The Dog Who Loved Me

To all of my pets who are waiting for me over the rainbow.

I can’t think of many advantages to living in a subrural community (not completely rural, yet definitely not suburban) like my hometown, at least not for someone like me. Allergies, crazy neighbors, nowhere to go, nothing to do, downwind from a huge auction yard—even if you’re born and raised there, you don’t necessarily like it. One advantage of growing up subrural, though, is that my family has had pets my entire life: a cat, a rabbit, guppies, my brothers’ various rodents, the stray neighborhood cats we feed, and dogs.

We’ve loved all our animals, but I must admit that we are dog people. Our house has always had at least one dog at a time, usually two. Seven dogs have so far come into my life, and four have left, each leaving their own hole in my heart. Usually, getting a new dog helps to ease the pain—or at least get my mind off it—without me forgetting the wonderful soul we just lost. The absence of one dog, though, has cut me so deeply, I’m not sure I will ever recover.

The story starts with the death of another wonderful dog, Boomer. Boomer died December of my sophomore year of high school. At 13 or 14 years old, he had grown up with me like a brother, maybe even more so than my human brothers, who are about six and seven years older than I. He was the first dog we had lost in my lifetime, and his death was felt throughout the entire household. There was no more barking at the wind, at kites, or at people on roofs. No more dog-and-pony shows by an extra-fluffy American Eskimo Dog mix. Only a solitary Golden Irish lounging on the grass without his little white buddy. Mom’s dog, Ryley, slept with my cat, Hunter, many nights after Boomer died. Considering they had both preferred Boomer, them cuddling together seemed like a miracle, a really sad miracle.

Something we had all taken for granted was just...gone.

One afternoon that January, Mom took me to Haven Humane after school. It wasn’t planned. Mom simply felt it was the right time, and I would never say no to seeing some cute dogs, whether we took one home or not. That’s where I saw him, a sweet little black-and-white puppy in a litter of sweet little black-and-white puppies, the only one not to jump up on the gate hyperly (and adorably, I confess). I immediately wanted to see him, so a volunteer grabbed him and took us all back to an office so we could play and get to know him. He was drawn to us and very curious. Quiet, yes, but I liked that. Mom said Boomer had been the same way when we first got him. We both felt a little bad because of the chocolate lab puppy we had told we were going to see again, but we knew that this puppy right in front of us was the one.

Jared was his name at the time. This had to change. I went to fill out some paperwork and then came back to get Mom for parts I was too young for. As soon as I got back, she suggested the perfect name: Bud. The “d” sound at the end would confuse him less during the change, and it fell in line with my pets who had “B” names (my first dog Boomer, my rabbit Buster). While Mom returned to the front desk, I sat in the room with Bud, who proceeded to poop on me. I sheepishly told a volunteer, who helped me clean up and assured me that it meant he liked me and was very relaxed around me. I guess this wasn’t just lip-service because soon after we started driving home, Bud settled into my lap in the backseat of the car and fell asleep.

Bud and I were inseparable from that first night. While Mom got a new crate and some other supplies at Walmart, I sat at home doing my geometry homework, and Bud lay on my feet, perfectly content and never moving. He was my little angel. Little did we know that inside that little angel resided a devil in disguise. One of the first days we had him, Bud pulled a Houdini and escaped his crate. Somehow, he moved both latches and pushed opened the door. Fortunately, there’s always someone at home, so nothing bad came of it, but we definitely got a laugh out of it. We laughed at it again when he got out and right up in Mom’s face while she was lying on the couch. She took a picture and sent it to me at school, saying that he missed me. (Unfortunately, I seem to have lost that picture somewhere among all the phone and computer updates.) We eventually had to get Bud a bigger crate, and it had latches that hooked at the end, so no more Houdini dog. That doesn’t mean he didn’t try, but thankfully he got tired of chewing on the latches before he did damage to himself or the crate.

Buster never cared either way about Bud. So long as Bud stayed away from his cage and small hutch (both of which were inside because it can reach over 110 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer), then they were fine. Ryley and Hunter, though, took time to get used to Bud, especially once we started letting him in the backyard without us. Bud was young and overly energetic, whereas Ryley was older and calm, and Hunter just didn’t like others in his face. However, Bud learned his place pretty quickly. To put it frankly, the others showed him the pecking order. Ryley peed on him, just as Boomer had peed on Ryley when they were young. Similarly, Hunter only needed to swipe at Bud once—like he had with the other dogs—before Bud learned a healthy respect for that cat. No scratches, no damage, just a warning, and it worked. Some days, I feel kind of bad that Bud never got to play “alpha animal” the same way the pets before him had when our next dog, a female Cocker Spaniel named Lexi, came along, but I’m also grateful that he had such a kind soul that he wouldn’t act anything but protective (if a little annoyed) towards his initially hyperactive female companion, let alone pee on her (as if he could; he himself peed like a girl).

