Sad news
Our much beloved family dog, Elvis Beauregard Carney the Greatest of Great Danes was put to sleep on 24 February 2009. He was diagnosed with advanced cancer of the stomach and abdomen. he was a little less than nine years old.
A post-dated apology
We have decided not to break the news to Ethan till we return. We will tell him just before we leave that Elvis is sick and then that he has died. I'm a little uncomfortable with this as I have always supported a policy of frank honesty with our children. We feel though that this is for the best as Ethan is likely to pick at this emotional sore for the next three months. We got very good advice from our friend Anja who suggested that an important step for children dealing with death is to give them something to do to ameliorate the sense of powerlessness we all feel when faced with the reality of our mortal existence. So we will wait and when we return we will go to the grave and lay flowers and make drawings and tell stories and give Ethan a sense that he is doing something about it.
I'm writing this bit now not for our friends following (though, please don't blow our cover with Ethan) but for Ethan a few years down the road when he googles my name and finds this blog. I hope that boy will understand that this lie of omission was an exceptional and difficult choice for us.
An extremal dog
Elvis was our second Great Dane and our third dog. He was concurrent with our first Dane, Hannah, a rescue who hooked us on the breed.
Hannah was a small female, extremely clever and also eager to please, a rare combination. She was thus very trainable. I could do the old biscuit-on-the-nose trick with her and comeback hours later. She would walk a specified number of steps in a direction and turn and go another specified number of step, all on a single command. She was dedicated to us and sweet and gentle and had a way of making her hundred pounds very small and unobtrusive.
Elvis was sweet and tolerant and very dedicated to us and that's about where the similarities end. He was block-headed and bull-headed, nearly impossible to train despite extensive efforts on our part. His one-hundred and forty pound frame seemed to fill a space even larger. He stole food from counters and tables, drank from the toilet and cleared coffee tables with his tail. He left me with a legacy of century-old plaster to repair from his repeated collisions with perfectly stationary walls. He smelled awful and insisted on sleeping in our bed. He had horrid breath and was a dedicated face-licker. He was an absolute disaster on a leash.
Elvis was also the most tolerant of dogs. Near the end, Hannah would occasional growl at Ethan for annoying her. But Elvis, through his whole life, would tolerate the most outrageous abuse from the boys. The boys never meant to be mean, but they would climb on him and pet him and in the process, poke, pinch, poke, and pull things that I would not have tolerated myself. Leif liked to climb on and bounce on him while Elvis lay on the floor. Occasionally this meant bouncing on the poor dog's head. Elvis never growled, never indicated he might growl and seemed instead to enjoy the attention. He would follow Deborah around during the day, never more than inches away.
The scourge of little white fluffy dogs
Elvis also overlapped with our cat, Kitty. He was great and gentle with her too. He generally got along well with other dogs and all living things. There was one remarkable exception. Elvis had a preternatural hatred of little white fluffy dogs. I have no idea why. I would like to attribute this to good taste, but he never exhibited good taste otherwise. I never saw him traumatized by a little white fluffy dog. But while dragging us around the neighborhood he would go absolutely berserk at the sight of a miniature poodle or other such dog. While it was incongruous with the rest of his personality, and slightly worrying, I always found it endearing.
We paid for this?
Hannah had been a rescue. I found her while volunteering at the local no-kill shelter. When we decide to get another dog, we thought we would find a good breeder and try to circumvent some of the notorious health problems in the breed.
We got elvis in the summer of 2000. He had been born in May. We did extensive breeder research and found a line in Arizona that we liked. Deborah had a fortuitously planned business trip to Tucson and so she flew him home as a carry-on. He was supposed to spend the trip under the seat, but instead rode in Deborah's arms. I picked her up at the airport amid a crowd of admirers. He was eight weeks old and the cutest puppy ever. The photos from his homecoming are back in the states on something called ``film.''
Hannah was by then about four years old. She was not particularly thrilled with the new puppy. She liked the company of other dogs, but this new thing was entirely too wild. She wouldn't tolerate him touching her and that was when I started letting him sleep with us (big mistake!).
At eight months, Elvis started a bad limp and was diagnosed with hip dysplasia. The breeder insisted that this must be our fault ( our vet assured us this is nonsense) and reneged on her health guaranty. So we spent about k$8 on having his hips re-engineered so that ball and socket would stay properly together and not lead to the arthritic changes that cripple dysplastic dogs. Those hips held up extremely well for eight years. Thanks Dr Allen. Elvis was given excellent care the rest of his days by Dr Hill and the good people at Hill Animal Clinic.
Upon his return from surgery, Hannah took pity on him and elvis was allowed to actually touch her and even rest his head on her. There are those who have theories about dogs mirroring their owners. There's clearly nothing to this.Darwin shmarwin
Elvis loved to swim. This was great as he also often stank. The problem was that he was dumb as a bag of hammers. He would swim himself to exhaustion and then yelp for help, flailing and sinking when his muscles failed. I would then have to rescue him while trying to neither drown nor lose too much blood from the lacerations from his flailing nails.
He was a Good Dog
We are deeply grateful to Deborah's brother and his wife who looked after Elvis while Deborah's mother was here with us. We are also grateful to Deborah's mother who had the misfortune of caring for an ailing Elvis and taking him in for the diagnosis and finally to be euthanized. She tried to nurse him along in the hopes that with sufficient pain management he might comfortably make it till we got home in June. It rapidly became apparent that this would not be possible. His death was at least as hard on her as it was on us.
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