And then there were two.... RIP Big boy.
0 Comments Published by Oh Wayward One on 26 August 2010 at 8/26/2010 12:36:00 pm.
Well what a freakin' emotional roller coaster this week has turned out to be. No, scratch that, it's just been pretty crap all around. But I suppose after a killer fun weekend in Joburg last weekend inclusive of standup comedy, lotsa drinks with Uncle A., a new pair of jeans and blouse, new Harley gear for The Mr.'s birthday present, excellent Vietnamese food, and lots of laughs, the axe was bound to fall somehow.
Working backwards, we lost our big boy Jock. Yesterday evening I took him for a run to try and clear my head from all the BS I've been dealing with already this week, and when we came back he just collapsed and wouldn't get up, but was panting and puffing like he always does when he's exhausted so I just monitored him for a couple hours hoping he would shake it off. This, I might mention, was after I had to call Alois to come with his pickup truck to help me get him up the hill to our house because he was like a 120lb/55kg sack of rocks and I couldn't do it by myself and OF COURSE The Mr. is in Zambia. Once I could see him start to spasm, I phoned friend/vet DD and asked what I should do, and he said take him into the hosp. at once. Which of course meant I had to settle down, get The Kid out of bed, in the car (because I'm home alone), find someone who would be awake (this is at nighttime now) to help me lift him up into the truck which ultimately involved driving down to the security gate and hijacking the security man from his post (typical me, I just didn't want to have to ask for help and bother anyone so this is all after I tried my damndest for 10 minutes to lift him on my own but that was just not happening). Drove to the vet as fast as I could and then the on-call vet didn't show up for almost an hour, during which time, he died in the back of the vehicle. I knew it the instant it happened because the laboured breathing turned into a seizure and then the loud "noise of death" where everything just lets go/burns out. I knew, but got out of the truck and went around back to check, and got there just in time to feel his heart stop beating. I was so sad I just used the rest of the waiting-in-the-dark-and-the-stink (it's biology, it's what happens) time to cry my eyeballs out.
Of course I feel guilty as well as sad because I keep thinking "what if I hadn't run so far?" "what if I would've called DD earlier?" (again I just don't like to bug people) but both vets said a bad heart is a bad heart and a heart attack/stroke is what it is and they happen. Period. But I still can't stop wondering... and sobbing... I couldn't even talk to The Mr. (who was beside himself wondering, by this stage, 20 hours away after getting the "rushing to vet" text message from me) because my battery died on my phone. Ugh.
By the time I finally got home and re-put the LJJ to bed and remembered to eat something, it was pretty late and I felt really numb and clueless so I just went to bed and stared at the walls all night, which sucked because I was exhausted this morning.
So prior to the losing-man's-best-friend, life was generally already in the shitter as A) The Mr. was summoned away to Zam. and B) marital relations were all around edgy and negative as we had spent the first part of the week literally in angry deliberation about this whole proposed-family-cruise thing I mentioned in my last post.
Little did I know it wasn't as easy as saying "thanks but no thanks". Sunday night I called the Gran to politely decline and chose to use the "it just wouldn't be possible to lay out another 40k on flights to get to New Orleans, after just returning from 3 weeks in In-law Land" excuse. Except then she trumped me with "but I will pay for those tickets too".
Huh?
And then: "I would really love to have you there..., etc" followed by negotiation tactics including the words "once-in-a-lifetime-thing", and "one-time-only-offer", etc etc....
Great.
So fuelled with guilt and genuine interest in going (I mean who WOULDNT want to go on an all-expenses-paid cruise around the carribbean with the hi-larry fun cousins?) as well as the nagging feeling of "there goes your one and only good/acceptable excuse... if you say no now, it'll be black-sheep-ville for the rest of your life" (as if that isnt already the case). I propose to The Mr. that we go. He (for lack of 3,000 pages in which to transcribe what happened next) does NOT want to go. It's too hard. It'll be too much trouble. We're JUST getting back from europe, we can't leave the office for so long all the time, you're living in dreamworld, what-what-what.
