'Bye Lucy

Last night we said goodbye to our beautiful Newfoundland, Lucy, after almost 13 years with her.  She was very old for her breed, and in the last year had becoming increasingly immobile, and it was just her time.  She died so peacefully, and we buried her in the backyard, in the middle of a crazy lightening storm.  It was so, so sad, as anyone who has had to say goodbye to a much-loved pet knows.  I wanted to write a little bit about her life just for the sake of memory, but it came out a lot longer than I thought it would be, so please don't bother reading this unless you really love dogs or you knew Lucy, because it's really just a biography of my great dog.


If you have known me as an adult, you have known Lucy.  I was 24 when I bought her, living in Washington, DC and teaching at The Field School.  I don't know what gave me the idea to buy an enormous, hairy, beast of a dog, especially since I was living on the third floor of a crazy group house in the middle of the city.  I was also spending most of my weekend nights going out, dancing and having fun into the wee hours.  I vaguely remember that my side-kick Carrie and I thought that having a remarkably large dog would be a great way to meet boys, and probably it would have been, except that I was pretty much already destined to marry Matt, even if I didn't realize it yet.  Another teacher friend of mine was also thinking of buying a dog, and he was researching breeds since he had two kids and needed a good family dog, and he determined that the Newfoundland would be the perfect breed for both of us.  Not having much time for research what with all the dancing and teaching, I decided to trust his judgment and get one too.  We drove up to New Jersey one cold December weekend to pick up two girl puppies from the same litter, and we named then Lucy and Lily.  The woman who had bred them told me that Newfoundlands are pretty happy doing whatever you want to do, so long as they can just be with you.  If you want to go for a walk, she said, that's fine; if you want to sit on the couch and watch a movie, that's fine too, as long as she's by your side she'll be happy.  I can't even describe how cute she was, how good she smelled, and I can still remember the feeling of holding her warm, soft body in my arms.

Through that whole Spring in DC, Carrie and I walked Lucy around the Mall almost every week night, planning our lives and scheming about various boys.  She bounded along, totally untrained, happy just to be included.  Lucy came with me to school events, she came to parties, restaurants, friends' houses, and on road trips.  She hated being left at home when I would leave every morning to go teach, and she would bark in my room until one of my housemates would come up to let her have the run of the house.  Once let loose, she could be quite destructive, eating books, shoes, purses, wallets (including the contents), and, of course, any food she could find.  Being so large, she could just jump up and scavenge on countertops for food left unattended, or eat from the table like a person.  Bread was one of Lucy's favorite things to steal, and some of her most impressive food binges include eating whole loaves of bread at a time, or a whole sleeve of bagels, not even leaving a crumb behind as evidence.  If you forgot you had bought it, you might not even realize she had eaten it.  She would also employ her body weight to her advantage by knocking over kitchen trash cans to find goodies for herself.  One bleary Saturday morning, I remember waking up to a wet sensation around my pillow.  Upon investigation, I concluded that Lucy had somehow gotten out of my room during the night, run down three flights of stairs, knocked the trash over, found some raw sausage that someone had apparently decided was not safe for human consumption, brought it back upstairs and buried it under my pillow while I was sleeping.  It wasn't the greatest way to wake up, but it did make for a funny story.

That summer, I moved back to Texas to start law school, and Lucy and I moved into a house in Austin with my brother, Ted.  He had recently acquired a cat in a parking lot somewhere, and I assured him (completely baselessly) that Lucy would be nice to it.  As it turned out, Lucy really hated that cat.  I actually hated the cat too, but I didn't want to kill it the same way she did.  For the three years that we all four lived together, we always had to keep the house divided in two parts - the cat half and the dog half.  Every now and then someone would forget to close a door, or Lucy would bust past you on your way to the bathroom, and she would take after that cat like nothing you've ever seen.  We always joked that the cat must have been on her mind at all times, night and day, and she was just waiting for her moment.  She never did succeed in her mission, and Jill lives to this day, and she's still a pretty lame cat, as far as cats go.

Those years in Austin were so fun with Lucy, since she loved to swim and hike around.  She grew and grew - eventually reaching her adult weight of 130 pounds.  I ran a few miles with her almost every day, and I would take her to meet friends at Austin's numerous outdoor eating and drinking establishments.  We would set her free at the dog park a couple of times a week, where she would establish her dominance over smaller, lesser dogs.  Her head was about the size of a basketball, but she was sweet, and playful, and enthusiastic about everything.  Many a time she dragged me to the ground in an effort to catch a squirrel, or knocked over half the living room running to greet someone at the door, but it was hard to ever stay mad at her for long.  And she was still up to her naughty ways with food.  One year on New Year's Eve, Matt and another good friend from DC were in town and a big group of us were going to a party, so we ordered a ton of Chinese food for dinner before the party.  There were lots of leftovers, which we stashed in the fridge before going out.  When we got home, the door of the fridge was wide open, there were styrofoam containers all over the kitchen floor, and not a bite of food left.  We imagined Lucy waiting until we were gone for sure, then having her own little party.  Another night, Ted and I were getting ready to have a party, and we had cleaned the house, top to bottom.  The house was spotless, and I felt I deserved to sit and relax for a minute in this unusually sparkling scene.  As I settled into the couch, I noticed a slightly fishy odor -- a slightly dead-fishy odor.  Not immediately seeing any dead fish, I started checking around a little more seriously.  When I put my hand in between the cushions of the couch and came up with a wet, dead, whole fish, it was immediately clear what had happened.  Ted had thoughtlessly thrown away some fish he had previously caught and frozen but never cooked, and Lucy, realizing his mistake, had rescued this treasure from the trash can and stored it in the couch so as to enjoy later.  I never did totally get that smell out of that couch.

