Bespotted: My Family's Love Affair With Thirty-Eight Dalmatians

by Linda Gray Sexton

  After a while, I picked up the spray bottle and began to wash him down, where the IV had been, where the Betadine had stained his skin, where the urine was left from his final accidents. There were no words. There were only my hands on his still, warm body. Only the tears streaming down my face, stinging my eyes. After a while, I pulled his sheepskin blanket up around his shoulders. I kissed him and pulled him into my arms once again.

  Brad was still sitting in stunned silence. I knew the people in the waiting room could hear my noisy sobs, but I didn’t care.

  We sat with him for another half hour, I think. I didn’t look at my watch. I kept stroking him. I didn’t know how to stop.

  But at last it seemed that it was time to leave. I didn’t want to see him stiffen and the life that was still there, such as it was, go out of him with finality.

  I went to the door again and called for the vet. “You won’t just put him in a heap somewhere?” I asked. “You’ll keep him covered with his blanket?”

  “He has to go into the freezer,” she answered, apologetically. “Just until they come to get him. I’m sorry. They should be here by this afternoon. But I’ll make sure his blanket stays with him.” She reached down and unbuckled his collar and handed it to me. I gripped the leather in my hand: his life, his death.

  •••

  PART VII

  afterward

  {IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE}

  Breeze

  Mikey

  fifteen

  I WAITED, WITH SORROW and anxiety, and finally in a few weeks, the animal hospital called to say his ashes were ready to come home.

  The day was sunny, just like the day he died. I was teary before I even got through the door. The receptionist bent to a cabinet beneath the desk and pulled out a little pine box with a brass plaque that had his name stamped on it. I cradled it against my chest, and we drove home again. As simple as that.

  Breeze greeted us at the door and examined us both, hard, with her nose, undoubtedly smelling the vet’s office on us again, and suspicious as to why we still didn’t have Gulliver with us. She had continued to look for him, day after day, wondering why she was suddenly eating out of his food bowl at the raised stand I couldn’t bear to see empty. Why he wasn’t there to play hide-and-seek around the couch. Why he wasn’t there to curl up with, sated, after dinner. Or to romp up and down the hill with first thing in the morning after breakfast. She was depressed, too, picked at her food, and just lay on the rug, facing the back door, as if she expected him to come in at any moment.

  The days went on.

  I didn’t know what to do with the box of ashes; I couldn’t figure out where to put it: the mantel just didn’t feel right, but eventually I put it up on a bookshelf in the family room because that was where he had spent most of his time in the later years, sleeping on the sofa. Not the right location, but the only one I could think of.

  When I was very young, my family used to drive past cemeteries on the way to other spots. My sister and I always held our breath as we passed, squealing about “catching cooties” from the dead. Pet cemeteries were the worst, with their monuments and markers, and we always made fun of them. I had allowed Gulliver’s body to be cremated because I didn’t know what else to do, and I didn’t want to bury him on our property because if we moved, he would have to be left behind. There wasn’t a pet cemetery near us, and he would have felt too far away even if there had been.

  Increasingly, I wasn’t happy with his location. I wanted a place that was less prosaic than a bookshelf. More special. Something that appropriately represented my feelings for him. A friend suggested creating a garden for him, and this seemed a brilliant idea, to create a place that would be the home for his urn and that would flower with blooms during the spring and summer.

  I knew just the spot. Behind the house there was a little space that got a bit of sun during the day. It had a chaise longue for sitting in and daydreaming, right under three enormous Monterey pines. On windy days, the branches soughed in a comforting manner, and the needles that dropped during the autumn months left a soft bed underfoot. In spring, the dust of the pollen fell like yellow rain, and I would sneeze when I visited. The tiny pond I had built there made a patter as water spilled from the mouth of a small bronze frog. I bought several large terra-cotta pots and planted them carefully, and then piled round gray landscape stones to create a little platform for him.

  But then I realized I couldn’t put a wooden box outdoors, susceptible to our rainy winters. And so I found myself on the Internet, doing something I would never have anticipated back in those days when my sister and I held our noses while passing cemeteries: I searched for animal cremation urns. Not surprisingly, I found quite a lot of them, and I spent a long time deciding which would be the best. At last I settled on one that was a deep green marble, with a classic design, and of a size big enough to hold a dog of sixty-five pounds. That was how they were sold: by the weight of the body. I thought about his body again, how still and soft he suddenly became when the last breath stopped midway in his throat. I ordered the urn and had Gulliver’s name engraved on it. It took only a week for it to be delivered.

  One day in late June, while Brad was at work, I opened Gulliver’s small pine box. Somehow I felt the act of transferring his ashes was private—just between him and me. Inside there was only a clear plastic bag of gray dust. I picked it up and held it in my palm. It was cool to the touch and squished in my fingers.

  My hands shook as I placed the bag that now held my dearest friend into his final resting spot. Carefully, I pushed it down into the mouth of the urn and settled him in. Then, along the edge, I squirted out a thick line of the marine adhesive Brad always used on the sailboat, sealing the urn shut and protecting Gully from the rains that would come in October.