So then I say to him, fine, this is your decision then, you call and tell them no. Oh, but then that would make HIM the bad guy instead of me so now all of a sudden "fine, we'll go, but I'm going to resent you forever" and all that crap.... so then I'm all "NO! We're not going then, because I don't want to put up with all the negative juju and resent ment" and this basically goes on for 2 days. Fun times. These things always ruin my life while they're happening, as sometimes the down side of being a couple who generally never fights means that when you DO have a real barney, it tends to make you want to jump off a bridge or, alternatively, (for me anyway) just plain crawl in a hole of depression and die. While simultaneously NOT SLEEPING. And for the record it has nothing to do with this damn boat trip, it's all about the resentment/accusations and the basic side dishes of aggro that come with the big main course of the original disagreement.
Anyway, I guess the saving grace finally came from The Mominator, who upon becoming exasperated at not getting a yes/no answer from us after repeatedly asking for one (tickets were being booked once and for all, and we were still "undecided"), finally emailed a very clear "please do not come, your grandmother had no idea what she was offering ($$$$) when she said that", which at least solved the issue between us. Well, the tip-of-the-iceberg issue anyway. After 2 days of anger in the house, there's a lot more than just that one core issue to deal with. But coming from the Mominator, it was like the golden ticket we needed to decline without hesitation... basically because one of my motivating reasons for saying "ok, fine we'll come if you're paying" was that I'm kinda sick and tired of always being the black sheep who is never around for family things.... reunions, funerals, birthdays, holidays, etc etc. And I really wasn't keen on the idea of the rumor circulating around that "oh, THEY'Re not coming because they dont give a crap about this family and they NEVER come to anything... They choose to live overseas but then they say it's too expensive.... yet they keep going to Europe and Australia and Canada and yadda yadda yadda.... so then Grandma offered to pay and then they STILL said no...."
But now, The Mominator will gladly take the heat for driving the nail into that coffin, so that's good.
So to make a long story a little less long, this week = bad vibes, alone on mommy duty, my big buddy dies, and here I sit. Sad. For now.
Working backwards, we lost our big boy Jock. Yesterday evening I took him for a run to try and clear my head from all the BS I've been dealing with already this week, and when we came back he just collapsed and wouldn't get up, but was panting and puffing like he always does when he's exhausted so I just monitored him for a couple hours hoping he would shake it off. This, I might mention, was after I had to call Alois to come with his pickup truck to help me get him up the hill to our house because he was like a 120lb/55kg sack of rocks and I couldn't do it by myself and OF COURSE The Mr. is in Zambia. Once I could see him start to spasm, I phoned friend/vet DD and asked what I should do, and he said take him into the hosp. at once. Which of course meant I had to settle down, get The Kid out of bed, in the car (because I'm home alone), find someone who would be awake (this is at nighttime now) to help me lift him up into the truck which ultimately involved driving down to the security gate and hijacking the security man from his post (typical me, I just didn't want to have to ask for help and bother anyone so this is all after I tried my damndest for 10 minutes to lift him on my own but that was just not happening). Drove to the vet as fast as I could and then the on-call vet didn't show up for almost an hour, during which time, he died in the back of the vehicle. I knew it the instant it happened because the laboured breathing turned into a seizure and then the loud "noise of death" where everything just lets go/burns out. I knew, but got out of the truck and went around back to check, and got there just in time to feel his heart stop beating. I was so sad I just used the rest of the waiting-in-the-dark-and-the-stink (it's biology, it's what happens) time to cry my eyeballs out.
Of course I feel guilty as well as sad because I keep thinking "what if I hadn't run so far?" "what if I would've called DD earlier?" (again I just don't like to bug people) but both vets said a bad heart is a bad heart and a heart attack/stroke is what it is and they happen. Period. But I still can't stop wondering... and sobbing... I couldn't even talk to The Mr. (who was beside himself wondering, by this stage, 20 hours away after getting the "rushing to vet" text message from me) because my battery died on my phone. Ugh.
By the time I finally got home and re-put the LJJ to bed and remembered to eat something, it was pretty late and I felt really numb and clueless so I just went to bed and stared at the walls all night, which sucked because I was exhausted this morning.