After law school, Lucy and I made another big trip, this time moving up to New York City to practice law while Matt was finishing medical school.  We were engaged by then, and for the next two years we lived in various apartments around New York.  Lucy was a pretty good city dog, and by then she wasn't such a rambunctious puppy, so she was content to lie around the apartment most of the day.  On the weekends, we would go for long walks with her, through Central Park or over to the river.  Lucy got lots of attention everywhere we went, since lots of New Yorkers wish they could have a dog but are sensible enough not to.  From New York we took her up to the Giegs' cabin in the Catskills many times, and she would race around the woods like a wild thing, finally plunging into the lake to swim until she was so tired she couldn't move.  Being a water rescue breed, Newfies can't not retrieve things out of the water, no matter how tired they are.  She would swim out to bring sticks and even big logs out of the water a hundred times if you were willing to stand there throwing them in for her.  If we went in to swim, she was right there with us, watching to make sure we were okay, or circling until we came close enough to shore to suit her.

Me (pregnant with Finn) & Lucy in NCY snowstorm.

When Matt and I got married down in Texas, we drove down so that Lucy could be there with us.  The whole trip, both ways, she sat in the back seat of our red Jeep, head on the armrest between us to catch the air conditioning and the occasional pat on the head.  I don't think we ever ate in a restaurant on that trip since we couldn't take her in, but we also couldn't eat in the car since she would jump up front if we had food up there.  We had to eat standing outside of the car, or wait until she fell asleep and hope she didn't wake up.  My mother put her foot down that Lucy could not be in attendance at the wedding (very sensible considering the number of elderly folk and the tempting food that Lucy might go for), but she was part of the whole wedding week, and she drove back up to New York with us, not caring one way or the other that we had just gotten married.

A year later, we brought Finn home from the hospital to our little one-bedroom apartment, and Lucy was officially a big sister.  She actually seemed pretty indifferent to the little bean, which is pretty good considering how much he cried the first few months.  When Finn was six weeks old, we all piled back into the red Jeep and headed West, for Oregon, where the new doctor would begin his residency training.  This time, Finn was in the back, so Lucy was in the way back, comfortable in a little nest we made for her, but probably sad to be bumped from the bosom of the family.  And of course, as anyone who has a dog and then has a baby will know, things change.  No longer did we tell each other about funny things Lucy had done that day, or plan our weekend around taking her to parks she would enjoy.  Now we mostly just talked about how to make the baby stop crying, or how tired we were.  Lucy just listened, laying at our feet by the couch or waiting under Finn's highchair for scraps.  She did have a big yard and a high front porch where she could wait for passing dogs to greet with her loud barks.  Finn and Lucy and I would walk around the neighborhood, meeting people and dogs, going for coffee and dog biscuits at Starbucks.  It was a pretty nice life for us, and for Lucy, even if she missed being the center of our lives a little bit.

By the time we moved away from Portland four years later, Lucy had really slowed down.  At some point, we stopped taking her on long walks because she would get tired half-way through and lie down, refusing to move until someone came back for her with the car.  She didn't come upstairs so often and jump up on the bed with us at night.  She might not insist on dragging us across the street to meet a new dog.  When Matt drove her across the country to move to North Carolina, he had to help her in and out of the car.  But she still had her moments, and she won over many new friends here.  Lucy has always been a dog that even people who are afraid of dogs will agree is a great dog.  In the case of dog-phobes, it's probably because Lucy didn't move around very much.  She was like a giant black dog-carpet much of the time, strategically placing herself where she knew you would have to be in order to get a little scratch or a kind word.  But she could also be stubborn, or regal, or playful if the mood struck.  And she could just watch you for hours, protecting and radiating love with her giant black eyes.

Over the last six months, we knew the end was coming.  She wasn't in pain, but we felt like her quality of life was pretty low because it was so hard for her to stand and walk, and we didn't know if it made sense to just let her live without any joy in her life.  But we would often find her relaxing up on her favorite sofa, or sniffing around the dining room floor after a meal, so we knew she still had a little life left to live.  Before we left for Ethiopia, we talked about maybe putting her down before we left, but Matt said he wanted her to at least get to meet the new baby, and that seemed right.  One of Ruby's first words in English was doggie, or actually "goggie," but pointing at Lucy, so we knew.  Over the last few months I kept saying that I just wished there was a way to know for sure that it was the right time, since it felt so weird to have to decide to end a dog's life.  And then yesterday morning, when she couldn't stand up or stay on her feet when I propped her up, I knew.

As I write all of this, I feel that it's such an inadequate tribute to such a great dog.  For close to 13 years, she was in my life, always with me or waiting for me at home, whether I was gone five minutes or five weeks.  Never once did I walk in the door that she didn't bound over, tail wagging, or, in later years, lift her head and look at me with eyes that clearly expressed her happiness at my return.  But what does a dog, no less one that is no longer alive, care about a tribute?  The only thing Lucy really cared about was us, and we were imperfect in that, of course, but we loved her.

Last night we explained to the boys that Lucy is now in "doggie heaven," and Gus could not understand how she had gotten all the way up there so quickly.  He finally came up with the solution that she must have gone in a rocket ship, and we could tell that he was disappointed to have missed seeing it come for her.  And now somehow I have it in my head that she did have one last big trip on a rocket ship, and I'm hoping that when it landed there were pizza crusts and cats to chase and a comfy place to rest and keep and eye on us down here.  We will miss you Lucy.