Today we said goodbye to our Madam Curie. Affectionately known as Creep, or Creepo, because in the mornings when she would wake up she would root to the foot of the bed to come out of the covers, stretch out and creep to the head of the bed to wake us up or say good morning.

She’d been with us for 12 years and 8 months. Jami and I hadn’t been married quite two years when she saw a dachshund listed “free to good home” on southeasttexas(dot)com (think of it as a regional facebook marketplace that was started before facebook existed). She sent me the listing as I was getting ready for a graduate seminar class.

The lady brought her to our apartment the next day. She came with a blanket and a leash, that was it. I thought for the longest that she was giving away someone else’s dog. It was that impersonal. She carried her in, handed her to Jami, and then went to look at the guineapigs and leopard geckos we had in the living room of our apartment. She never even gave her a pat goodbye. She did say her name was “Fifi.”

Shortly after we got her we made the maddeningly wild trip across four states to visit campus at OU for graduate school, look for a place to live, drive out to my cousin’s house in Illinois, stop back by and stay at my great aunt’s in Arkansas and then return to Southeast Texas. Day one into the trip and Curie goes into heat, so we spend the trip managing not to get blood everywhere.

She was fixed after we got back and settled. She then rode with us when we came up for Jami to do her math certification test. She and I rode around a bit and ate McDonald’s while Jami was testing. Later when we moved to Oklahoma for good she rode with us all night in the cab of a Uhaul truck. She was always up for an adventure then, loved driving but hated traffic.

She was mostly apathetic to the gaining of Chloe in the November we moved to Norman, but soon warmed up to her and was glad to not be alone at that townhouse. She first hurt her back running at a Husky in the complex we were in. I never thought about the retractable leases being a problem. They are. That was the first of many more back and mobility scares. She was incredibly happy when we moved to a house with a yard in 2014 so she could ramble around and run and take care of business without someone following her around on a leash. Again apathetic (or possibly agnostic) when we brought Freya into the fold that September.

She would take care of all the wayward bugs that came inside, crickets and junebugs would pay for their intrusions. She ate cicadas a few times even though they made her sick, and she once (twice, actually) brought in the toad that lived on the back porch inside to play with. She never hurt it and was careful when she carried it in her mouth.

She caught a bad virus that was going around in 2015 and we thought we were going to lose her then. She was hospitalized at the vet’s office for a few days of fluids and monitoring. In 2016 she hurt or twisted her neck and we had all kinds of medicine for her and a back brace that us and the vet modified with wrappings and gauze to keep her from turning her head. It was a giant turtleneck sweater.

In 2018 before my son was born she hurt her back again, and we could not figure out if it was disk or muscle or both so we treated all. Nothing we did would work and it wasn’t just the normal IVDD problems it was looking like if we couldn’t figure it out she would be completely paralyzed and we thought we were going to lose her again.

She really only started showing her are this past year. As a double dapple her genes were against her from the start. First losing full sight and then her hearing, but she was still peppy and mobile even if she snapped at the other dogs first or if you came up to her too fast without giving her some warning.

Even over the summer when she started losing weight we adjusted her diet and got her back up. She was still feeling good enough to be cranky. September she started losing weight again and we tried special diets, bland diets, cooked foods at home, and we almost kept it at bay. She had congestive heart failure but responded well to the medicine.

The last 10 days were precipitous decline. She ate less and less, and was up and out less and less. As long as she was eating we could keep this new normal. She stopped eating her food earlier this week, and was down to only seven pounds. She continued to eat mixed treats when I would come home for lunch and she’d amble out to sit in the sunshine. She only ate one treat on Thursday and nothing on Friday. She didn’t even get up when I got in. Today was the same. It was inevitable, but we didn’t know when. Expecting it at any time and always taking long looks to see if she was breathing when we passed her bed.

The old adage that dogs will give you some of the best days of your life and one of the worst is one of the truest statements out there. We made the call, it was the right thing to do, she wasn’t hurting per se, btu she had stopped eating and it would have been beyond selfish to keep her basically comatose until she passed away at home. But like I told my son tonight, just because it was the right thing to do didn’t make it easy.

