Beatrix Clementine, May 18, 2014-April 12, 2023: An Exceptionally Good Girl

On Tuesday, Beatrix was the new version of her normal self that we have come to expect in the days since her diagnosis. She ate with gusto (and threw it back up), laid in the sun on the back deck (basking season has always been her favorite), tried to come outside with me when I stepped onto the porch to watch Dorothy bike to school, barked at the cartoon puppy on Super Kitties (a show as terrible as its name suggests, by the way. Jack got into the car to hear the soundtrack playing and said, "Oh, good. the songs from my nightmares."), demanded table food when the kids were eating, slept on the couch, went down to the backyard-- all of the things.

It was HOT in Madison, too, might I add. I wasn't expecting such an April heat wave, so I had all of the windows open, which was fine on Tuesday but definitely less fine yesterday because our house has terrible airflow, and it was nearly 80 degrees inside and out. So, when Beatrix spent all Wednesday morning lounging on the floor against the baseboards by the back door, I didn't think much of it. This is not unusual behavior for her over course of her life-- in fact, it was her norm. Harry came home for lunch when Minnie and I were out running errands and asked if I noticed that she was just sprawled on the floor. I said I had, and he asked me if she was OK. He petted her before he left, but she didn't follow him to the laundry room-- which was weird, but, I mean, she was actively dying of cancer, and the house was hot.

When I got home with groceries, I accidentally put the rotisserie chicken down upside down on the laundry room floor, and the juices spilled a little. NO REACTION from Beatrix. This was concerning because just the other day when we got a Costco Instacart delivery, she went bananas for the chicken when it was still on the front porch (WE ARE IN A SEASON OF ROTISSERIE CHICKEN HERE, OKAY?) I fed Minnie and put her down for a nap and ran downstairs to put Dorothy and Cooper's clean sheets on their beds and heard a loud thump from upstairs. I thought it was Minnie trying to climb out of her crib in her sleep sack and ran upstairs to find Beatrix trying again to climb onto the couch and falling with another loud thump.

Her back legs weren't working. At all. Which explained why she spent the whole morning on the floor.

I called the vet immediately and sat on the floor with her head in my lap. The vet said to bring her in but it would be a good idea to make sure everyone could see her before she left. Ben left work. I called the boys and told them not to go to their after school activities. I planned to take Dorothy and Cooper to dance and dive, like usual just so we would have something to do besides worry about wheat was happening to Beatrix.

Then I just sat with her while Minnie slept, ugly crying and rubbing her head and face because I wasn't sure where her body hurt. I told her all of my favorite memories of her and reminded her what a good girl she had always been. She fell asleep drooling and snoring, which made me cry even more. I brought her some water, and she was able to stand up on wobbly legs to drink it, but then she fell back down. A few minutes later, she stood again to throw the water back up. At one point she dragged herself to her bed and tried to roll onto it. I started to help her, but she recoiled when I touched her torso, so I stuck to her  rubbing her head and face, and she relaxed again. 

When Minnie woke up, I went to her room and opened her curtains and blinds. When I pulled the blinds up to open the window, I heard Beatrix moving and was shocked to find her all the way at the beginning of the front hallway-- as far as she could make it and only a few feet from her bed. Her entire life, the sound of the blinds opening in Minnie's room has been her cue to come running to put her paws on the window sill and bark and the neighborhood, and she tried to heed that particular siren's call until the very end, optimistic and curious to her last breath.

Ben sobbed all the way to the vet's office where her doctor said she had blood clots on her spine and a collapsed lung. He offered her some freshly cooked bacon and a beef stick, and she didn't even try to engage with either of them. A couple people from the dog hotel attached to the vet''s office (where Beatrix vacationed when we went out of town) came to see her, and Ben said they were crying, too.

 The doctor said he could re-inflate her lung and try to remove the clots, but he didn't think that would be in her best interest, although he had hoped, he said, that we would all have more time. We got 10 days between diagnosis and the end. Just 10 days. But also 10 whole days-- good ones, too, except the last.

She wasn't scared to be at the vet, which is why we opted to take her to her doctor instead of keeping her home and having other doctors come to us, and she was peaceful after some pain meds. Ben got to sit with her as she fell deeply asleep and treated him to her zen snoring one more time. After the vet started her IV, Beatrix breathed for just a few more minutes, and Ben sat a little longer, petting her bony body.

He picked Dorothy up from dance and met the other kids and me downtown for ice cream at the Memorial Union Terrace and a shell shocked walk by the lake while we waited for Cooper to finish dive practice. 

"Oh thanks," Dorothy said from behind the huge sunglasses she was wearing to hide her tears. "I am so glad you brought me to see all these happy dogs living their best spring lives." As soon as she said it, we noticed all the galloping retrievers, terriers, spaniels, and shepherds bounding in and out of the lake and chasing frisbees on the grass. Beatrix was never that kind of dog, though.

She was the best kind of dog. Unfailingly sweet. So lazy even as a puppy that she never destroyed anything (except a wall in our entry way that she ate one winter when it was too cold to go outside). She hated other dogs, true, but she loved every human she met, even Minnie who really threw a wrench in her peaceful twilight years. She barked at any dog on TV-- a real dog, a cartoon dog, a person in a dog suit. And! When the dogs would exit the TV stage left, she would bark ferociously and demand to be let outside so she could find them in the backyard, something that always made us laugh. She sat on the couch to watch TV like a person or perched on the back of it like a gremlin. When she was a puppy, she would lose her mind barking at the puppy reflected in the sliding glass door at night or the one looking at her from a newly shined refrigerator, and the day she saw the dog in the living room mirror is one we all remember. Her mortal enemies were the broom, the mop and especially the vacuum. She almost expired from rage the day she met the Roomba who quickly went to live downstairs, a place Beatrix never went because she couldn't stop herself from peeing on carpet. I am pretty sure she thought it was grass.

She and Dorothy were puppies together. Harry and Jack walked her before elementary school for 4 years of mornings. She's the only dog Cooper's not afraid of. Just 5 days ago, she was eating Costco mini chocolate chip cookies out of Minnie's hands. When the sound of Ben's snoring drives me out of our bedroom, it was the sound of Beatrix's on the couch that could put me back to sleep.

She leaves a 40-pound, stinky, snotty (at Beatrix's height up and down the hallway we could often find a trail of snot because she would walk along wiping her constantly runny nose on the wall) hole in the fabric of our days, and we miss her smells and sounds already. Is anything else as soft as her silky ears? Will another mouth ever take a pill wrapped in slightly out-of-date deli turkey from my hands so gently? Will I ever meet another creature who likes a nap as much as I do?

We'll never have a dog like Beatrix again, and we were so lucky to spend the last 8 years and 11 months with her. 

She was a delight, flatulence and all.