So prior to the losing-man's-best-friend, life was generally already in the shitter as A) The Mr. was summoned away to Zam. and B) marital relations were all around edgy and negative as we had spent the first part of the week literally in angry deliberation about this whole proposed-family-cruise thing I mentioned in my last post.
Little did I know it wasn't as easy as saying "thanks but no thanks". Sunday night I called the Gran to politely decline and chose to use the "it just wouldn't be possible to lay out another 40k on flights to get to New Orleans, after just returning from 3 weeks in In-law Land" excuse. Except then she trumped me with "but I will pay for those tickets too".
Huh?
And then: "I would really love to have you there..., etc" followed by negotiation tactics including the words "once-in-a-lifetime-thing", and "one-time-only-offer", etc etc....
Great.
So fuelled with guilt and genuine interest in going (I mean who WOULDNT want to go on an all-expenses-paid cruise around the carribbean with the hi-larry fun cousins?) as well as the nagging feeling of "there goes your one and only good/acceptable excuse... if you say no now, it'll be black-sheep-ville for the rest of your life" (as if that isnt already the case). I propose to The Mr. that we go. He (for lack of 3,000 pages in which to transcribe what happened next) does NOT want to go. It's too hard. It'll be too much trouble. We're JUST getting back from europe, we can't leave the office for so long all the time, you're living in dreamworld, what-what-what.
So then I say to him, fine, this is your decision then, you call and tell them no. Oh, but then that would make HIM the bad guy instead of me so now all of a sudden "fine, we'll go, but I'm going to resent you forever" and all that crap.... so then I'm all "NO! We're not going then, because I don't want to put up with all the negative juju and resent ment" and this basically goes on for 2 days. Fun times. These things always ruin my life while they're happening, as sometimes the down side of being a couple who generally never fights means that when you DO have a real barney, it tends to make you want to jump off a bridge or, alternatively, (for me anyway) just plain crawl in a hole of depression and die. While simultaneously NOT SLEEPING. And for the record it has nothing to do with this damn boat trip, it's all about the resentment/accusations and the basic side dishes of aggro that come with the big main course of the original disagreement.
Anyway, I guess the saving grace finally came from The Mominator, who upon becoming exasperated at not getting a yes/no answer from us after repeatedly asking for one (tickets were being booked once and for all, and we were still "undecided"), finally emailed a very clear "please do not come, your grandmother had no idea what she was offering ($$$$) when she said that", which at least solved the issue between us. Well, the tip-of-the-iceberg issue anyway. After 2 days of anger in the house, there's a lot more than just that one core issue to deal with. But coming from the Mominator, it was like the golden ticket we needed to decline without hesitation... basically because one of my motivating reasons for saying "ok, fine we'll come if you're paying" was that I'm kinda sick and tired of always being the black sheep who is never around for family things.... reunions, funerals, birthdays, holidays, etc etc. And I really wasn't keen on the idea of the rumor circulating around that "oh, THEY'Re not coming because they dont give a crap about this family and they NEVER come to anything... They choose to live overseas but then they say it's too expensive.... yet they keep going to Europe and Australia and Canada and yadda yadda yadda.... so then Grandma offered to pay and then they STILL said no...."
But now, The Mominator will gladly take the heat for driving the nail into that coffin, so that's good.
So to make a long story a little less long, this week = bad vibes, alone on mommy duty, my big buddy dies, and here I sit. Sad. For now.
Labels: RIP
Saturday evening we came home after slaving away in the burning sun all day at an Animal Peeps fundraiser, earning thousands of bucks for the crowd that first brought this big boy into our lives, to find him lying dead in the back yard, with no explanation.
I was so shocked I couldn't really focus enough to be emotional, but today it's really hitting me.
But I'm conflicted as to what to say because the shock is still clouding the emotions. It's true that we'll never know 100% what happened, but it's 99% likely to have been poison-related based on clues (confirmed by Dr. Vet, over the phone), and 90% likely to have been a snake. To get highly technical, we've narrowed it down to a Mamba or the Puff Adder that I spotted in our garden before.