  I set it down on the platform I had built in the garden, situating it carefully so that the inscription was immediately visible as you came into the space, his name and his dates engraved in a subtle gold—all that I had wanted. I didn’t want “beloved,” or “in our hearts,” or anything that might seem maudlin. I hadn’t even put down his show name when I ordered it because, in the end, he was just “Gulliver.”

  I rummaged around in the garage until I found the dog angels that Dawn had given me when I had to put Rhiannon and Tia to sleep. Flat and cut from wrought iron, they were attractive, generic-looking dogs, in profile, with small wings coming off their backs. I had never used them, perhaps because my guilt over Rhiannon and Tia’s death had been so keen for so long. They were rusty now, but that didn’t matter. I only wished I had one for Gulliver. Their stakes sunk deeply down into the soil, and soon they were flying next to his urn, keeping him company.

  I would never again pass a pet cemetery and hold my breath.

  •••

  I visited him every day and told him everything we would have discussed if he had still been here: what was going on in the house, what was happening between Brad and me, how Breeze was doing without her big brother, how my work was progressing. Everything. I touched the cool marble the way I had once stroked his warmth and told him how much I loved him.

  A month passed. The impatiens I had planted there bloomed pink and ivory; the lobelia and alyssum hung over the edges of the pots in a froth of blue and white. I came in the mornings after breakfast, and in the evenings before supper. I hung his collar on the handle of my purse and felt that he went

  everywhere with me. He was as full in my mind as he had been in my life. With time, I grew afraid that the collar might drop off, and so I reluctantly removed it and hung it on the photo of him I kept beside my bed—the photo to which I said good night every time I turned out the light, stroking his soft face, now behind glass.

  And I began to wait for the pain to subside.

  sixteen

  I FORCED MYSELF TO work. But grief still reigned. Being unable to work on anything new that was creative and connected to the actual process of writing scared me, reminded me of the tim
e when Gulliver was all that stood between me and death.

  I wasn’t able to go down to my office. It was too filled with the memories of him curled up in the blue armchair. If I’d had a nine-to-five job, I would have left home and gone somewhere that wasn’t filled with memories. Worse still, writing required you to open yourself up. Without that surrender to the unconscious, imagination refused me. And so instead I just sat at the little desk in the kitchen where I ordinarily paid the bills.

  Yet, to be without memories didn’t feel right either, and so I began to hang up photos of Gulliver, taping his many faces onto the cherry cabinets that held my cookbooks over the desk. There he was in profile. Or lying snugged up on the boat with his head on his paws in his life jacket. Looking up at me, adorned with the flower wreath he wore as a ring bearer for our wedding. Cuddling at Christmas with Brad and me, on the green sofa. At a show, with Butler and Ashley, after one of her big wins in Brood Bitch. In bed, his head on my chest, my hand draped around his sturdy neck.

  Every week, I added a new photo.

  He looked down over me, still keeping watch. Someday, I would take down the photos, and this period of mourning would be at an end. Someday he would live on only in my heart.

  We weren’t really able to hold a service for Gully until a few months after he had passed. And then we took the sailboat out to “Gulliver’s Beach” at Paradise Cove, both places that now seemed so right. And right there that day, opposite his beach at Paradise, we dropped the hook. The hours passed until we waited for precisely the right time. At sunset, we went up onto the deck to say our true good bye. It was a calm evening and the boat barely rocked, just the current passing, giving us a stable footing at the bow.

  I had brought along a carefully selected bunch of flowers, and as the sun set, casting an orange light over the small waves, I began to drop them alongside the boat, into the water.

  “This is lavender,” I told him, throwing a handful of the fragrant stems over the side. “Lavender because you loved to romp through the plants in my garden and come in smelling of the musky scent.

  “And this is a rose, from the bush Dawn gave us right after you died.

  “This is a yellow daisy because it was my Mom’s favorite flower, and I know she would have loved you as much as I do—and because I am sure she is here with us right now.

  “This is alyssum, white, for the purity of your heart.

  “And bleeding heart—purple for your courage, and red for your love.

  “This is a pink rose from the arbor that arched over the back door to the house, your favorite way to come in to get your supper at night.”

  I dropped the last bloom, and Brad and I just stood there with hands linked and tears falling, as the flowers lay on top of the waves without sinking.

  They passed the stern, carried away from us on the current until they became mere specks in the distance—floating straight toward the beach that we had named as his.

  seventeen

  IN NOVEMBER, THE RAINS began and the flowers in the garden died. Gully’s urn looked forlorn. I couldn’t bear the idea that he was cold and lonely out there now that I couldn’t sit in the lounge chair and visit, and so I brought him inside, setting the urn on my desk next to my computer. Only Myrna and Brad understood my reaction, and I didn’t admit it to Dawn, who was so practical and pragmatic and might have seen it as silly. I didn’t want to hear any jokes about what I had done.

  A few more months passed. The loss did not ease but kept changing shape. I remembered him with joy and sorrow, but no longer with the shocked pain his death had originally brought, no longer with the deep and dark emotion I had felt in those days after I took him from our lives with my decision. No longer with the anger I had originally felt toward God or life or fate or whatever was responsible for his untimely death. Even the uncertainty about the decision to put him to sleep began to pass. It was taking time to go through the many stages of grief, as much time as I had imagined it would when I had worried about losing Gulliver in years past. The days moved by slowly.

