We lost our oldest boy, Dillon, yesterday afternoon. He hadn’t been able to walk in months, yet his eyes still lit up and he could still catch a tossed dog cookie in the air, even lying down. He spent his days on a bed in our living room, right outside my office. That’s where I took the photo of him not too long ago, in a new bed that Sue R. from Colorado kindly sent him. But in the past couple of weeks his body became stiffer and stiffer, and then he struggled to get sternal. And finally, somewhere in the past several days, the light in his eyes went out. He wasn’t enjoying life any longer. He let us know.
So yesterday Alayne and I put fleece blankets on the stretcher, laid Dillon on it, and carried him out to the truck. I drove Dillon into Missoula, where our internal medicine specialist there, Dr. Dave Bostwick, helped him on his way. I held Dillon’s head in my hands and cried as his life slipped away.
Oh, even a day later, this is so hard to write.
We called Dillon our "old lion" for the thick scruff of fur around his neck. He was one of our original "Seattle six-pack" of dogs that moved from Seattle to Montana with us in 2000. He had been traumatized as a puppy, and ended up in a small no-kill shelter in Shelton, Washington at the age of one. There he spent the next four years in a small outdoor pen, scared to death of people and considered ‘unadoptable’ by the shelter as a result.
We had adopted Dolly from the same shelter earlier. Dolly had also been traumatized from abuse and was one of their ‘unadoptables’ as well. A year after adopting Dolly we realized poor Dillon was still there, so Alayne and I drove back to Shelton to get him, too. Dillon turned out to be even more frightened than Dolly, and restoring his faith in people took much longer than it did for her. He came to accept us easily enough, but the sight of other people would send him fleeing. Only in recent years did he stop hiding from people, though he would still keep a safe distance.
Of all the original six dogs, Dillon was the quietest one, the most likely to remain in the shadows. He was never one to come running up to get attention and some petting. No, he would amble over in a tentative, stealthy way, very quietly … the first you knew he was there was when you realized he was pressing his body against your leg. You’d feel this pressure, look down and there he was. This was his signal for "Okay, love me up!"
Other than love from us, the thing Dillon enjoyed most was rolling in the snow. Sadly, he was too stiff this entire winter to roll at all. But how his eyes still shined. And for some reason, all the other dogs loved to sleep with their "Uncle Dillon," as I posted here and here.
I took little blind Goldie with me yesterday to help cope on the long drive home. It seemed fitting to have her there, since Dillon was the reason we got her in the first place. I wanted her to be able to say goodbye to her Uncle Dillon.
As I write this, Goldie is asleep on his bed outside my office.
Alayne and I have already lost more animals than most people ever will … in a bad year for us, it’s probably what most people lose in a lifetime. It’s the nature of doing what we do. But driving back from Missoula yesterday evening, I wondered why we seemed to grieve as much for the ones we’ve had for a long time — like dear old Dillon — as we do for the ones we’ve had for only a short while. I realized that for a beloved old dog like Dillon, we grieve because we loved him so much and for so long … 12 years … and thus a part of our life died with him. For the ones who die unexpectedly and early, I think we grieve not only for the loss but also for the time we didn’t have with them. Either way, grief hurts. A lot.
This is how we’ll remember our old lion … side by side with another of our beloved seniors, Pappy, who we lost last year:
Goodbye, you sweet old boy. We love you.
Rolling Dog Farm Blog 
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