Across the Rainbow Bridge

Remembering Eddy

The kid wanted a dog.

She started asking for one when she was four. I always told her that when the time was right, the universe would bring us the right dog. I’ve long been a firm believer in animals finding you when you need them most, and at that time, the stars were not aligned.

When she was five, she asked again. It wasn’t the right time. We were still struggling. We didn’t need the added responsibility.

At six, she asked again. I had to tell her no. We weren’t in a position to get a dog at that time. “That’s fine,” she said. “I’ll just have an unhappy childhood.”

Ouch. Good line, kid.

A year later, we ended up being the temporary caretakers of a friend’s yellow Labrador Retriever. Harley was a brilliant dog, but it was pretty obvious that our house was a little too small for a Lab. If we were ever going to have a dog, it needed to be smaller.

We liked Corgis because everyone likes Corgis. It seemed like the right size. Corgis don’t end up in shelters too often, though. We needed something Corgi-sized.

In 2016, when the kid was 11, there was a news story about a bunch of dogs arriving at the Dane County Humane Society from an overcrowded shelter in Oklahoma. The kid looked them up online and found a litter of half-corgi, half-heeler puppies, about six months old. One of those would be perfect.

We went to the shelter on Saturday to see them, but there was a line backed up out the door that day. When we asked to see the puppies we’d seen online, we were told they were all adopted.

I guess it wasn’t meant to be. We left without a dog, fully dejected.

On the following Monday, I was having a bad day at work. The job I had for almost a decade was going away. The writing was on the wall. It would only be a limited time before the doors closed for good, and I’d be jobless. I was depressed and worried about the future.

As I had done several times while I worked at MMI, I went over to the dog shelter on a lunch break just to see the cats and dogs. It was always nice to see the animals, and the shelter wasn’t far from work. It was something fun to do.

That day, I walked into the dog section of the shelter and found it largely cleaned out. However, a sad, scared, lethargic spotted half-Corgi, half-Heeler puppy was lying next to the door in the first stall. I summoned one of the volunteers and asked about it. “I thought they’d all been adopted.”

“This one wasn’t ready to be put out this weekend.” The little puppy had been spayed earlier in the week and hadn’t recovered enough to be subjected to the adoption fair held the past Saturday.

“Is she available?”

“She is.”

“I’ll take her.”

The volunteer gave me some time with her in one of the adoption rooms to see if I liked her. She was scared, but I held her on my lap, stroked her short, coarse fur, and after a few minutes, she gave my hand a couple of tentative licks and seemed to relax a little. She would be okay.

The pound’s paperwork called her Eddy. She was a stubby-legged, spotted, walleyed little thing with radar dish ears. I signed the necessary documents, paid the fee, and took her home. I stopped and bought all the necessary dog-raising accoutrements at Mounds Pet Food Warehouse.

At 3:30 pm, both wife and child were due home, so I went outside with Eddy on a leash and waited. The wife pulled into the driveway first. She had one of those looks on her face. That look when your spouse thinks you’ve done something insane. “What did you do?”

A few moments later, the bus dropped off the kid, and an unsuspecting 11-year-old got her first glimpse of her new best friend.

Needless to say, I was Dad of the Year.

We tried to think of a better name for her for about a week, but unable to come up with anything better, she remained Eddy.

Ed for short. Sometimes Dog or Dogface. Sometimes, she was Weaselnose.

Ed was one of the good dogs. She was shy and unsure at first. I figured she came out of some trauma because every time I approached her, she ducked and cowered like she was about to be hit. Once she knew you were only there to give her love, she was the happiest thing in the world. She loved to be touched.

Especially belly rubs.

But she didn’t flop over on her back like normal dogs. She sat next to you on the couch and used a paw to drag your hand toward her stomach. She would sit and make you rub her belly while she stared at you. If you stopped, she pawed at you until you started again.

Eddy loved walks. Sometimes, she would run out on the retractable 20-foot lead, sniffing madly at everything. When she hit the end of the lead, she would curl her body into a half-circle to make sure I was still following her. When she saw I was, she would wag her tail and smack herself in the face a dozen times while I caught up to her.

She was smart. Very food motivated. She learned some tricks quite easily. She understood what we wanted from her. We used to say her IQ went up 100 points if you had cheese in your hand.

Whenever we came home, Ed would be at the door to greet us, a stuffed toy in her mouth like a fuzzy pacifier and her tail smacking the wall in a rhythmic thudding.

Ed went to sleep on the kid’s bed every night. At some point in the middle of the night, she would leave the kid and come to our bed. This was the routine for years. When the kid was at a friend’s house for the night or when the kid went to college, Ed slept in our bed, a 35-pound weight between us.

Ed was never difficult. She was always laid-back. She loved people. She loved other dogs. She loved going to the dog park and socializing. When she was young, she loved to have other dogs chase her. She had that blazing heeler speed and could turn on a dime. She would bait a dog into drifting left, then cut hard right and leave the poor chaser in her dust.

When she got older, she lost some of her speed, and when other dogs would catch her, she got a little cranky. No one likes getting older.

Eddy loved to be included. She hated riding in the car but would always want to go along just to be someplace new when the car stopped.

It’s been almost a decade since we got her. Unfortunately, she started showing signs of lethargy. I thought it was depression because she wasn’t getting as many walks due to the winter’s cold and my worsening knee and foot injuries.

The kid took her for a walk the first day she was home from college for spring break and came back minutes later with a phrase no pet owner wants to hear: Eddy’s peeing blood.

A vet visit was arranged, and the diagnosis wasn’t promising. Signs pointed to leukemia or a pretty serious autoimmune disorder. She was given steroids, and without signs of improvement, there was not much to be done.

When she couldn’t keep water down, we knew her time was short.

The UW vet hospital tried their best to pull her back from the brink, but she didn’t have it in her. At four o’clock this morning, we had to let her go.

Eddy crossed the Rainbow Bridge four or five years before most dogs her size make that journey. She was everything you ever would have wanted in a family dog.

I made sure to let her know she was the best dog ever.

And she was.

It never fails to amaze me how much an animal can weave itself into the fabric of your heart. I still miss Fred and Barney, the dogs my family had when I was a kid. I miss Macbeth, Hermione, and Marley—the three cats my wife and I have had to let go over the last twenty-six years.

But losing Eddy feels different.

She was my dog. She was Kaija’s dog and Annika’s dog, too. But she was my dog first. I brought her home from the shelter. I was the one she followed. I was the one she deferred to out of the three of us. I was the one she demanded belly rubs from the most. If Kaija and Annika were in the living room watching TV, and I was in the bedroom reading, Ed would want to be on the bed with me.

It’s going to be hard to picture life without her. For the better part of the last decade, I have not finished a single sandwich on my own. Ed always got the last bite. Without her, to whom will I pay the cheese tax? Without her, who will decide I’ve slept enough at 7:30 am on a lazy Sunday morning?

Get up, man—there’s bellies to be rubbed!

I don’t know if I will ever have another dog.

Right now, I don’t believe I will.

I got the best dog in the world the first time I adopted one. I don’t know if I want to try my luck again.

I know it’s been said before, but the worst part about adopting a dog is knowing they’re going to go before you.

I don’t know what comes after this life, but if Eddy isn’t there waiting for me when it’s my time, I don’t want it.

She will be missed.