Mary & Richard came to see him & express their grief with us, and help us bury him. We opted for a less stoney spot than over by Reggie, at the end of the marquee lawn, on the west side, under the sunset. It was dusk, the sun was going down, everybody was sad. But again, the shock robbed us of our chance to be 100% tuned in to the cold truth that our big woofer was gone.
He came to us as a 1 & 1/2 year old welfare case, having suffered abuse and a horrible accident that left him forever 3-legged & gimpy. At first he was traumatized and limp, but after the long rehabilitation of his leg, he grew into his own hilarious and outrageous personality.
He had agression and trust issues to work out, often leaving the marks of this behind (in the Mr.'s face and left arm, primarily) but eventually began to trust adult males and even take instructions from the ones he used to be cheeky to. I thought it was going to take forever and a day to teach a 50kg boerboel to get into the truck, when it used to freak him out and send him into psycho fits. But with a little effort, it only took him a couple weeks, and his fear and car-related anxiety was conquered. Not by me, but by him trying so hard to please.
He learned obedience instructions faster than any dog I've ever had, like sit and stay and roll over, but the one thing he could never do was "stop talking". My favorite thing about Sech was the way he would sit down in front of you and just chatter, saying "moof moof wow wow wow" and look into your eyes to try and figure out if you were getting it.
This dog, more than any other dog, lived to please his humans. His magical tactic (once he learned it solid) was "sit". Even at 100 miles per hour on the fly, he would come screaming up to you and before bowling you over, right at the last second, the "sit" would come with the brakes. Every day we would drive into the driveway and flying around the corner would come the Big Gimp, and before crashing into you, he would sit and MOOF, knowing no pets would come unless there was bottom-on-the-ground action. This would then be followed by a big "roll over", without even being asked, in the most ungraceful fashion anyone had ever seen. I laughed every time.
The big crazy yellow eyes will always be imprinted on my mind - I never had a dog with yellow eyes before, and these ones were set so far back in his head, scaring almost everyone who ever saw him. It made us feel good, knowing that we had an intimidating force on the property, even though he was as soft as mush to us. He would've protected us from anything. He had an unbelievable sense of human vibes. He never growled a single tooth to Mary, yet he could spot a trespasser a mile away. He even wanted to protect his plot from the wildlife that came into it. Who could forget the porcupine, various snakes, and most recently the monitor lizard. We never wanted to punish him for being alert and on the job, because in these parts a good guard dog is a good asset. But the most amazing thing about him was that he was never trained or asked to do it, he just took it upon himself after settling into our family and realizing that we were his people. It was as if he was born to do it, and he already knew what to do. We never even had to train him to stay on his plot, he just instictively knew where his property line ended and that this land was his responsibility.
He loved us more than any other dog we've owned. Sure the other ones think we're great, but this dog would've fought to the death to protect us, and wouldn't rest until he was able to earn his pets and affection from us in return.
His best friend in the whole world, Reilly, is in mourning. So much more than we witnessed with our last loss. This morning she went outside to where he died, sniffed around, and then followed the exact trail we moved him on, over to his grave, and sniffed around some more. She's been obviously bummed today, and I can tell she just knows her best mate is gone now. No more tearing across the plot at top speeds, exhausting him and taunting him to keep up. No more secret walkabouts together through the bush on the plot, looking for live & dead creatures to play with, when mom & dad leave the house.
The Mr. is equally devistated, and keeps saying over and over "I had gotten so attached to him..." and we really can't believe how empty the house can feel without 50kg of solid PUPPY wonkily bouncing through the place going "hah hah hah hah". You really do miss it a lot more than a small, old dog.
I'm not surprised I miss him so much, just given his huge in-your-face style, and over-the-top presence in the house. But I also miss his eyes and his character and having a pup who was genuinely your biggest fan and protector. He was the kind of dog who would really grow on anyone, just ask the Mr. (the one who once threatened to get rid of him during one of their "getting acquainted" rows), and our gardener (whom he once tried to eat).
I know there's more to write, but for now, this is really all I can muster. I think the underlying sentiment is still just one of total confusion and loss.