Bud was my baby in more ways than one. On his first trip to the vet, Mom and I got a big surprise: he was half the age Haven Humane had told us when we got him, according to his teeth. Haven said he was eight weeks old when we got him—already fixed at the time—but if the vet was right, Bud was more likely four weeks old, far too young to be fixed or separated from his mother. In hindsight, it was probably why he had latched onto me so tightly. I was as good as his mother, not just from the perspective of human sentimentality but from a puppy’s needs as well.

So, of course, he turned into a lap dog that was too big to be a lap dog, just to be as close to me as possible. I didn’t dare sit on the floor while he was inside or else he’d end up squishing me. It’s not that he was big, necessarily—OK, yes, he was big, but not Great Dane big. He was well built, sturdy. We never did find out his exact breed. Haven called his litter a “Heeler mix,” but something never seemed right about that. Bud did always resemble a Black Lab and a Border Collie, though, and he definitely had a Border Collie’s herding instinct (he loved to herd us when he was a puppy and even as he got older, which became troublesome with guests) but only let us train him for the tricks he chose. Otherwise, he played dumb. For instance, rather than using the doggie door my dad installed in the garage door, Bud chewed his own entrance into it. Hunter rather liked the convenience of two entrances as well.

We settled on Bud being mostly Black Lab and Border Collie, but he also resembled my cousin’s pit bull, Piper. I wasn’t sure at first, but after watching Piper as well as the pit bulls on Animal Planet, I figured it was a distinct possibility that Bud had at least a little of that mixed in as well. Mom agreed, and Dad reluctantly did, too. To this day, Dad seems hesitant to admit that and has a chip on his shoulder about pit bulls, despite also admitting that the owners are the problems, not the dogs themselves. I’ve personally grown to love pit bulls, but it doesn’t really matter. Bud was my baby, and no matter which flavor of mutt he was, that will never change.

I always hated leaving my devilish mutt behind when I’d be gone for multiple days, even if my parents were taking care of him. That first summer was especially hard. I was accepted into a Gifted Youth program at Stanford University, specifically their creative writing program. It was a once-in-a-lifetime chance, so I had to go. Then Mom sent me a video of her asking Bud where I was and Bud looking down the hall at my bedroom. Every. Single. Time. She thought it was cute and hilarious—and it was—but it still broke my heart. I sent a video back talking directly to Bud, and I cried the whole time. I think I broke Mom’s heart with that one. I enjoyed the program, made some new friends, and learned a lot, but I was still relieved when I returned to my baby. The next summer when I went to Stanford for their high school summer learning program wasn’t as bad, but it still stung. By the time I went to university at UC Davis, the pain had numbed, but I still visited every chance I got—for Bud, for all my pets, for my parents—and I missed being able to have animals around me.

Deep down, though, I’ll never be able to forgive myself for those times that I left. One of them signaled the beginning of the end for my relatively short time with my baby Bud.

Whenever my family went on vacation, we’d board our dogs and my cat with our vet. Since we were never gone for more than five days—three was actually the average—we would make sure that Buster had all the food and water he needed while we were gone and have a neighbor check on him for the slightly longer trips. There was never a problem with this arrangement—or so we thought. Then came the end of my sophomore year of college. My parents and I went to Disneyland, our usual happy place, and used our typical boarding arrangements. When we returned and picked up our dogs and Hunter, I noticed a sticker on one of the folders that warned that the animal may bite. I automatically assumed it was Hunter’s file. He wasn’t very sociable, especially when someone was trying to put him in his crate. Mom and I tried to apologize for not warning them ahead of time and laugh it off when we got the biggest surprise imaginable: it was Bud’s file. There had supposedly been an incident when they tried to take his stuffed moose to clean it, during which said moose’s antler was ripped almost entirely off rather than letting Bud keep it, and Bud had supposedly bitten someone (they showed us “the mark” on their hand, but we saw absolutely nothing there). Not only that, but he apparently only calmed down when he ran to the side of the one nurse among a sea of new staff that he recognized, and they claimed to have had similar problems last time.

