When you first bring home a little bundle of joy from the breeder, full of vim and vigour and gnawing away at anything she can get her teeth on, it’s hard to imagine how quickly she will catch up with you in age.
When I got Lady MacBeth, I was already, shall we say, a mature adult. Ten years later, I’m 10 years beyond mature adult and she has now surpassed me in doggy years.
And it shows. She no longer even thinks about getting up until she’s absolutely certain we’re going somewhere and I’m not just being an annoying human puttering around for no good reason.
She struggles a bit with the stairs now (I feel her pain). And when we go for a walk, she now dictates how long the walk is. I don’t even have a choice in the matter.
For the uninitiated, Lady MacBeth (a.k.a. The Bug) is a Newfoundland. They have a reputation of being stubborn to begin with. When she was younger she could be coaxed into continuing, but now when the old lady is done, she’s done. And at 130 pounds, with four giant paws planted firmly on the ground, she kind of becomes the proverbial immovable object.
She seems to innately know, somehow, that distance we have gone is half the distance she can go. She has not yet, even in her mature wisdom, figured out the concept of a loop and that the distance to where we are going is much shorter going forward than going backward.
But we indulge her, you know, because she’s “getting on in years” as they say.
Sometimes I have to coax myself out of getting overwhelmed by the sadness of knowing, barring some tragedy of my own, that it won’t be that long before the inexorable passage of time takes her away from me.
Ten years ago, I was not a dog person. Lady sort of became my dog accidentally. Now, I can hardly imagine my life without her, but that life is coming all too fast.
I find myself coping by doing all the things I didn’t before. Like paying attention to her even when it isn’t convenient. Letting her sniff things as long as she wants. Letting her up on the furniture (she now even kind of has her own couch). Just letting her live her best life.
The worst thing I can imagine is, when the time comes, not only losing her, but looking back and regretting that I didn’t do everything I could to make her happy in her waning years.