Niko’s watch

A requiem for the last free dog

Niko and Juno enjoying a siesta.

The agony of losing your dog is every bit as crushing as I remember from when I went through it the first time as a teenager. It was not just that I was 15, with little life experience and lots of hormones, it turns out. Nope, I am a wreck all over again as a 44-year-old mother of three with my fair share of grief under my belt. That it is a mundane tragedy, one that eventually befalls almost every dog owner, does not dull the pain — not at all.

It’s been three weeks since the evening the vet’s electric car bumped up our long dirt driveway, where seven of us sat in the yard with Niko, scratching her floppy ears like she likes, burying our faces in her thick white fur, soaking up what would be the last moments of her majestic presence, my mind balking at the unthinkable act I had set in motion. She was still so very much alive.

I could still call and cancel. Who was I to play God this way? Hours earlier, she had surprised us all by wandering across the driveway into the white pines to relieve herself. Even when Niko was too tired to get up, her tail still thumped at my approach. Every fiber of my body screamed to put this off.

And yet, her decline was only going one way. She had stopped eating. When we were able to coax something down, it came right back up. She was only five years old, but — we knew from her last vet visit — her kidney had all but failed as a result of untreated Lyme disease. Even when she drank water now, she wretched. She was so, so thin.

I had failed her once, by allowing years to go by without a vet visit. Now I owed it to her to let her go. And it was only right that the last free dog should take her leave on a day when she could still walk in the woods and drink from the stream.

I have been unable until now to put pen to paper. When I sit with the loss, it feels suffocating, utterly unbearable. Even as the urge to write a goodbye to my best friend has welled up, the grief has so far proved stronger. But it’s time. I can’t let her go uneulogized any longer. It’s time.

Among the goodbye party were Kim and Steve, a couple we’d come to think of as Niko’s “grandparents.” These neighbors, who live in a log cabin a half-mile from our place, had opened their door to Niko and had, bit by bit, become her family too. In the process of co-parenting Niko, they had gone from wave-as-you-drive-by neighbors to friends I’d trust with my life.

Their goodness revealed itself in one little way after another. All the times Niko trotted back from their house brushed and washed, uninterested in her dog food because she’d clearly had something better. The discovery that Kim was not in fact feeding Niko dog food, but actually cooking for her — boiled chicken, scrambled eggs, mashed potatoes, French toast. When Niko’s appetite started to fail, the couple — themselves vegetarian — stocked up on sliced bologna, beef pot pie, salmon baby food pouches. And on Niko’s last day, level-headed Steve came home early from work, drove his digger over to our place and dug a hole in the spot I had cleared earlier that day: at the edge of the woods on the south side of our property, partway between our house and the log cabin.

I was going to say the log cabin was Niko’s second home, but that’s not quite right, since increasingly, she’d taken to spending more time there than at our house. For weeks at a time, the log cabin would be Niko’s primary residence, and we were reduced to her pied-à-terre.

I can’t deny that we missed Niko’s company when she wasn’t home. How could we not? That full-body-wagging enthusiasm that greeted you every time you set foot out of doors — who doesn’t get a kick out of that kind of reception? She was always ready to accompany us on a woods walk or get involved in a soccer game, whether or not we wanted her to. (Niko and me versus Dion and Juno were the usual teams; she understood the basic premise of the game and, I swear, could actually dribble.)

Now for the first time in years, our playmate was MIA. It was tempting to grumble about Niko’s desertion, and the kids did rage a bit. I missed her too, but this arrangement of Niko’s felt right — like I imagine it feels when a child goes off to college. I was grateful to her for coming up with it. Already the most low-maintenance of dogs, now she was freeing me even from feeling guilty about so rarely being home.

Between work, sports, and the month of the summer the kids and I abscond to the Adirondacks, we run around a lot. Niko never came with us. She wasn’t that kind of dog. She lived outside, hated being in cars, declined to take a step if a leash were involved, had never known a fenced existence in her life. Before Kim and Steve coaxed Niko into their house for the first time this winter, she’d only ever been indoors to go to the vet, and she’d trembled the whole car ride and vomited all over the back seat each time.

But instead of languishing in our absence, Niko was living her best life with her grandparents. When it got too cold or hot out, Niko — who was not allowed inside our house, per husband Joe’s conditions — could knock on the log cabin door with her paw and be let inside.

Was it the slightest bit insulting, to have your dog up and move in with another family? A little, I admit. But deep down, I was aware that Niko had not “chosen them over us.” That was a black-and-white way to look at it, unworthy of Niko. Her loyalty had not been dissolved by a little climate control or boiled chicken. It was more like she was broadening the boundaries of our family.

