(HOST) Lucy the dog is getting on in years, but commentator Edith Hunter says she’s grown old gracefully.
(HUNTER)
“Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life for which the first was made:”
Robert Browning
Lucy, the dog, is sixteen years old now. We found her at a local humane society in 1992 when she was two years old. She is predominantly terrier and betrayed her lineage by the holes she loved to dig under the lilacs. Now she mostly just occupies those old holes as she sleeps her days away.
She was still full of pupply vitality when we took her home. As the years passed she settled into middle age. Except for eight months, when she was missing, she has been a faithful companion, supervising me as I work in the garden while keeping the woodchucks and the deer at a comfortable distance.
At night she always climbed the steep back stairs to take her place on a black sheepskin on the floor beside my bed. However, this past spring she found that, although she could make it up the stairs, she could no longer handle the steep descent. We had to carry her down one morning.
That night I closed the door at the foot of the stairs so she could not go up. Since then she has voluntarily moved into the back sitting room and beds down on the rug in there.
It was last spring also that I suddenly noticed she was deaf. She had always had acute hearing. Whenever she heard the back door open, she would join me on the way out to the garden. Alas, not any more. At about the same time, I noticed, that her eyesight was failing and she tended to walk into doors.
There is a dog bed in my woodshed where she is apt to spend part of her mornings. Then, like Pooh Bear, she gets that “11 o’clockish feeling” and walks out to the driveway where she sets up her vigil. She lies down and looks toward my kitchen window. She may not be able to see me, but she knows that I can see her from the sink where I may be working. Her presence is a gentle reminder that lunch, her one big meal, is at noon.
Graham has put another old dog bed in his woodshed, and except for the rather regular hikes she takes around the place, she is very apt to relocate there for at least part of the afternoon. Someone must have told her that regular exercise is essential for the elderly.
For Lucy the end will come either when she goes to sleep here and doesn’t wake up, or when I take her over to the vet’s to be put to sleep.
“The last of life, for which the first was made.“
Writer and historian Edith Hunter lives in Weathersfield Center.