When Email has four legs

Today was a really bad day in the family. After ten years of love, devotion, and patience, our boy Email was mercifully released from his mortal coil. He was blind, deaf, incontinent, and coughing painfully. I know we made the right decision. We had long held out hope that he would get better but in my case, I could not let go of the glory days when he was a wild, excitable thirty pound Pug, and yearning for a lap in which to snuggle. Today, I held his head in my hands as the drugs carried him away. As I said, today was not a good day…

Email the pug came into our lives when one of L.’s co-workers received a job offer in NYC and offered several of her five Pugs up for adoption. L., being an animal lover and a soft touch, was an easy mark. As she told me the story, she was driving this smelly, odd breathing, bug eyed creature to our piece of shit house in a dreadful neighborhood, and “he keeps staring at me and making this horrible hhhhrrrrrrr hhhhrrrrrrrrrr” sound. When he arrived at our dump, he was six years old, named Amile, and had been trained to defecate towels in the house as though they were doggie rest areas. He had worn his collar so long without a bath that a bald spot had been rubbed into his neck. His nails had curled under like they were eye-hooks. After taking one look at him, we could not in good conscience send him back to the Cruella Deville mistress from which he had come. So we took him in, changed his name, and crate trained him – at six years old.

For nearly every day for the next six months, we would arrive home to a black Pug marinating in the mix of his own urine and feces; requiring a bath for him, if not for ourselves as well. It was awful; yet we did it because he was the sweetest dog in the world. When we decided to adopt him, we did it out of mercy – he had been mistreated and we could make it better. And in a few months time, we were as happy a doggie family could be. He was the best dog a family could wish for. Treats to him, were manna from the Gods. A scratch behind the ears seemed a pleasure unknown until us. He would run headlong into your knees, just to be near you. That dog had a bark that would grab your attention like a siren, just egging for you to rub his belly. We would rename him Email, housetrain him, and take this bizarre misfit into our hearts. We loved his weirdness; we reveled in it. He was a strange little dog that had stolen our hearts. We were the happiest dog parents in the world.

When he first got sick, we tried usual stuff. Visits to the vet, etc. Eventually, we were told that our boy required tons of surgery that we could not afford. He would have to go to NC State and have an operation that he may not survive. He made it work so we made it work. He lived through the operation and we bought ourselves a couple of years. Those years have been trying, but that is what you do when you love someone. You make it work…

Today, well, we could not make it work anymore. I think that I was somewhat selfish in that I could not let him go without one more fight. He had earned the right to one more shot at the crown. But as our Vet gave Email the last shot of his life, he said that he had fought the good fight – and our boy had. He was sixteen or seventeen years old. He was now down to twenty pounds but still tough as nails. In his prime, he took on a Boxer, twice his weight, and gave not an inch. Today, he would have done the same if he could.

But as I watched the life drain from him, I know the life he had lead. He had fought the good fight. He had proven the old adage:

What matters is not the size of the dog in the fight but the size of the fight in the dog…

On that score, our Pug Email was Great Dane…