Loo is Leaving.

I hate today. I hate being a grown up and I hate being forced into making decisions that feel a lot like playing God. Yesterday, I let you live. But today? Today, I end you. But here we are this today that I’ve already changed twice, and it's upon us, and I have to do this – and my mister is going with me to hold my hand, to make certain I don’t flee the vet’s office screaming “Run, Loo! Run!” with my all-done Great Dane, which is exactly what I did Monday.

Loo is leaving. We’ve had pancakes for breakfast and lasagna for lunch. She’s had oatmeal pie and a ham bone. I’ve bathed her still larger-than-life even when withered body, rubbed the webbings between her toes. I’ve laid on the floor spooning my girl, negotiating, flip flopping, finding and losing conviction. Weeping. I’m not certain I can compare this loss to any yet suffered, though, I am by no means the first to experience it, and Loo isn’t our first pet to meet this fate. But for me, this is different. With her, it’s different. I’m sure many of you have been in this exact spot – and I’ll apologize now for not realizing just how deep the agony of it was. Sad yes, sad before – but this. This shit is agony.

There is a long series of unfortunate events that has led us to This Moment more quickly than we imagined, even though we’d discussed This Moment as recently as last Friday, before the terrible happenings even occurred. But then they did, and here we are and now it’s time.

But, oh, my Loo. My big, stinky, slobbering girl, Talulah Sassafrass Bellamy. She is a Blue Merle Great Dane and ironically, before moving to our little town – the only other singular time I’d been here was the day we got Talulah. We took her from her mother when she was still so new her grey hadn’t set in but instead she was rather … purple. I shit you not – a purple puppy. We sought her out for a reason, see. Long short of it – our little bungalow in East Dallas had been robbed. We had a dog, a handsome if not all-fearing fellow named Niko. Our burglars maced poor Niko, and I was pissed. Figured ol’ boy needed someone bigger to protect him. I felt incredibly vulnerable, too. I wanted a presence. So, a Great Dane it was. And a presence she is.

With paws the size of saucers, she grew clumsily into her full form of boob-high (next to me) and two hundred pounds. From our very first outing with her, everywhere we went, folks were Dane experts. Folks with weenie dogs, folks with labs, folks with cats and no dogs at all. It wasn’t just her largesse they commented on, but rather a whole battery of Things You Should Know Since The Internet Might Not Inform You Well Enough Factoids on Danes. We were shocked to discover how often and quickly strangers were to point out a typical Great Dane’s lifespan – eight years (and that’s pushin’ it!) We knew that. They’d say things like “Wow, that’s a really incredible dog. Too bad she’s gonna die in a few years.” Or, someone with more tact once said, “Isn’t she majestic? If only they lived longer. You *do* know that Dane’s have notoriously short life spans, right?”

Loo is the kind of girl that slobbers Richard from elbow to wrist and hard-pokes him with her big blunt nose if he slaps my ass, or if I emit any sound of despair or fright. She never says anything unless there is something serious to say, she’s never abused her booming ‘wooof.” I’ve never heard her whine or whimper. If she gets upset, or scared, she pants. We pet her, beg her to close her hot hole. If Richard and I get sideways, she’s there to nudge and poke until we hug it out – mediating. If our boy is rough housing with friends or cousins, she’s there to referee. When I was pregnant with each of our children, she never left my side. Matter of fact, when we brought our first child home from the hospital, she aimed to help me out – started lactating herself. Of course, we didn’t take her up on this, even though there were a few nights new motherhood and exhaustion had me considering “why not?!” She is in constant watch over both our children, ever on their heels, always vigilant. She’s laid at my feet through every page I’ve ever written.

Come year eight, even our former vet told us to start watching the clock – that we were on borrowed time. We still knew it. But Loo didn’t. She has kept on keeping on – defying most stereotypes specific to Blue Merles and then the general breed. She’s eleven – and that’s a freakin’ miracle! But after all of our years together, she’s going out for the very reason I sought her in the first place – for doing her job, for protecting me.

