Lucky......
Fourteen years ago a friend of ours who lived in Kentucky
had a Chocolate Lab who had puppies.
Chablis wanted one of those puppies so badly. Being the mean mother that I am, I put my
foot down and denied the repeated requests.
We already had a Yorkie and I really didn’t want a big dog that sheds.
Chablis pleaded her case for one of those puppies on the
entire drive home. Louie kept giving me
side long glances and I kept shaking my head “No.” Then Chablis blurted out the one sentence
that melted her father's marshmallow heart. “If I had
a new puppy I’d name it Lucky because I’d be the luckiest girl in the whole wide
world.” I was out voted and I knew it.
The next afternoon Louie and Chablis took off, with an empty
promise that they were just going to “look” at some puppies – some small
puppies. Two hours later they returned
with a 6 month old black Lab that had been scheduled to be destroyed the next
day. “I named her Lucky,” said Chablis
proudly. My heart sank.
Unfortunately Lucky had been confined to a small cage for
the first 6 months of her life. As a
result she did all her business in the cage, which most dogs won’t do. It took me 3 months of extensive work to
break her of that nasty habit. She was
shy and skittish, and panicked any time she had to walk down our ceramic
hallway. She would lay on the carpet in
my office and whine, terrified to walk on that tile floor. It took me 4 months to get her to trust me,
to come when I called her, to chase a ball, to walk around the house. By the end of the first year she was my
constant companion, following me from room to room, always laying at my feet. When I went to the bathroom she would lie
outside the doorway, if I was in the kitchen she laid in the middle of the room and at night, she always curled up in the corner of my
bedroom.
We tried to train her to retrieve ducks or pheasant when we
went hunting. The first time we took her
to the hunting property she spied the pond and leapt in, happily splashing
around in circles. After we shot the gun
at a duck, she ran the other way and that was the last of her hunting
excursions. When we bought the lake
house she scrambled down the hill, tumbled off the break wall, landed in the
lake and swam out towards the mouth of our bay.
The kids and I ran down the shoreline after her, screaming, scared to
death she’d swim out into the main lake.
She just paddled around after
some geese and then returned, covering us with a sheet of water as she shook
herself dry.
She was a good travel dog and all I had to do was open the
front door, yell “Who wants to go to Kentucky?” and she would zoom past me and fly into the back of the truck. She’d
plop down and we’d never hear a peep out of her until we pulled into the lake
house driveway, 425 miles away.
Fourteen years is a pretty good run for a black Lab. She’d been having problems the past few
months, especially with the arthritis in her legs. The past month had been hard on her as she
frequently lost control and peed on the floor.
We often had to grab her around the waist and haul her into a standing
position and when she went out in the yard, she usually needed help climbing up
the 6” from the grass to the deck. I’d
sit and stroke her silky soft ears and hate myself for my increasing thoughts
of putting her down.
Last weekend was an especially bad one for her and on Monday morning I
handed Louie the vet’s phone number and begged him to call and schedule a time to
bring her in. I just couldn’t stand to see her
suffer any longer. I let her out in the
yard and watched her struggle to relieve herself and then hauled her back up
onto the deck. She stumbled from the
back door, through the hallway with the ceramic tiles that she used to hate,
got as far as the kitchen, and she collapsed in a heap. She looked up at me with her huge, dark eyes
and it was like she was saying “That’s it, I can’t do it anymore.” I knew in my heart that God had sent me a
sign that I had made the right decision with the vet.
We slid her onto a blanket and covered her with towels and
spent the day saying our good byes. When
I had to leave to go to the hospital for my mom’s operation, the kids took
turns sitting with her, talking to her, stroking her and holding her head in
their laps. At 6:00 pm Chablis wrapped her in a clean blanket and Tony gently
carried her out to the car and she took her last ride.
The vet was wonderful and caring and joined the 3 of us on
the floor as we surrounded Lucky, kissing her and hugging her and crying over
her. She blinked her eyes a few times,
but I think she was ready to go. And
then she was gone, taking our love and our hearts with her.
I’m glad Chablis named her Lucky. She was a lucky dog because we saved her and
gave her 14 good years with us. But we
were really the lucky ones because she gave us so much more than what we gave
her. I will miss her sweet disposition, gentle spirit, soft ears and the way she loved it when I stroked her head. Lucky was the day that she came home to live
with us – in more ways than one.
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