Brandi is our bird dog. We inherited her some years back from a friend who, after owning her for a year, made the wise choice to give her up to a loving home, as his arduous work schedule left him little time to be with her.
We accepted Brandi into our home, but not without a few misgivings. You see, she would take her place in a pack of Dobermans each of whom stood head and shoulders taller than she.
We need not have worried. Brandi instinctively knew her place, not as ‘Alpha’ or ‘Beta’ but poor little ‘Omega,’ the least of these. But don’t feel sorry for her, for it is precisely this knowing which allows her to thrive in the pack. She loves everyone, two-legged and four, challenges no one, therefore is not challenged. Her principal contribution to the pack is to solidify it.
She is a happy dog who spreads that joy around the house with her long wagging tail, her enthusiasm, her attempts to talk [Row, row, row! Not unlike Row, row, row your boat] and her tap-dancing on the floor which reflects her enthusiasm for merely being alive. [There’s a lesson there, I think.]
As I mentioned, Brandi is a bird dog, a pointer, except we haven’t see her point in years; until this afternoon. Was it a bird? No, it was the after-effects of anesthesia. We had taken her to the vet to remove several skin lumps; probably nothing, lipomas, little briars caught in her skin; nothing major. She came home a bit wobbly. Once that passed, she stood up on somewhat uncertain legs, stared at the corner for two hours, on point.
She was in no pain post-operative, so the sight was amusing. Less so was the biopsy report… It might have proven to be a lipoma or a benign hematoma, instead, it was a wide-spread, untreatable Mast cell cancer.
Our little girl has three months more to live…
So what is there to do but to make her final months more loving even than the years with us have already been? Unaware she is dying, Brandi continues to be a source of happiness for Sabrina and me. She demonstrates that there is a difference between contentedness and joy; contentedness is a solitary pleasure, joy, a contagious one, drawing us all in.
Some time back, Sabrina was in a hurry. She was at the vet’s office but couldn’t stay long for a lady was bringing an injured bird to us. Sabrina was approached by a vet-tech she had met, but only in passing. The tech said, “Had a dream about you last night. You were holding a hummingbird.”
This set Sabrina back a bit in that the injured bird soon to be delivered to her care was, guess what? A hummingbird…
I guess many people – not me – have had occasion to ‘know the future.’ I feel that sustained gift – prescience – might prove more of a curse than a blessing.
Brandi has no such gift. Though she is dying, she doesn’t know it, thus she lives in the moment; a good lesson for us all. Humans, must, of course maintain a prudent, but not overly-weighted regard for the future. It’s so easy to let the now slip by unnoticed. Brandi, God love her, will have none of that. Sabrina and I will see to it that these final months will be the best of a good life.
It is said that Sarah Palan’s son, Trig, reportedly afflicted with Down’s Syndrome awakens each day, looks out his window at the new day, claps his hands and laughs out loud with joy. If that’s an affliction, perhaps we could all be improved with just a dash of it. Brandi shares this joy; I must sometimes be reminded.
– Lucky Garvin
Look for Lucky’s books locally and on-line: The Oath of Hippocrates; The Cotillian; A Journey Long Delayed; Campfire Tales; Sabonics.