Tip

He came into my life as a carefully guarded secret in the middle of the night. He came suddenly, unexpectedly. His arrival was the kind of surprise you didn't know you were waiting for, but once it comes you can't remember how you lived before.  My mom smuggled him into the house. I didn't even get to see him that first night.  Everyone was sleeping as I welcomed the midnight guests, and we didn't turn on the lights. We put him in my bathroom, closed the door, and went to sleep ourselves. 

I first saw him the next morning, big eyes on a shivering, nervous, tiny ball of white fluff.  He had long, floppy ears, and soft silky hair.  His tail, normally curled high over his back, hung stiffly down. This was Tip, my mom told my girls and me, as we gathered around trying to contain our squeals and giggles and excitement. 

My mom had called the day before she came, and asked if I could keep a secret. She told me that if I could, she would bring something really special with her. Now that I had met Tip and learned the secret myself, I was under strict orders not to say anything about it to my dad.  She was going to work out the details on how to tell him and her three cats at home about Tip later.  For now, we had a new dog to spoil and get to know. 

My mom had just been out to Nebraska to visit some two weeks before.  When she got the news that her aunt had died, she loaded up a vehicle with her dad and her brother and drove back across the country to Utah for the funeral. Once there, it went the way funerals do, with relatives claiming anything they might have wanted from Fern's possessions. Ordinary tokens and little personal items that we like to collect to hold on to the ones we love, just a little longer.  Fern's beloved companion, her little Tip, had been, until then, unwanted and unclaimed. One of my mom's cousins approached her asking, "You're the one who loves animals, right?" And because the answer to that question is a resounding yes, there I was a few days later with this terrified dog in my bedroom. He only seemed to feel safe when he was as close to my mom as possible. 

My uncle and my grandpa left the next morning to get back to Indiana. My mom stayed with me for a few days, keeping our new secret as a delightful little treasure that only a select few knew about. We gave him the nickname of "Goodwill Ambassador" because it began to seem that Tip was an exception to Devin's pronouncement of "I hate dogs". Tip also seemed to be a special miracle because there I was, with a dog in my very own home, and I hadn't had any kind of allergic reaction at all. No swollen, puffy, itchy eyes, no rashes, no sneezing, this dog was almost too good to be true for our family. 

Eventually my mom boarded the train with her tiny passenger in tow, and I wished her luck in introducing her surprise to my dad and the three cats. As it turned out, it went pretty well with my dad, who has long known my mom's reputation for being "the one who loves animals". It did not go so well with the cats. Over the next year or so, every time my mom came to Nebraska she brought Tip with her, and we got to see him at family reunions and when we went to Michigan to visit them. He slowly began to accept me as a worthy alternative to my mom when she wasn't around, and sometimes saw me as acceptable even when she was around. Maybe, maybe he was learning to love me as much as I already loved him.

Meanwhile in Nebraska, far away from the squabbles of the sudden introduction between three adult cats and one adult dog who had never had to co-habitat with a creature of the other species, I was facing down the future where all of my children were in school. The day when Hazel would start kindergarten was still about two years in the future, but I could feel it looming over me, large and overwhelming. I didn't really know who I would be without children at home, what I would do, what I wanted to do. Most of all, I wondered who would need me. Who would I take care of? And if I'm not taking care of someone, what's the point of my life? These were the questions I wrestled with, and didn't have any answers for. 

I went back to school myself, taking a few classes at UNL, and that helped. The bustling campus, the energy of youth, it was all a balm to my soul. I knew though, that the following year, when I would start coming home from classes and Hazel wouldn't be just at the neighbor's house to come right back as soon as I was home, but that the house would instead be empty and stay empty, it would crush me. Thus began my campaign.

"Devin," I would say to him at random times and whenever I thought of it, "you don't have to give me an answer right now, but I just want to make sure you're thinking about it. When Hazel starts school, I'm going to need either a dog or another baby. I just want you to know, it's your choice which one." Sometimes I would say, "if we get a dog like Tip..." and eventually I shifted my language to "when we get a dog like Tip..." Devin would sometimes notice the change, and call me out on my use of "when". "Who ever said we were getting a dog?" he would try to complain. To which, I would respond, "oh, does that mean you've decided on a baby, then?" Eventually, about two months before Christmas the year before Hazel started kindergarten, Devin told me that I could start looking for a dog. 

