Yonkers

Sweet Bea, our blond neighborly rescue lab passed away thirty-four days ago.

Bianca, Bea, Sweet Bea, Yonka, Yonkers . .

Before rescuing Bianca (we stuck with renaming her ‘Bea’) in September of 2022 she had spent the majority of her days alone in our neighbor’s overgrown, chain-link fence-lined yard, when she went inside nightly her beautiful fur became compacted with her own excrement, the feral cat’s excrement, and her former owner’s cigarette ash. We quietly cared for her from near and afar as my husband, Bub, took up helping elderly neighbor Bev with her yard and car, and we both took to caring for her skinny dog Bianca, who we would walk with our dog and then guerrilla feed. When Bev died Bianca became part of our family and one of the great joys and light in our days. 

I’ll just say it now as my husband says it: we loved that dog too much.

On a rainy Tuesday afternoon Bub got the call from Bea’s vet that our beloved dog would need to be transferred to the emergency vet for overnight emergency observing, so I rushed home from work and quickly packed some of Bea’s favorite stuffies, ‘woobies’ as my husband called them, into a little pup overnight bag, including her favorite blond lab plushie. When I would buy Bea toys I went for the cute, fluffy stuffed ones mainly since she was accustomed to either nothing or the occasional tennis ball Bub would donate to her while Bev still lived.

She never tore into her toys, ripping them to shreds like her black lab sister did, she would gently, mindfully take them from me and hold them as though they were alive. Whenever she was happy she would grab a stuffy, whenever she was anxious, whenever she wanted to rest her head on something soft. She loved a very special few and carted them around to either maintain or tamp her big joyful feelings. Her soft tail always wagging, sometimes she’d make a ‘coo’ sound like a pigeon, but almost always holding a stuffy were her big tells of her happiness.

Once we got her cleaned up and well fed, Bea’s fur was smooth and the softest at the nape of her neck leaning towards her armpit, the colors went from a shiny amber to a pale icy blond as it got shorter, almost like the spots that got the most sun grew darker from tanning. She had become beautiful and healthy living with us with a permanent smile, her love for me and my husband obvious as she was our shadow – she simply would not leave either me or his side, and I found the notion of leaving her side or leaving her without a stuffy, appalling.

An hour into checking her into the animal ER, our Sweet Bea seized so hard they had to tie a bell around her neck and we were given the grim news that she wouldn’t make it through the night. They brought her into the room with us for the goodbye that neither my husband nor I were remotely prepared for, even though earlier I prayed (to, and for her) that ‘today was not the day.’

Alas. I put her big, blond lab stuffy with its pink nose under her chin on that cold, hard, vet office floor and rested her head on it. She eased onto it while the vet put down a deeply soft fleece blanket so her elbows and feet wouldn’t get cold or feel painful. I twirled my fingertips through those longest dark golden lengths and scritched at the shortest while arching my back over her body to hold the best I could while making space for the vet to do her work. My husband put his hand across her heart and I watched as it moved up and down with her breath, then I watched as it eased down to nothing. She laid still; not a whimper, not a moan or gasp was heard over my hiccing and heaving as the vet tech started cleaning up the needles used for Bianca’s death. She kindly let us know that we could stay with Bea as long as we wanted and that even when we left she’d stay with her until whoever they had contracted with would come to retrieve Bea’s body. We nodded, I held it together until the second the vet put her hand on the door to leave the room and my voice started pulsing on its own, making a coughing, kicking, heaving sob. We stayed another twenty minutes before we finally forced ourselves to get up and leave Bea as the kid (fourteen) and our other dog were at home, both probably hungry. We drove home in stunned, deep, bereft silence.

One of my meandering sad thoughts after this terrible moment was when we first purchased our lake house and got through the hard, grody work of fixing it up and deep cleaning; one big thing on our mind for a worry-free winter was going to be replacing the ancient electric pellet stove with a wood-fired stove. The whole house as it stood ran solely on electric and being that we bought in unincorporated Skagit county meant that if we lost power on our little mountain, we would very likely be S.O.L until someone from the big city remembered us. Given that we love hot food and hot water this seemed a no-brainer. We started really shopping in November of 2023.

WOOF so expensive.

After considering a more economical, smaller but unsightly model I had shifted my gaze to a stove that if you pictured one in a cozy log cabin, this one would be summoned to mind. Smooth black cast iron, free standing on vaguely Victorian legs, a double door with a flat metal surface atop perfect for an old timey tea pot. I thought it was beautiful and charmingly on sale, so we had our sales clerk Loretta pick out all our installation equipment, gave us discounts galore, recommended the wood stove company to set up this new era in home heating and we were off to the races.