What I would come to realize was that, far from forgetting about us, Niko was standing watch — over all of us. See, you have to pass the log cabin to get to our stone house. From her new perch on the porch overlooking the road, she could clock all our comings and goings, and that’s exactly what she was doing.

Ready for an adventure.

Whenever I drove out of our driveway, if I hadn’t seen Niko at our place, I’d cruise by the log cabin slowly. Sometimes she’d sally out into the road to say ‘bye and I’d give her a bite of my breakfast and an ear scratch. Otherwise, I’d crane my neck for a glimpse of white on the porch — and there she’d be, looking right back at me with such a regal air she could have been a statue: head up, chest broad, for all the world a sphinx standing sentinel over our woods.

But she saved the full force of her enthusiasm for the occasion of my homecoming. When I crested the hill on my way home, rarely could I catch Niko still on the porch. By the time I drove by the log cabin, she’d be trotting toward the road, giving herself a tail-to-head shimmy and gearing up to escort me on the final leg of my commute.

“She hears your truck from the bottom of the hill,” Steve said once, shaking his head as he watched Niko — sloughing off an afternoon siesta — break into a comfortable trot to match pace with my Jeep.

Steve was right. It was not coincidence that Niko was always leaping off the porch or jogging out of the woods just in time to sprint home with us, regardless of my wildly irregular schedule. Whatever else she was doing, she was listening — always listening — for the rumble of my motor. If that’s not love, what is?

Niko’s escort may be the thing I miss most. It was a spectacle to rival the Queen’s Parade. By the time we hit our dirt road, she would have taken the lead, accelerating to a dead sprint as she rounded the bend by the mailboxes, zagging for a startled deer without ever breaking stride, cutting through a gap in the fence to slash across our yard and beat the car. It was an honor guard of such implausible majesty it made me laugh aloud, particularly when she was lit up by my headlights, dazzling white against the black night, leaping to snap at a fly-by moth, in a race with the wind itself.

I always meant to time her — was that a four-minute mile?

Once home, she’d accept a treat, then often as not, trot right back to the log cabin, to take up her position as sentinel on the porch once more.

On her final day, Niko no longer had the stamina to make the trip from our house to the log cabin — or maybe she just didn’t want to, since the last vet visit had taken place on the log cabin porch and was far from pleasant. So on that spring morning, Niko and I meandered to the stream about halfway between the houses, and Kim walked from the log cabin to join us.

Kim and I stood and watched with shining eyes as Niko picked her way, slowly slowly, down the uneven stream bank, stood in the cold water and drank deeply. Then the three of us meandered back to our stone house as the sun came up over the tree line — an honor guard of a more somber shade.

Niko on her last woods walk.

Grief is, I’m noticing this time around, very much a physical sensation. It feels something like the air has been replaced by a viscous substance that presses on your chest, making it hard to fill your lungs completely, and every now and then, pressing so hard that you spontaneously burst into tears in the damndest places. I recall this from when, age 15, I found myself weeping in ninth-grade biology class the day after my black lab, Paddle, died in my arms. This time, it was in an airport rental car shuttle that I went to pieces.

The feeling of desolation is just as I remember it. Everything feels far away, dim, gray, trivial. You can recognize that a spring day is gorgeous as they come, but it lacks a focal point, an animating energy, the joie de vivre — we realize the dazzling extent of the gift too late — that was bestowed on us so lavishly, by a friend who asked so astonishingly little in return.

And yet, I am three times as old as that teenager, and it helps to remind myself that I have been here before — and come out the other side. I know that eventually, the world will return to full color. I know that the painful memories of Niko’s suffering over her last days will fade, and be replaced by the thousand and one joyful ones.

Kim and I sat together last week on her porch — Memorial Day, fittingly. The kids and I had biked over with a clay pawprint of Niko’s for her and Steve to keep. We both burst into tears as she took the gift, then wiped our eyes and talked of other things. Why it should be that sharing the weight of grief makes it a little lighter, I have no idea, but from my experience, it’s about the only thing that does.

She’s started keeping her door bolted now, Kim tells me, since Niko’s not there to keep watch. Sometimes she sees a white tarp flap near the edge of their property, and her heart turns over. I find it oddly reassuring that it’s not just me seeing Niko’s ghost out of the corner of my eye.

Biking back home, I’m keenly aware of who’s not beside us. Still, my spirit feels lighter somehow. It’s partly the healing power of time, I’m sure. But I think it’s also the new friends that Niko brought into our lives.