I searched rescues, I searched shelters, I searched breeders. It was so hard to find a dog that was small, hypoallergenic, good with kids, could go to a home without a fence...  The requirements we had were long, and it seemed like the list of available dogs was so short. I called my mom in near tears asking her how do other people find dogs? It was was so much harder than I thought it would be, or should be. My mom offered me Tip.  I told her I couldn't possibly take her dog. As it turned out, it wasn't actually that hard for her to talk me into it. Tip came to us with my mom when she visited in January of 2018.  My mom left him with us on January 23. 

He was ours, now. It wasn't always smooth sailing. I had to learn how to teach my girls how to help take care of him, we all had to learn to read his cues and signals, but from the day my mom left him at my house, he was my boy, my tiny best friend, my little shadow, my constant companion. 

He went with me every morning to take the girls to school, and every afternoon in the long wait to pick them up.  He took me on walks around the neighborhood, and to the park. He sometimes came with me to the store.

In the spring of that year, my girls noticed something on his paw that scared them.  I took him to the vet, because I had noticed him limping, and we all worried about our boy. The vet took a biopsy from two of his paws, the front one and the back one on the left side. 

The front paw was just a cyst, and easy to resolve. The back paw was a malignant sheath nerve tumor, and his leg would have to be amputated. That happened on May 17, 2018. My mom came out to help me, help Tip, recover from that. I don't know how she survived those first few nights, holding him while he cried through the night. We cheered for him every time he was willing to sniff his food, and cried when he took his first bites again. He wouldn't walk for about three days, so we would carry him outside to let him sit in the sunshine and see if the sound of birds and trucks would encourage him back to liveliness. The vet had told us that big dogs sometimes walk on their own out of the vet clinic after an amputation, but that little dogs can take longer to get up and walk. 

I was just on the border of panic that three days was too much longer than she meant, when our neighbor Janice came out with their dog, Teddy, for their walk. And all of a sudden, just like that, Tip was up and doing his best to go along after Teddy. I can still remember seeing his little body bounce and undulate as he tried to learn how to walk this new way, going after his best friend Teddy as fast as he could. He went one driveway, two driveways, before the pain became too much, but oh how I cried watching his interest in life be restored. 

He began having trouble digesting his food in the fall of that year. He had trouble keeping down any food, finding a little corner and bringing it all back up, usually still in perfectly identifiable chunks and pieces.  We took him to the vet, who finally decided that he was just having trouble chewing. And so began his life on a soft food diet. I would mix in the soft food with hard food, and get it all wet until it became a mushy paste. Such a spoiled little puppy, but at least he was no longer losing weight. We had to be so careful not to give him too much food, because he would never eat it all and then it would go to waste. 

It began to seem like he had trouble hearing, seeing, and smelling. Sometimes he couldn't find me in the house.  If I got up while he was sleeping and he didn't notice I had left until I was out of the room, he simply wouldn't be able to find me. It was alarming to realize that if I was in the kitchen and he was in the next room over, even if I was calling for him, he couldn't find me. Perhaps this is why his anxiety started to go up. 

He started barking at shadows, and needing to sleep in my bed at night. Devin thought he was scared of the dark, and he finally was willing to let Tip sleep in bed.  Though Tip had to be careful to stay on my side, he seemed to instinctively know that, his little chin resting on my ankle as we slept. Even now, it's very hard for me to fall asleep without that very small weight on my ankle. 

In the spring of 2020, there was general chaos and confusion in the world. Tip helped me through those weird days of March and April. Though he was sleeping more and more, sometimes not willing to get up for his walk until late afternoon, I prayed constantly that I would not wake up in the morning to find he had died in the night. Every time I walked into a room, the first thing I did was check if he was still breathing. A few more months, I begged him. I need you so much, just a few more months. But he seemed so tired, all the time. One night, Tip and I were sleeping in a closet in the basement because there was a thunderstorm (I had learned over the years that I could get the most sleep if that's what I did). So there we were, curled up in our closet under the stairs in the basement, when he started screaming in his sleep. I thought he was having a nightmare. I thought maybe this was a new manifestation of his terror of thunder and lightning. I shhhh'd him gently, the way you do for babies, and we both fell back asleep. 