Once that ball got rolling with the stove, watching our cherished labs walk through our house once the leaves started turning gold and falling hit different as I could see so clearly in my minds eye the future: a Christmas, a quiet snowy night, or perhaps even a power outage, with the dogs curled up before a roaring fire, snoring in ecstasy of their limbs enrobed in their cush fleece bed, the fire a wash of relaxing comfort. Pellet stoves can be great, but for us there was no radiating heat or satisfying wood crackling, no pets aching to get closer to a loud and mechanical whirrrRRRRRRrrr from a forced electric fan in our former hunk of junk.

Given that Bea had never had a fireplace or felt the wonderful glow of a perfectly groomed bed of coals I felt like a parent on Christmas Eve, attempting to convey the magic to a child who doesn’t know what they’re in for. I told her all about the stove and while kissing her face, beyond excited for her, I kept whispering ‘You don’t know baby, but you’re just going to love being in front of a fire. Just you wait!’

Unfortunately, wood stove installation isn’t a ‘DIY’ so I hopped on the phone to get our beautiful stove installed immediately.

Also unfortunately, they couldn’t see us until mid-January, far from my Christmas-fire fantasy.

I toyed with the fella on the phone.

“It won’t be in for Christmas! Oh that’s too bad, I’m so disappointed! No no, I totally understand, you guys are busy. Sounds like we need a Christmas miracle, right! I mean those could exist in a cash bribe, or a -uh- Christmas donation to move things along HAHA? Oh no. Oh of course.. I’m sorry sir.. thank you for fitting us in…”

DAMN.

Come the big day, the one day the stove was coming, we received every bit of snow our season had lacked all in a single morning. Several inches in I bit my nails, watching the snow fall hoping that perhaps they’ve got a truck, they could make that hill? While I chewed on the inside of my cheek I received the call that indeed we were rescheduling another two weeks out. Our pipes had frozen a few days before the install and we had been without running water for the days leading to this snowstorm so our humors were still slightly in tact because truly: of course this happened. Of course this was how this was playing out. WHAT FUN.

Sadly for the wood stove timeline another timeline was running out and we didn’t even see it coming. One morning our Sweet Bea wouldn’t get out of bed for breakfast, nor did she seem to know where she was or who we were – worse, as a blond Labrador/retriever mix, she didn’t want food. After a powerfully emotionally crushing fifteen minutes or so she suddenly wagged her tail, saw me, and ate up. The relief was sharp and sweet.

We limped along with Bea over the following days, thinking it was some kind of stroke that we could work through, her spurts of weakness and memory lapses were varied and difficult but seemingly maneuverable because she would always snap out of it. We discussed bringing her to the vet but she had just been a week earlier and we weren’t trying to get her back to a place she was rapidly growing sick of. My husband had his mother spend an afternoon with her when we both had to be at work and she remarked that Bea seemed fine! Cuddly, sweet, calm.

The day the wood stove was finally for-real to be installed was the day my husband finally relented that we should get her checked out, worried that we were both cradling a more confused and potentially pained dog by the day. Bea was at the vet for hours before they called him and said she needed to go to the ER, her blood sugar was in the 20’s (very bad) and she was seizing, she needed more tests.

Poor Bea never stood a chance against insulinoma – a tumor growing on her pancreas that was flooding her with so much insulin that her blood sugar was dropping so low as to cause seizures, coma, or eventually death.

We know how this ends. Just Bea and her sweet puppy stuffy, with two hysterical adults leaving her alone for that final car ride.

When Bub and I got home that night and broke the news to the boy plus remaining pets with Niagara Fall-eyes I stood in our living room bleary-eyed and finally gazed at that goddamn wood stove. It’s beautiful. New Vermont casting, new pipework. Red-eyed, Bub asked me if I wanted a fire and I said yes so fast I could’ve slapped the words out of the air to ignite that first flame.

True to form in this house, we set off the fire alarm over and over again, smoked up the joint, and stunk it up with all those ‘gotta burn ’em off’ oils before anything.

But now, this many days since we’ve lost Bea, I’m looking at the stove with a gorgeous fire rolling; Bea’s ashes, collar, and clay footprint sitting next to the stove enough to feel its warmth. Each day I walk past her I touch her paw print or throw a kiss at her, ask her how she likes the warmth. The floor before the stove has our comfy dog bed with Pepper the black lab in it, just soaking up the fire as I knew she would, each light a tribute to the best girl.