She was a dork.
Weimaraners are supposed to be cool. Sleek, athletic, fast
and smooth. Hunting dogs. Otters with long legs and flappy ears. Tilly was not
like most weimaraners. She was a dork. A silly, uncoordinated, unthreatening, over-friendly,
decidedly un-sleek ninety-pound chunk of weird-smelling grey fur who once lost
a staredown with a groundhog. She couldn’t swim, despite coming pre-packaged with
webbed feet.
She was not great at being a weimaraner. But she was the
best damn dog.
She had more quirks than a Zoey Deschanel convention. Her
tail wasn’t docked properly, so it was a little too long and had weird twists
and bends, like an offensive lineman’s fingers. She had some sort of permanent hernia
that left a nickel-sized bubble hanging off her pink belly. She was always a
little greasy, even right after a bath. She was terrified of little dogs.
She was expensive.
She had a facelift when she was a puppy. Her face skin had been so loose that it folded in, allowing her short, sharp fur to poke her eyes, leaving a constant trail of crusty tears. On
Mother’s Day of 2008, she ate an entire pack of gum with Xlitol, which is
supposed to kill dogs pretty effectively. She was fine. The following Mother’s Day, we came home
from breakfast to find her rear-end covered in blood, with bloody geysers spurting out every few minutes, like the elevator scene from The Shining only grosser. We rushed her to the dog ER an hour away. She’d eaten some coyote
shit and gotten a bacterial infection. She was fine.
Unattended food immediately became attended by Tilly’s belly.
She was stubborn and persistent and fancied herself a lapdog.
Which meant that on nights I just wanted to stretch out on the couch and watch
TV, I had to deal with an annoying dog staring me down from four inches away. Or deliberately pacing in front of the TV. Or thinking she was a ninja and oh-so-slowly easing
herself over the arm of the couch. She
always ended up spooning on the couch. Always.
Her breath was terrible on an Old Testament level. It
smelled like rusty pennies dipped in blood. ALWAYS.
For some reason, her favorite place to poop is the middle of
the goddamn road.
She wore her heart on her ears. Which is to say you always
knew when she’d done something wrong. Her “guilty ears” hung low on her head,
and they were so cute that they almost distracted you from the unpacked garbage
can, the puddle on the floor, or the fact that she was just standing on her
hind legs and eating out of the dirty sink.
She would take every single item out of the trash and lick it clean. We'd come home to find a trail of trash-crumbs leading to a low-eared Tilly, cowering in a corner.
She would lean into ear scratches until it hurt your fingers.
Moaning in ecstasy the whole time.
I once clocked her at 23 MPH. So I guess she was kind of
athletic.
At night, she’d relentlessly pace the house, flap her
batwing ears or nose me awake to let her out to pee. I’m convinced she was just
bored.
Her goddamn ROO-ROO-ROO bark was terrible and beautiful.
Tilly was the people-dog’s people dog. She loved snuggling,
and when we weren’t available, she’d force her older sister, Tulip, to snuggle, usually by sitting in her and falling asleep.
She hated being alone, and once when Airika took Tulip to the vet, Tilly broke
out of the house and tracked the car down the road. Seth and I caught her just
as she was following her nose onto the busy highway.
Tulip died a few years back, and Tilly was never the same.
She’d never been alone in her life, and now her constant companion was gone.
She got super-weird around other dogs, so getting a replacement pal was out of
the question. She’d try to dig her way out of the house when we went to work. We
put her in a kennel for her own safety, but she’d bite and bend the bars trying
to escape. For months, we had to give her Xanax when we left the house.
Eventually, she calmed down, but she still didn’t like being
left alone. She had the run of the house, but she wore holes in the arm of the
couch as she stood vigil at the window, waiting for someone, anyone, to come
home.
Tilly got old in a hurry after Tulip went away. Her hearing
left completely and, while she'd never been svelte, she got fatter and fatter. She
slept 23 hours a day. Still, she was happy to snuggle and give gross,
full-tongue kisses. We thought she was finally ready for a buddy, so we brought
Beans home. He helped a little, and his relentless desire to play was awfully
Tilly-like. It certainly perked her up at times, even if her method of “playing”
these days was to bark incoherently while Beans chased a tennis ball for an
hour.
A few weeks back, her back legs stopped working for a while. She could walk, but she couldn't stand on her own. I had to carry her up and down the steps at night. We thought it was the end, but then, Tilly being Tilly, she recovered. She's like the dog equivalent of the end of Lord of the Rings.
She woke up Friday morning dizzy and unable to walk, drooling
terribly. But, stubborn Tilly being stubborn Tilly, she kept trying to get up
and pace around. I shudder to think what would have happened to her if Airika wasn’t
home to keep Tilly from hurting herself. The vet said that the condition might go away in
a few days, but would probably have lingering effects. It wasn't that she'd need constant care. It was that a dog should be able to move around when she wants.
It was time for Tilly to go. Our active, persistent,
annoying, needy, stinky, pacy, loving girl needed to go find herself again. And so she did.
But she’ll never truly be gone. Our dorky German is pacing behind me right now. I can feel the wind from her flapping ears. I can smell wet pennies.
