There’s something about losing a beloved pet that’s similar to hitting your funny bone, or perhaps more aptly, getting kneecapped. You know the pain isn’t going to kill you, but for a short time it’s excruciating, almost unbearable, and although you know it will get better eventually, for the time being you can’t focus on anything but your loss.
My husband and I got kneecapped pretty good last Friday, when we had to put down our beloved Leonberger dog, Lady. Her registered name was Legacy’s Aristocratic Lady; she was a Grand Champion and the mother of two litters of fine Leonberger pups. In this post, I just want to note her passing, even though the world around me is falling apart as I do so.
Lady was always a big girl. My husband called her “Lady” specifically so that people would realize she was a girl, because with her size and heft, she looked less delicate than a typical female Leonberger, which are large dogs to begin with. Here are a couple of pictures of Lady and her littermates when they were newborns:
If memory serves me correctly, Lady was wearing the red collar. The really important thing about Lady is that she was best friends with her sister Alfie (Legacy’s Alphaba). Alfie was the runt of the litter, so it was kind of sweet that the biggest puppy and the smallest puppy got along so well. Sometimes bitches, even from the same litter, have problems establishing a pecking order, but that was never an issue with Alfie and Lady. They were best friends from the very beginning, and as far as they were concerned, there was no pecking order.
Lady grew up to be an AKC Grand Champion, but more importantly, she and her sister completed well over one hundred visits as Therapy Dogs to our local library as Reading Dogs (PAWS to Read), during which they patiently listened to young children read to them.
And throughout their lives, they stayed best friends:
About a month after her first litter of puppies left for their new homes, we acquired a Siamese mix from our local Humane Society, and proceeded to go on a three-week camping trip with all of our pets. Lady, perhaps still mourning the departure of her four puppies, latched on to Leo Tolstoy. From the moment she met him, she decided that Leo was her feline offspring:
Leo and Lady remained closely bonded, as you can see above.
Three years ago, Lady had another litter, and we kept a puppy, whom we called Millie (“Legacy’s Lady Camilla”). Here she is perched in her favorite spot:
And the years passed. We knew Alfie and Lady were approaching old age as we celebrated their eighth birthday at the end of February. (Leonbergers, as giant breed dogs, generally don’t have long lifespans.) And I had worried for years about which dog would live longest and how she would handle the final separation. I’m not surprised that Lady went first; she had many physical issues, most stemming from a knee injury she sustained when she was four years old. But of course we were still devastated when we learned three weeks ago that Lady was dying of osteosarcoma–an all-too-common disease in Leonbergers. So we set out to enjoy the last bit of time she had with us as much as we could, taking her for drives in the countryside so she could enjoy all the smells, spoiling her with treats, and generally just loving her as much as we could.
I can say that I never, in eight years, saw Lady curl her lip at another creature. I have heard her growl from time to time, but only in her sleep or when disciplining her puppies, never as a threat. She was unfailingly gentle, always loving, and she thought every smaller creature was her own long-lost puppy. I could say she was the best dog ever, but that wouldn’t be true, because Alfie, too, is the best dog ever, and Millie, though young, is showing great promise of becoming the best dog ever, too.
We all miss Lady terribly. As I said at the beginning of this post, hitting your kneecap on a sharp object certainly won’t kill you, but it sure feels like it will for a while. We’ll survive the loss of Lady, certainly, but the pain hasn’t ebbed away just yet. And we are all, especially Alfie and Leo, doing the best we can to wait for our grief to subside.
The Tabard Inn 