The Everyday Cafe

The lyrics from John Mayer’s “Dreaming with a Broken Heart” make me think of Sally:

When you’re dreaming with a broken heart
The waking up is the hardest part
You roll outta bed and down on your knees
And for the moment you can hardly breathe
Wondering was she really here?
Is she standing in my room?
No she’s not, ’cause she’s gone, gone, gone, gone, gone….

When you’re dreaming with a broken heart
The giving up is the hardest part
She takes you in with her crying eyes
Then all at once you have to say goodbye
Wondering could you stay my love?
Will you wake up by my side?
No she can’t, ’cause she’s gone, gone, gone, gone, gone….

Each morning I get up and I’m reminded that Sally’s gone, because she’s not waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs. If I wake in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, I look around for a dark shape on the floor that might be Sally, but she’s not there either. Sometimes I see a movement in our backyard, and I think it’s her — but it’s not. She’s gone.

It was traumatic making the decision to have her euthanized but equally traumatic to watch her waste away, knowing how awful she must have felt. Though she was eating, she continued to lose weight, because the lymphoma had so screwed up her digestive system she couldn’t gain any nutrition from her food. She had begun vomiting and having diarrhea again — the symptoms that first led to her lymphoma diagnosis. We knew there was nowhere to go but gone and the question was, how long were we going to put her through it?

We’re left with our good memories — 13 years of them.

We got her at the Santa Clara County Humane Society. I went one day on my lunch break and picked her out because she pressed up against the chain-link holding her in so I could pet her soft fluffy fur. She had been found on the streets, a stray with no tags.

She looked like a golden retriever but fancier, with a fluffy tail and puffy pantaloons and a pink nose. She was blissfully unaware of how beautiful she was but everyone else noticed. People would stop their cars to say “what a pretty dog! What breed is she?”

We initially thought she was part malamute or husky, so strong was she when she pulled us around the neighborhood on walks.

We didn’t find out until later that she was likely part Nova Scotia Duck-Tolling Retriever, dogs bred to raise a ruckus at the side of a lake in order to draw ducks’ attention (that’s called “tolling for ducks”). She was frolicsome until almost the very end, when she no longer had the energy to toll for anything.

Goodbye dear doggie.