Sometime before my brother and I were born, my parents made a pact that our family would never have a pet. They were too much trouble, my parents reasoned, and kids never took care of them even if they promised that they would.
It always seemed so out of the question that I never pushed the issue. However, one day when I got home from school, my Mom kept talking about a segment she had seen on Live With Regis and Kathy Lee that featured pets from the Humane Society. My brother and I excitedly ran the idea past my dad, and the embargo was lifted.
In typical Pace-family fashion, we did our research before we made the purchase. We bought several books about dogs, and we were going to find the perfect breed. (valium) My favorite book was the Reader’s Digest Book of Dogs, which described not only the dogs’ physical appearance, but facts about the dogs, like if they were easy to housebreak, or if they tended to bark a lot. The book also described personality traits of the different breeds, describing the papillon as “smart but at times jealous” and the Chow Chow as “wily and possibly treacherous.”
I heard on the middle school bus that my friend’s dog was going to have puppies. I asked him what kind, and he said golden retriever. I quickly told my parents the news, because I remembered that while most of the other dogs had a list of flaws in the Book of Dogs, the golden retriever did not.
I clearly remember the night that we went out to see the puppies for the first time. It was the day after I got my braces, and after I sorely gummed my way through some Mexican food, we drove over the Alabama border to my friend’s house. The dog that we picked was the first one that approached us, and I guess the logic was that if this dog approached anyone with a mouth full of metal with complementary colored rubber bands, she must have several good character traits going for her?at the very least, bravery, open-mindedness and affection.
The naming process was difficult. First, you don’t want to name a dog after a human, living or dead, because that is just weird. Second, you want to name a dog something that is both easy for the dog to understand and that also doesn’t make you sound like an idiot when you are calling for her in the park (even though anyone feels like a goon shouting in the back yard for the dog to “go potty”). We settled on Holly, because we didn’t have any good friends named Holly, and the name seemed to have a deeper meaning because we picked her up on my birthday, which is close to Christmas.
Lady and The Tramp alleges that dogs and owners start to look alike, and while I’m not quite sure about that?at least I’m hoping not?I do think that dogs start to fit the personality of the family they are living with. Or maybe Holly was just a good match. While she had all the qualifications to be a show dog, we weren’t too big on grooming her, and we got the vibe that she wanted to be low-maintenance anyway. We are a low-key family, and at times Holly acted a little bit like someone had slipped her some animal tranquilizers?she wasn’t out of it, she just wasn’t big on causing a fuss. The only “trick” she knew was how to sit, and she wasn’t the best at retrieving?she’d always get the object you threw, but she’d never give it back.
After I came back from Chile this summer, Holly wasn’t looking too good. She was a 10-year-old dog, but she seemed older than that. We went out of town for the weekend, and when we came back she had trouble walking and couldn’t lift her tail?the same tail that she had held high when she used to run into the lagoon when we were kids, the tail she would thump when anyone would come into the room or say her name. She had also started peeing inside the house, something she never used to do.
We took her to the vet, and she started taking continence medicine and began improving. But taking care of her was a time-consuming job, and we knew that we couldn’t ask any neighbors to do it. So last week, when my parents were taking my brother to college for the first time and I went to the Bahamas to visit a friend, we decided to board her.
When we came back, Holly couldn’t walk. The vet thought that she had slipped a disk, which cut off her spinal cord, making it so she couldn’t move her hind legs. But Holly was determined. Rather than lie without moving, she would drag herself around the room with her front legs, cutting huge wounds into her elbows, where the skin had peeled back and flesh was torn every time she pushed herself. We would help her try to stand up, but she just couldn’t support herself. Her thin body would collapse, her body shaking with the over-working of her heart. I knew that she was in a lot of pain, but she never whined, barked or nipped at us.
Last Saturday my dad made an appointment to put her to sleep. It was like she was on death row, but she didn’t know it, just like she didn’t know why her legs and bowels had suddenly quit working.
During all of that initial dog research, I read a story about a man that had a dog in rural England. After the man died, the dog would walk over every day and sit on his grave. That is the kind of loyalty and unconditional love that dogs can give. What human do you know that would still look happy to see you after you have taken him from his family, and made him hang out with you in a confined little space?
I know that I loved my dog, but it had always been the selfish kind. I know I didn’t play with her enough; I know I should have taken her for walks more. I should have stayed home from the Bahamas to take care of her. But I left, even though she was always there. She was there throughout middle and high school, and she made it until my brother left for college.
I know it was a tough decision for my parents to make. It marked the end of an era, the “Holly years,” my brother’s and my childhood. Mentally, she was fine, but we knew she was in a lot of pain. In the end, we wanted to give back the love that she gave to us. We just didn’t know how.
Gina Pace is a senior in the School of Foreign Service and senior writer of The Georgetown Voice. While she thinks that golden retrievers are the best kind of dog, she is rooting for her friend to adopt a papillon.