Naturally, Mom and I were furious. Last time when we asked how everything went, they said both dogs were wonderful (Lexi especially, but she was an adorable cocker spaniel; everyone loved her the most). Nothing about biting or any sort of problems with Bud ever came up before. I felt horrible. How could I help my baby if our vet did not tell us when something like this happened? They tried to explain the reasons why a dog might act differently away from home, and I knew them all. I was just busy stewing on the fact that they didn’t tell Mom or me about the problem before. Moreover, they had accused my sweet baby—the same sweet baby who had gingerly carried a baby bird that had fallen out of its nest and been abandoned to our back door in his mouth and did not leave it until he got our attention—of doing something vicious. I didn’t want to hear their excuses anymore.

Then the t-word caught my ear. Tumor. They talked about how a tumor could press against a dog’s brain and change their behavior. Something about that struck a nerve with me. Why in the world would they even mention that? Bud was a perfectly healthy five-year-old dog, running around and loving life like all healthy dogs do. How dare they insinuate something like that! It was enough for me to want to get out of there before I broke down into tears. Mom picked up on this and chewed them out for saying that in front of me. We went home and told Dad what happened. He was livid. Since our favorite vet at that clinic had retired a long time ago anyway, we changed to another one closer to our house and never went back.

Mom didn’t tell me until more recently that there was actually more to that story than I knew. While I was distracted by my anger at everything, Mom saw that they had put a note in Bud’s file about a tumor. That’s how the tumor discussion had even begun. When my mom asked the receptionist about it, the receptionist told her that we weren’t supposed to see that. This infuriated my mother, and I still can’t believe that someone working at a vet’s office actually said that. We, the pet owners, weren’t supposed to see a note about a tumor in the pet under our charge? When did they even find this out? Who did which test and why? We never authorized anything, so nothing of the sort should have been done. The fact that they found something and weren’t going to tell us just added insult to injury. What else could they be hiding from us? We couldn’t go back to them, ever.

We thought that would be the end of it, but that summer, Bud got what we assumed was a cyst in his cheek...again. He loved to eat grass and weeds, and he always managed to get the spiky weeds stuck in his cheeks, causing him to get huge cysts more often than a dog should—than most of our dogs did, anyway. So, we took him to our new vet, thinking it was nothing. Our new vet thought it was nothing either but tested a sample from it when he realized it wasn’t from a weed. The results were devastating: non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The worst thing I could have heard right after my birthday. Even our vet was upset at giving us the news.

The cancer had advanced so impossibly rapidly that there was little we could do. The vet told us about a procedure we could try, but we’d have to go to another city hours away. The travel alone would do Bud more harm than good, and the procedure itself, if it worked, would only buy us at most six months. Not to mention the expense. So, we left that office with some pills to ease Bud’s pain and the knowledge that he was only expected to survive a few more weeks.

By the time I went back to school at the end of August, Bud was still alive but slowing down. I tried to get him to chase me, and bless him, he tried. He just couldn’t follow through. After a while, he just lay down. As I said goodbye to him that day, I asked him to “give me paw”—his favorite trick—if he promised to stay through Thanksgiving for me. From his position lying on the cement, he raised his paw and put it in my hand, as the trick required. I asked him again. He did it again. I asked him again. And again. And again. We went through this routine until I started bawling and hugging him.

Bud defied the odds. He made it past Thanksgiving straight into my Fall Quarter finals in December. Most of my finals were online that quarter, so I went home early, going back down to Davis only long enough to take the one final that wasn’t. When I saw Bud for the first time since Thanksgiving, another of many cracks from this venture etched itself into my heart. He couldn’t walk anymore, just managing to crawl. Mom had put a towel under his front end and a training pad under his back end for accidents. He hardly ate or drank. His eyes could barely stay open. Still, his tail wagged when I came down to his level and petted and spoke to him. After I finished a timed final in my bedroom and came out to complete an essay in the living room, Bud dragged himself on top of my feet and did not move for hours, just like his first night with us.

Bud didn’t make it through December. The day he was put down, I sat with my legs under me and Bud’s head in my lap while my parents got ready. I immediately regretted my position and not having lunch, but I wasn’t going to leave him, not for the world. Saliva-diluted blood rolled out of his mouth and onto my arm. Dad helped me wipe it off and held me while I held Bud and cried. I didn’t let Bud go until the last second, when Dad absolutely had to put him in the back of the truck. Mom and I followed in the car, leaving the rest of the pets at home—no reason to traumatize them further.

