has no personality,” I accused. Bosco, the Boston Terrier, would have been bouncing off the walls, this dog just sat there. I stood up. The dog stood up. I said “sit” and did the hand motion for the command. He sat. I said “Speak” and he cocked his head at me and stared. I could tell he knew I wanted him to do something. Finally, he raised his paw. “No,” I said. “Speak.” He laid down. We laughed. “No. Speak.” He rolled over. He knew every trick in the book except speak.

“Can we keep him?” my son pleaded.

My heart was still hurting for Bosco. “We have to post signs and maybe the owners will come forward.” I sent out a prayer that this would be the case. But you know it didn’t happen. Someone had tossed this dog away, probably because it was getting old, and I was stuck with it.

The next day my son named him Jake. And Jake named me “his person.” I knew when it happened, too. He just walked up to me, looked right at me with his big puppy dog eyes, and laid his head on my lap. I so didn’t want to be “his person.” I actually tried to push him away.

“Love the boy,” I told him. “He brought you home.”

“Love the daddy. He’s the one who will feed you.”

But nope, Jake had made up his mind. Whether I liked it or not, he’d chosen me.

I’d heard about one-person dogs, but I’d never really met one, until Jake. He was friendly to everyone, but he’d bypass anyone to sit beside me. If I walked out of the room, Jake walked out of the room. If someone looked at me crossways, Jake got between them and me. I was this dog’s mission in life. I was his world. I was . . . “his person.”

Let me tell you, when someone loves you that much, you just can’t help but to start loving him back. Even when you didn’t want him. Even when you knew he was already an old dog. Even when you knew that he was going to break your heart.

We took him to the vet and the doctor put Jake at anywhere between 9 and 12 years of age. That was five years ago. And during those years, he became my best friend. When I was in the office writing, he was in the office. We were in the office a lot. Jake watched me write eight books. I brainstormed my plots with him. I tested my jokes out on him, which is probably why I kept trying to make them funnier. Jake didn’t know how to laugh, not more than he knew how to speak.

When I went outside, he went outside. When I took a potty break, Jake took a potty break. It got harder and harder for him to get around. But it didn’t stop him from limping after me wherever I went. The last few months, he couldn’t make the stairs and my bedroom is upstairs. So every night, my husband picked up the sixty-pound dog and gently brought him upstairs to sleep beside me on his cushioned bed. And because he was embarrassed about not being able to make the stairs, we would all clap when my husband put him down, and Jake would wag his tail as if he’d done a great thing.

He never had an accident indoors, but age snuck up on him. I swear the few first times it happened, he’d see the mess behind him and give one of our four cats the evil eye. When accidents continued to happen, I started cooking for him. Chicken and Rice. We’re talking boneless chicken breasts with long grain rice. It was so yummy, that times the family opted to eat Jake’s food.

Hubby kidded me several times, “You make me go pick up take-out for us, then you cook for the dog.”

I would just look at hubby and say, “But you don’t love me as much as he does.”

Even hubby couldn’t argue. No one has, or probably ever will, love me as much as Jake.

When his cancer got so bad that I could tell he was in pain, I knew what I had to do, but dang it, I didn’t want to do it. So, I sat him down and had a talk with him. Told him it was okay to go. But that damn dog just looked at me and I knew what he was thinking, “I can’t go. I won’t leave you. You are my person.”

So after a year, and thousands of dollars of vet care, I had to help him say good bye.

I laid on a rug at the vet’s floor beside him and told him how much I loved him as he slipped away.

Yes, I know that loving Jake was a joy, a gift, but losing him still hurts so darn much. So find me that writer, would you. I still want to kick his butt.

I’m going to miss being Jake’s person.