  And then that winter, just as the publication date for my next book arrived, loss descended once again. This time it was Myrna. Myrna, who had stood up as my bridesmaid just one year before. Now, terrible night sweats plagued her, though at sixty-three, she was past menopause. At last, she consulted with her doctor. After an MRI determined that there was some kind of a tumor in her abdomen, the subsequent PET scan “lit up,” an indication that the growth was indeed malignant. We all sat back in shock.

  The diagnosis: metastatic melanoma. The tumor was the result of a small, malignant lesion on her ankle ten years back, one which the doctors had promised her was entirely eradicated. She hadn’t had to have chemo then; clean margins had been obtained, and the lymph nodes were clear. No one mentioned that small determined cancer cells might slip past the nodes and reseed themselves elsewhere.

  After a biopsy, her condition was categorized as Stage 3B. Melanoma, her oncologist explained, was a sneaky kind of cancer. Not something easy to cure, as was that of the colon. Pat had died because she had waited too long to respond to her symptoms.

  But Myrna hadn’t avoided doctors and had had her regular mammograms, her regular checkup with the dermatologist to make sure that the original site on her ankle was inactive. Under the pall of her diagnosis, my winter grew even bleaker, filled by gray skies and rain. I didn’t allow myself to think of the worst: what would I do if the friend who understood me so well died?

  May rolled around, and with it, the first anniversary of Gulliver’s death. I spent a lot of time sitting outside with his urn, back in the garden now. I mooned around, sadness revving up in me, tears returning, inundated with flashbacks from the day he died, the terrible act of putting him down. And here was Myrna, too. For a while, it all seemed too much to bear. At night, I couldn’t succumb to the undertow of sleep.

  However, Dawn temporarily shook me out of my worry by suggesting that we breed Breeze when she came into season again: perhaps by the time the puppies were born in the summer, nearly a year and a half after Gulliver’s death, I would be ready for a new dog, and this time maybe I would decide to show it; perhaps it would cheer me up as I sat there afraid for my dear friend. But part of me worried that a new puppy would just make me miss Gulliver more. It would be part of letting go, part of putting him to rest at last.

  And so, I wasn’t sure I would be ready.

  Nevertheless, I was willing to try, just as I was trying to be cheerful whenever Myrna and I went out to lunch. Now it was my turn to keep her company through a crisis, as she began her rounds of chemo and blood transfusions. Sometimes we sat together in the hospital and I read to her as she lay with tubes running into her, carrying the precious fluids that might save her. We didn’t talk about what would happen if none of it worked. Sometimes, in the late afternoon, if we were feeling sleepy, we both closed our eyes and took a nap.

  The chemo was grueling, and most of the time, she was exhausted. I couldn’t visit her as often as I wanted, and so we often spent an hour or so on the phone during the evenings. In some odd way, it helped her if she could recite her symptoms to me, over and over again, like a mantra, as she tried desperately to exert control over all that was happening to her. Slowly, her strength drained from her—but never her spirit. Generous and empathetic to a fault, she always insisted, no matter how poorly she felt, on knowing what was happening to me—with Brad, with work, with the kids, with the dog. And with the possibility, which now presented itself, of having another litter. And in this way, the subject of puppies came up, despite Myrna’s bleak outlook. I retreated into the idea of new life as a way of avoiding what was truly threatening me.

  •••

  This time around, however, it would be a bit more complicated than it had been with Rhiannon and Ashley. For one thing, I no longer had the equipment required for having puppies. And if I were lucky enough to have a show candidate, I had discarded all the paraphernalia from my show career. All my
suits and treat pouches. All my show leashes and collars. All my obedience equipment, given to me by my father over the years as Christmas gifts, which reminded me, silently, of Rhiannon: out had gone the expensive broad and high jumps in their nifty canvas bag; into the Dumpster went the custom-made wooden dumbbells and also the metal articles, never touched because we never got to the level of Utility Dog. I had given away my whelping box and weaning pen and all my breeding and whelping books. It was a stupid thing to have done, but I never anticipated that I’d be back in the ring again, much less having another litter of puppies.

  But there was another problem: Breeze hadn’t been in season for over eighteen months, in contrast to a female dog’s normal cycle of six. Dawn and I took her over to Dr. Janice Cain—who had followed Ashley throughout her artificial insemination and her pregnancy—to see whether Breeze had an issue. The report came back clean: nothing to worry about. Dawn and I shook our heads and used the extra time to figure out a suitable sire. Without realizing it, I was choosing to bring a waft of life back into my own, which had grown so dark since Gulliver’s death. I had been lucky enough to have a book published during that time, but it had paled next to the loss of Gulliver and the onset of Myrna’s illness.

  We had slowed down on entering Breeze in a lot of shows, as we were anxious for her first litter. She was nearly three, but we decided that since she wasn’t in season anyway, we might as well take her to the National. I wasn’t able to attend that year due to publicity for my latest book, but Dawn would go, show Breeze, and look for a suitable “husband.”