Now he barks alone

From 11/27/07

Today we found out that Winston’s best friend Ro died. She was a pit bull who lived across the street. She was an escape artist, and every time she got loose, she came over to see Winston.

We knew that she had a fatal disease, and she had already beaten the vet’s prediction. It was about a year ago that the vet said she only had weeks left to live. She was obviously failing… deaf, stumbling when she walked. But still it was a shock today when we saw her family cleaning the garage and got the news.

Her humans tried to break it to us gently by offering us a half-empty bag of dog food. “Would Winston eat this?” Wendy asked.

At first I was preoccupied with the type of food, and didn’t think about what it meant. In the past, they had given us rawhide bones that Ro didn’t like.

“How’s Ro?” I asked.

So many times they had replied, “She’s still hanging in there.”

But this time the strained look on their faces told me that things had changed.

“She died two weeks ago,” Wendy answered in a low voice.

In response to my questioning look, she added, “We had to put her down.”

We expressed our sympathy, and Wendy made one more comment: “We have her ashes on the mantle. Maybe we’ll scatter them when we go hiking.”

As soon as we were back inside the house, Dillon suggested that we send a sympathy card for Ro. Then Winston whined, seeming to understand what we were talking about. All afternoon he kept giving me a certain intense, human look that he gets when something important happens. There was a tragic look in his eyes.

Looking back, I think that my dog knew when Ro died, because he has been acting different for about 2 weeks. He mopes around, moves really slowly when he gets up, and sighs a lot. We thought it was just his hip dysplasia flaring up, but none of the usual remedies for that are helping.

Winston used to enjoy barking along with Ro whenever a dog walked by. We didn't really notice when that changed, but I'm sure that he did. Now Winston barks alone.

I still keep thinking that I'll hear Ro pawing at our gate to get in and play with Winston again any day now. Her visits were one of the simple joys of life for me and Winston. It's hard to believe that those days are over!

Dillon burst into tears when we looked at the “pet sympathy cards” online.

Then Winston came running to the rescue.