Kitchen Floors and Teddy Bears
Last night, I fell asleep on the kitchen floor yet again.
I had not slept there since the age of 18- and it was not that good of a sleeping place. Our kitchen floor, in those days, was in shaggy disrepair: the wood was buckled and uneven from years of clumsy young girls letting rain in the back door, the linoleum was ripped up in many places exposing the convex wood, the result of a dog too zealous with his claws to realize that ripped up and shredded linoleum ruins the effect of it passing as tile. I slept there for said dog. My dog Jiggs.
“My Dog Jiggs” was the title of my first book, written at age 6, about my most favorite thing in the entire world… you guessed it, my dog. A great dog. A big, fluffy, scary-looking pitbull-German shepard mix- imposing to intruders and fiercely protective of us, his family, but an absolute teddy bear if you got to know him. Jiggs was with us over fifteen years, and it was incredibly devastating when he passed on. We knew the day was coming for quite some time but when it came I felt as I never had when my human family passed away… perhaps it was easier to grieve for an animal than a human, but I was a child again. I stayed up into the wee hours of the night, despite the fact I had finals the next morning- the finals that would determine my high school graduating GPA- I lay with him on that kitchen floor, dirty and shabby and now covered with dog hair. I lay with him as his breaths grew shallower and less frequent. I lay with him and thought of the day I picked him out: I was 4 years old then and here I was, weeks away from graduating high school, months away from leaving for college, from becoming an adult. But in that night I was 4 again, that dying animal lay beside me, and I weeped as I hadn’t since childhood… weeped for my dog that died. In my arms. On the kitchen floor.
A month or so after, we got a new puppy. Gus. Named after the famed Augustus McCrae from Lonesome Dove; named after the not-so-famous Gus the Mouse from Cinderella. He was not Jiggs’s equal in many ways: where Jiggs was intelligent and shrewd, Gus was loving and playful. Where Jiggs was fierce and aggressive, Gus was a perpetual baby, capable of nothing more than happiness and love… Where Jiggs lived his life outdoors, desperate to protect our family and our house from harm, Gus begged every night just to come in… a pit bull-black labrador mix who wanted nothing more than to be a human, to be hugged like a teddy bear. And he was our teddy bear: a sweetly, heartbreaking dog who never quite realized that he was a dog at all. We got him before his eyes were even open and we were the ones who raised him: as far as he knew, he was the same as my sister and I- the baby of the family, only he slept outside in a doghouse and we slept inside in beds.
But his life wasn’t easy. A slowish brain prevented him from ever really developing as a dog should and prevented him from ever allowing a wounded leg to properly heal. For years now, we have been proud owners of a mentally slow, mostly three-legged dog who couldn’t have been kinder. Not a great guard dog, as Jiggs has been, but a great friend- and a great way to come home. Had I been gone only for an hour, out to lunch, or for months on end, out to college or off to New York, Gus’s bark was the first thing you would hear as you rounded the corner to our house… welcoming you home.
This past weekend, after years of nursing his wounded leg, he quickly took a turn for the worst.
Stuck across the country, thousands of miles away, I was not there when Gus breathed his last breath. But I was there again, in spirit, laying with him on the kitchen floor; now tiled and beautiful, now home to a dog happier inside than out, I lay there with him as he passed on, my chest heaving with sobs, my heart heavier than it has been since my Jiggs left us twelve years ago.
In truth, he died at the vet’s office, in a sterile, cold environment- far from home, far from us who he loved. But I hope, in his heart, he was right back home where he loved to be… right back with his sisters, with our parents. On the kitchen floor. His home. The home of My Dog Gus.
R.I.P. Gus Knox (pictured here with my sister, the last time I saw him, last Christmas)