A few weeks later, he did the same thing, this time upstairs in bed, and as I was calming him down, I also realized he had wet the bed. That had never, ever happened before and I didn't even know what to do. I got him calmed down, changed all the sheets on my bed, and we all went back to sleep. I worried a little about these strange nightmares, what was my boy suffering from now? I didn't really understand what was happening to him until I came home one Saturday afternoon in June. 

I had been at a Black Lives Matter march in downtown Lincoln, leaving Devin home with the girls. I walked into the house, and as I came into the family room, I saw Tip on the floor. His whole body was shaking, his head was thrown back over his spine, and he was soaking in his own urine. I shouted for Devin. I dropped to my knees next to him. I didn't have any idea what was happening to him, or what had happened to him. He started squealing in agony. And then, suddenly, it seemed to be over. His head came back down off his back to a somewhat normal position, his body stopped convulsing, except his back leg which was still shaking in a strange way, and he still wouldn't get up out of the puddle. What happened to him, I kept asking Devin. But Devin didn't know, no one had even been in the room with Tip before I came home. I couldn't decide if it was safe to pick him up or not. I thought for sure he had some kind of spinal injury from the way his neck was twisted so far back like that. He was staring at me with his huge dark eyes, and I knew he hated sitting in that smelly wet puddle, but couldn't get himself out of it for some reason.

Later that afternoon, he was sleeping on my stomach on the couch. He had spent the entire day sleeping on me after we had cleaned up from that first whatever-it-was, and I had refused to get up all day. I didn't care what Devin was doing, or what my girls were doing, I was going to hold my boy all day. Just before dinner, he had another seizure. It was just as terrifying as the first one, though thankfully he didn't have an accident this time. I still didn't know what it really was, but seizure was the only word I could think of to describe what was happening to my boy. I called my mom on Sunday, told her that I would call the vet on Monday morning. The vet said she would take Tip for observation on Tuesday.

My mom and sister packed up their car Monday morning, loaded up all my sister's kids, and came out to be with me. The vet said Tip was suffering from grand mal seizures, and that at his age most likely brought on by a brain tumor. My sister made the phone call for me to talk to the vet about options, while my mom sat on my other side and cried with me. They let us go in to the vet's office with him for that last goodbye. As his breaths got slower and slower, we discovered that his vet is Brasilian, and the startling joy of that discovery was enough to distract me from the raw suddenness of saying goodbye to my boy. The vet sat and cried with my mom and me, and that was a very tender mercy that I will always be grateful for. It was June 17, 2020, about 4 pm. 

It's possible that I will have another dog someday that I will love as much as I loved my boy. It's also possible that I won't. I am learning to navigate how to be ok with either future. I get to have my girls home for at least an extra two weeks this fall, as we made the choice to start them remotely. I have wondered how much of that choice, on my part, was born out of a selfish need to not be alone in this home that has had too many people in it for too many months.  I spent so many afternoons in the spring hiding, with my dog, from all those people when it became too much and I felt scraped raw. But now I'm back to facing down a future where I am alone, in this home, every day waiting for my people to come back to it, and the looming loneliness terrifies me. I've realized that as much as people can be overwhelming for me, I also don't know how to be alone, day after day. 

Maybe, maybe, maybe it's time for me to figure that out. Maybe Tip was my bridge, my stepping stone to get me over the initial hurdle of saying goodbye to all my babies, and maybe now I have to grow up and just do what millions of other people do, and just be ok. Have their kids go to school, and their husband to work, and not have a dog, and just be ok. But also, right now my sister and I are watching a Korean drama called, "It's Ok to Not Be Ok" and I'm trying to let myself balance that, too. (The Korean direct translation apparently is: "It's Ok To Be Psycho". The point here is, their tv shows have better names than ours do.) 

Wish me luck, navigating life without my boy, his tiny little chin always resting on me, loving me, and being by my side.