My son tried to keep himself distracted so as not to worry too much about it. Even while we sat with him and told him it was okay to be sad. He cried a little when he said goodbye to her on the table before the final shot, but then went out with one of the vet employees to see and feed two strays they were boarding. He got sad again on the car ride home and didn’t say much, but finally let a good portion of it out when we got home, because “he wanted to be sad here.” It comes in waves, much like it does for us really. He wished she could have lived to be 100 “even if he was cranky”, and he worried that we might forget her. You think you’re already as low as you can go when mourning a pet, until you hear a six year old’s broken voice say “this is the worst day of my life.”

It’s hard to explain to pIeople who don’t get it. Curie had been with us over a quarter of my life. And every night except the few she had to stay at the vet’s office she slept in our bed with us. Between us. She was the first relationship we had together. She was the last thing that tied us to our “before Oklahoma” lives. She was ever-present, and saw us bring two children home. She dressed up with us for the Homecoming Parade the first year we were here. The Grad College had to dress as the board game CLUE and Curie was in a Sherlock Bones outfit, much to the delight of the crowd. That was October 20th, 2012. Homecoming this year was today,( October 19th). almost 12 years to the day.

I am sad, I would say sad beyond words, but there’s probably 1500 of them already here, I am sad we couldn’t do more for her when she got older and sick, I’m sad she isn’t here with me on the couch or sleeping in the bed next to me, and I am deeply sad that today was the last day I got to scritch her behind the ears and under the chin and see her tail wag, even when she wasn’t getting up anymore she would still enjoy that.

But more than sad I’m angry, I guess because that is part if it, too. I’m mad that it had to be done, but I’m curiously mad that it was so convenient. That it could be schedule and taken care of around other things. I am mad that when it was done the sun was still shining and the wind was still blowing outside. But I think I am mostly angry at the fact that her not physically here is not more disruptive. Her passing deserves to be inconvenient, deserves to be upsetting, and yet we still had dinner and even setup to watch our movie outside. To maintain some sort of normalcy as if she were home inside asleep in her dog bed under the television. Meanwhile my insides are screaming that she meant more than this, and it’s not fair. And I am angry at how relieved I am that it’s over.

She wasn’t just a pet, or an accessory. She wasn’t a working dog, or a therapy dog. She was family, she was the first one that made us a pack. She was a life, a spark, an energy now released back into the universe and she deserves to be remembered better than an online eulogy can provide. Anytime one of us was sick of laid up, she was right there with us through the whole ordeal, never leaving our side unless it was to get a drink or a bite to eat.

One of the kid’s at my son’s school lost a baby sibling recently(ish). The baby was three months he says because the older sibling talks about visiting their grave every week and their spirit. We’ve gone back and forth for years about ghosts not being real from the Scooby stuff and others, but we were talking between out story and going to sleep tonight and he was concerned that Curie’s spirit would get messed up by the cremation. We haven’t gotten into the whole soul, western beliefs system with him yet, but I assured him that spirits (or souls–which I do think if we have them animals do, too) don’t wait around after the physical body is too weak to hold them. And as I was sitting there explaining that some people see death as releasing your inner energy back into the universe in a different form, or a different place (we did talk about heaven as an idea briefly), I told him that sometimes the people who loved you very, very much can still see that energy in the form that you were in during the best parts of your lives together. I have no idea where that came from, but it helped him, and I think I am going to hold onto it for myself as well.

I’ve outcried my sadness for the moment and have a permanent headache and pressure in my sinuses. I think of the times that we were worried we’d be losing her in the past, only to be blessed with four, six, then 8 more years, only to watch her waste away. She was small when we got her, being a “mini” and for a time in the middle was heavier than she should have been, but in the end she was just so little, and there was nothing else we could do. There was nothing left, but when we moved her to her other side to find a better vein for the final shot, while scratching her ears and talking to her we did get two final tail wags. I’d like to think that it was her way of saying things were going to be alright and thank you for staying with me until the end.

Goodnight, Sweet Creep.