You might not think a raccoon is anything to fear, but we encountered one this past Sunday who was the Kujo of Coons. It was rabid, it charged me, Loo moved faster than she has in more than two years and nailed that little fucker. She grabbed it by the neck, crunched it between her teeth and promptly slammed it into the base of a silver maple tree. The kind of tree that looks like it’s pulling up it’s skirt and showing you it’s panties every time the wind blows. The same tree we hang our son’s piñata from on each of his birthdays. I stood under that tree’s panties and pulled my now withered, elderly protector off that coon, screeching all the while.

As soon as we were a clear distance from it, Talulah put her giant nose in the palm of my hand and pushed. She was so proud. She’d done something very good and she knew it. But in the doing – she’d bitten a rabid animal and that little fact would set all kinds of unpleasant things into motion that included but were not limited to me low-talking to the Animal Control officer to take his leave or I’d bite him myself, to our old vet in Dallas being so far out of date on state laws and regulations and telling me Loo needed to be destroyed immediately, her head cut off and sent to Austin where they’d check her brain for virus – and further, myself, my son, my husband and our toddler who was never even outside – would all four have to have the dreaded rabies protocol and ps? Those come at the low, low, save-your-life price of two to eight THOUSAND dollars PER person. God help any poor folk who get attacked by a rabid animal – they be screwed.

Flash forward to a more subdued, calm, comforting voice of the amazing and wonderful Dr. Steve Albers. We first met Steve when he accompanied his child to our son’s birthday party two years ago, they were pre-school mates. He met Loo then, and we spoke then about This Moment. When to recognize it, how most Danes didn’t endure like she had and so forth. So I called Steve. He said other vet’s opinion was certainly an option, but not the only option. Another option included quarantine and the human rabies protocol which ironically, when administered to dogs, is not two to eight thousand dollars, but rather closer to about four hundred when all said and done. This has been proven affective for healthy, vaccinated dogs. “Let’s check her over,” he said.

The once-over revealed some things we already knew, and some things we didn’t. We knew she was arthritic (and I credit my homeopathic approach to this for it not yet getting the better of her), we knew she was beginning to lose her hearing, that her eyes were getting a bit fogged, a tad milky. We knew she was so old no amount of bathing would make her smell any less than mildly foul and that mildness would last mere hours before returning to full-on rank. We knew she had cartilage slippage on her hind heels. And on top of all that, ol’ girl has been incontinent for close to a year. I promise you – the only thing to rival an incontinent Dane would be a horse. And the only thing that can poot and toot worse than an old Dane is an elephant, but who puts a dog down for pooping her bed?

Shut up, I know.

The kicker though, was cancer. Ol’ girl has a mass that hasn’t metastasized, but will. Bottom line? Talulah, in all she’s survived, cannot survive the cruel trappings of the required ninety day quarantine. We can’t do it to her. We won’t. Contrary to the belief that dogs are dogs and they can all endure the great outdoors, it just ain’t so for Danes, and the brutal Texas summer temps are fast approching. But now this God forsaken coon has come along, and things we could have had time to address, to navigate until This Moment came naturally – have stacked against us and left us no choice. Even though I want to rail and rant about how she’s a statistical phenom, has already beaten every odd… she might could now! She could possibly… maybe?

And I am suddenly a petulant child who wants to stomp my foot, throw myself in the floor and pitch a wall-eyed fit. I’ve cried more in the past two days than I have collectively over the past two years. My kind parents have offered to relieve me of this, to take her for me… but of course, I can’t let them do that. I can’t let her go without me whispering in her ear. So instead they’ll watch our children while my man and I go do the grown up thing. The self-less thing. The terrible, heart wrenching right thing.

So yeah. I’m already deep in my cup. I’m a wrecked mess. (So do beg a natural pardon for this rough cut, once-read entry.) I’ll never be ready for this. Talulah is at my feet now. Listening to all my keyboard clacking and sniffling. And we’re gonna go now. And I’m going to whisper in her ear…

Safe travels, ol’ girl, easy passage. I’ll catch you on the flip side.  I love you. God, I love you. My constant companion, my guardian and protector. And thank you. I haven’t the words for this type of gratitude, for this type of partnership. Thank you… for every moment. You have been every single thing I ever wanted in a dog. You are my good, good girl.

I hate today. I hate right now. But now is here. And here we go.