Goodbye T-Bone

     When I left for work that Monday morning on April 7th, I didn’t know that by the end of the day I’d be saying goodbye to an old friend who has been a part of my daily life for fifteen years. Like every other morning, T-Bone woke up and followed me out of the bedroom as I went through my morning rituals of making tea, and packing my lunch for work. When I said goodbye, John was coaxing him to eat. T-Bone hadn’t eaten the night before, so we were concerned that he wasn’t eating his breakfast.

   

T-Bone waiting by the front door.

After work I headed home. When I pulled into the driveway, John’s car was parked. He’d beaten me home, and our friend Sarah’s SUV was parked out front too. I unlocked the front door and instead of being greeted by T-Bone and Suzie wagging their tails, T-Bone was lying on the living room floor bleeding and John and Sarah were kneeling down trying to help him. He was weak, but still tried to get up like he usually did whenever I came home.

     We called the vet and they told us to bring him as soon as possible. Sarah drove us in her SUV, which was the easiest vehicle for us to load T-Bone into. John and Sarah wrapped him in a beach towel and John carried him down the front steps. Even though he’d lost weight as he got older, T-Bone was still about 75 pounds, and he struggled a bit against being carried.

     He was quiet on the ride to the vet, another indication that he was in trouble because he’s never liked riding in the car and usually fussed. Even though we had watched T-Bone growing more fragile as time passed, he had gone deaf and partially blind, now it was clear that we had to face that this was probably the end.

     At the vet they brought a gurney out for him and then wheeled him into the emergency room. They transferred him onto the examining table and the vet checked him. He told the two vet technicians to get him started on an IV, while he left to deal with two other emergencies that had come in: the victim of a dog fight, and two dogs from the same house that had eaten chocolate.

     The way that both of the tech vets did their jobs left no doubt in our minds that they love animals. They were professional, but caring. One hugged T-Bone and hummed to him while the other shaved his front leg and worked on getting the IV in him--no small task since he thought they were trying to cut his nails so he was fighting it. John and Sarah were right there helping to calm him down.

      I tried to stay out of the way. I leaned against a nearby counter, and memories of T-Bone came flooding in. He was a six-month old pup when he joined our family. He and his brothers and sisters had been left in a box outside a Safeway store, and then taken to a shelter. John had asked a friend at work who volunteered at our local animal shelter to keep an eye out for a Labrador Retriever mix dog who would get along with kids and cats.

     A few weeks later, she told him we might be interested in a dog named Sid. They thought he about six months old, neutered, and house trained. He was a Lab-German Shepard mix. Perfect! He’d be smart and a good family dog. We took the kids and went in to see him.

     John had some “tests” ready for him.  When we walked into the room, Sid didn’t greet us with much enthusiasm. John knelt down to say hello and called Sid over. He walked up to John, slowly wagging his tail and then laid his chin on John’s thigh with a heavy sigh. Not your usual puppy greeting. He didn’t startle when John dropped his keys. That was good. He let John hold him on his back like a baby, and rub his belly. That was good too. He wiggled a little, then calmed down—no signs of trying to be dominant. He was calm when the kids petted him. When we took him by the cats that were kenneled, he showed interest, but didn’t go crazy.

     John asked me what I thought. I was hesitant. He seemed depressed. We had an active house with kids running in and out. A mopey dog wouldn’t fit in well. We left the shelter.

     When John talked to his friend at work, she asked how it went and was disappointed that we hadn’t adopted Sid. His picture had been in the newspaper twice and nobody had come to adopt him. She re-stated that he was really a great dog.

     John explained that he was mopey. She asked John when we had gone in and when he told her, she said that the last of his litter mates had been adopted the day before and our assessment was right, he was depressed. She encouraged us to go back in and take another look at him.

     We took her advice and went back to see him. This time he bounded over to us as if he were saying, “Hey! I remember you guys! I’m so happy to see you!” He was a bundle of wagging tail and kisses for everybody. He rode home in the back seat, fretting a little, with the kids and was officially a Stark.

    

T-Bone posing for the family Christmas photo, Dec. 2000.

None of us liked the name Sid, so we all started nominating new names for him. I wanted to acknowledge his big German Shepard ears (although one flipped down like a Lab’s) and name him Radar. He was all black, with a white mark on his chest, and a little bit of white around his mouth. We thought about names like Midnight because he was black, but John’s childhood dog was named Raven, and this dog needed his own identity. The kids came up with T-Bone, and that seemed to fit him perfectly.

    

Sarah and our new pup, T-Bone, 10/2000

     He liked music and gravitated to it. When the kids were playing the piano, cello, or guitar, T-Bone was right there at their feet. When John played blues harp (harmonica), T-Bone would sing (howl) along. I’d tease John and call him Mr. Bojangles. If I was dancing or singing, he’d come wagging his tail and tap dance with me. Until we found him, his life was a blues song.

     As we noticed the first time we met him, T-Bone was emotional. If we were going on a trip, we’d wait until the last minute to pack because he’d get upset as soon as he saw the suitcases. He’d lay his heavy head down and sigh.         