Dad and I spent a few final moments with Bud while Mom made the arrangements. The vet then made us pull around back to avoid disturbing other clients, and the vet tech came out to assist us. He was a very nice young man, everyone at this new clinic was nice, and he tried to make the process as painless as possible. We explained the cancer diagnosis and the internal bleeding, and he told us we were doing the right thing. One last favor for a good friend, he had called it. To end the pain. It didn’t feel that way when I sat on the bed of that truck, stroked Bud’s head, and said the last things he would ever hear from me. It felt like my grandfather all over again, when he died of leukemia and declined treatment so that he could spend his last days with his loved ones rather than in a hospital, in excruciating pain. This time, though, I felt more directly responsible. As I watched the vet tech slide the needle into Bud’s leg, as I watched Bud close his eyes for the last time, as I watched Bud’s body spasm for a split second even after all life was gone from him, a chunk of my heart ripped itself out and threw itself into the abyss. The responsibility for Bud’s death weighed heavily on me. I cried.

A lot.

I don’t know when I stopped crying. I know we went to a nearby pet cemetery that also does cremations to make plans for Bud. While Mom handled that for me, Dad and I stood in the viewing room, looking down on Bud’s lifeless body. I removed Bud’s collar and refused to let it go. We left at some point after the arrangements were made, as much as I didn’t want to. It was 3 p.m. and I hadn’t eaten for hours, so Mom took me to Sonic’s. I clutched Bud’s collar in my lap the entire time, too numb to do much else.

Mom and I went to Disneyland again a few days later to try and lift my spirits. It was my first time there in the winter, and it was fun, as always, but it couldn’t repair the hole in my heart. Bud wouldn’t be home when I got back. Worse, it was my fault—at least, that’s what I thought back then.

By the time university started again, Bud’s ashes were prepared. Down at my Davis apartment, I set up a little shrine to him with his blanket, his favorite toys, his urn, and his collar so that I could see him in my room every day. It was a little consolation, barely. I saw Bud in my dreams many times after that. One of my favorites was when I had a migraine headache and wasn’t sleeping too well. In the dream, he snuggled up to me and got under my legs before sticking his legs straight out towards me, which I then proceeded to grab. When I woke up, my legs were on top of my covers, which were bunched under me, and my hands clutched at parts of the covers shaped like Bud’s legs. Mom told me Bud had come to comfort me when I needed him, and I still like to think that’s what he was doing.

I didn’t get another dog for years after that. Initially, I couldn’t have pets at my college apartment. When I moved back in with my parents, it just never felt right. Then Hunter died of old age, leaving Lexi the only pet in our house (Buster died of a stroke and old age not long after Bud). Bud came to me again in a dream, a dream in which I was trying to find a new puppy, and I knew it was time. By the end of November 2017, Mom and I brought home my new toy fox terrier, Bubba. Small enough to fit in both my hands, Bubba lay in my lap the entire ride home. He was the one.

No dog could ever take Bud’s place, but Bubba gave me a feeling of unconditional love and responsibility that had been unparalleled since Bud’s death. The depression that had settled in since then hadn’t dissolved—too many factors contributed, still contribute, to it for that—but at least I had a dog of my own to wake up for again. There was something about him that I couldn’t put my finger on that just made our connection feel right. He acted like Bud, like Boomer, like Hunter—I’ve never seen a dog act so much like a cat. We even learned while getting him fixed at Haven Humane that he was actually half the age we were told he was when we got him (four weeks instead of eight). So much like my previous pets, and yet his own self all the way. But that’s a story for another day.

I don’t know if I’ll ever heal from Bud’s death. Lexi’s was even harder, for the entire household. Having only lost her in 2021, the wound is still painfully raw. Still, a few months ago, my parents have just gotten two bundles of energy to help fill the void, a Double Doodle named Luci and a King Charles cavalier spaniel named Sophi. (Again, a story for another day.) For my parents—for my grandma, even, and she doesn’t like dogs—Lexi’s loss has been the greatest and has thrust them into a deep depression. For me, it dug into a wound so cavernous that even though the loss has pained me, grieving has felt impossible. No new pets will ever take the places of the ones we have lost, but perhaps, with time, the new layer of scar tissue they bring can patch the holes their predecessors left and help me to fully function again.