     Part of the reason we got him was because John travels so much. T-Bone was our home security system.

As John wheeled his suitcase out of the house on business trips, he’d pat T-Bone’s head and tell him, “You watch the house and be a good boy while I’m gone.” When he returned, T-Bone would cry and howl and try to tell John all about what had happened while he was gone.

     T-Bone took his guard dog responsibilities seriously and would be on high alert when John was gone. He had a deep, powerful bark that was all business. If the batteries in a smoke detector were dying, he’d hear the beep and come get me. Most of the time when we had visitors, he thought they’d come just to see him, but there was one incident that showed me how protective he could be.

     The kids were out in the back yard playing. A friend of mine was coming over to pick something up. I figured I’d run to the bathroom before she got there, and left the front door unlocked in case she was closer than I thought. When I was washing my hands, I heard T-Bone start barking like a maniac. I came out of my room and there he was bark/yelling at my friend who he'd backed up against a wall near the front door. She was holding her hands up in the air, saying, “Nice dog!” He didn’t like that I hadn’t let her in.

     He was really smart too, for example, he knew how to lie. John had trained him to pee on cue. If we were going out, we’d let T-Bone out and tell him, “Get busy!” He’d run out and do his business. One day we went through that little routine and he balked. I told him again to “Get busy!” and pushed him out the door. Then I spied on him through the window. He ran off the deck, walked around the pathway for a few minutes to kill time, did nothing, then came back to the door with a smile on his face. Liar, liar, pants on fire! I sent him back down and went with him. He got with the program.

    

Sarah, John, Johnny and T-Bone at Cannon Beach, Oregon.

He got along well with our cats Velvet and Java. He barked warnings to our newest cat, Pippin, to settle down when he started ripping through the house or fighting with Java. Even in his old age, he put up with whippersnapper Pippin swatting at him trying to get him to play.

     When we started taking care of Suzie, the dachshund, he let her think she was the boss and gave her kisses whether she wanted them or not. If they were running, usually toward Milk Bones, they looked like a double decker bus. She’d get right under him and somehow, he never tripped.    

    

After his hearing and sight faded, he depended on her to be the lookout. She’d sit up on the couch watching the neighborhood. If she saw something suspicious and started barking, he’d join right in.

     He had his quirks. He liked sleeping in in the morning like a teenager although at night he was like an old person. Once it got past 10:30, he wanted to go to bed which to him meant we all had to go to bed. He’d start trying to shepherd us to our bedroom and then lie down with a huge sigh and moan of disappointment when we refused.

    

T-Bone was a big boy, but he had a distorted body image. He thought that if he turned his head sideways, he was smaller and would be able to weasel his way into sitting on John’s lap up on the couch. Actually, at least once that I know of, he was successful with John the softy. It wasn’t a pretty sight. If T-Bone was trying to avoid a bath, he thought he was small enough to hide behind my legs, or under my sewing table. He liked sitting on my feet, warmer than the floor, and he also liked leaning all his almost 100 lbs into me.

     I wished he was leaning on me at the vet. Instead, I was leaning against the counter, eyes welling up with tears, when a little distraction came skittering into the room. One of the “chocolate dogs” slipped out of her collar when they were weighing her and she started doing laps around the table that T-Bone was lying on. Her vet tech. was trying to corral her. It was like a Marx brothers’ film. After four or five laps, the “chocolate dog” came over and tried to hide behind me, like T-Bone had so many times. Then she gave up and sat right beside me as if I was her owner and would save her.

     The vet came back in and examined T-Bone. Then he said that T-bone was bleeding from a tumor outside his rectum, but he wanted to keep him overnight and run some tests on him. We agreed. There was a flicker of hope as we left.

     On the way home, we stopped to get something to eat. As we were leaving the restaurant, my phone rang. It was the vet. He wanted us to return right away.

      T-Bone was lying down in a kennel on the floor. I knew he was in trouble because he didn’t even thump his tail when we came in. He was breathing hard. The vet wheeled an ultrasound machine around and explained what was going on. T-Bone had another tumor inside his spleen. It had ruptured. We looked at the screen as the vet showed us the fluid built up inside him. He didn’t think T-Bone would make it through the night. This dog with a heart of gold had given us his all. We didn’t want him to suffer. We asked the vet to euthanize him.

     We knelt down by T-Bone to say good-bye trying to be calm and strong for him so that he could leave us peacefully.  We petted him and told him he was the best dog ever and that we loved him. He nuzzled my leg, took his last breath, and slipped away.

     The logical part of me knows that in dog years he was 105 years old. I know that we gave him a full, happy life especially for a dog that nobody wanted. I know that he knew he was well loved. I know that we got the chance to say good-bye. But every time I open that front door and he isn’t there, every time I wake up and know that I don’t have to let him out, every time I look at his empty pillows my heart aches and my hand longs to pet him. No creature on earth will ever love you the way a dog loves you. Rest in peace T-Bone.

 

Laura Keolanui Stark can be reached at stark.laura.k@gmail.com.