Molly

My dog Molly died yesterday after a struggle with lymphoma for most of the past two months.

She was a monumental pain in the ass from the day we bought her home from the shelter. Pregnant, I spent most of the summer of 2001 with her and nine puppies in the middle of my living room, a slave to dog containment and poo. I developed elaborate means of laying down grocery bags and newspapers in layers to make it a little simpler to maneuver around puppies in a wading pool, and an old playpen, and finally a huge metal dog crate. Molly was not housebroken, and nursing dogs eat and relieve themselves seemingly a thousand times a day. And I patrolled the house, mop in one hand, Nature's Miracle in the other - seemingly a thousand times a day, plus all the times the puppies got out, or Molly let them out, or the kids let them out.

But then there was the night that I was putting up the side on the playpen, Molly on the outside, the puppies inside, and she came over and insistently stood on the side so that I could not lift it and lock it. One at a time, she licked each of her children on the snout, wagging tails on both sides, as if she were counting noses and saying good night. Only when she was done, did she jump down and let me secure the side. She repeated this ritual every night until most of the puppies had gone to their new homes, and only she and four of them were left. And, then, it was just Molly and her son Grendel, the runt of the litter. She'd look over her shoulder at him, and lead him into the crate for the night, crying and barking and carrying on until both of them finally settled down.

She opened the refridgerator, and stole a turkey. She taught Grendel how to do it, and when Ginger, one of the other puppies, was returned to us after six months, she taught Ginger. So we'd get up in the middle of the night to the sound of three dogs trying to scratch the door open to the Magic Food Place when we tried to outsmart them with a toddler lock on the door. Woe betide us if we forgot to latch that latch. Molly never missed a chance.

Then there was the time that she and Grendel figured out that they could squeeze out the space on the side of the air conditioner in the children's bedroom. First, the plastic shutters were destroyed. Then, when I replaced them with masonite and screws, they pushed the entire air conditioner out of the window when I forgot to lock them in the crate while I ran and errand for 45 minutes. I came home to find it hanging from the back of the house by the cord, and both dogs tied up in the yard by a neighbor that had found them. And a police officer, trying to push the air conditioner back in because the door to the house was locked. So the air conditioner went back in with heavy mending plates screwing it in to the windowframe and securing it from moving.

I thought that was it. Problem solved.

A few days later, I came home to find Molly tied to the front railing.

Another neighbor was standing on her porch across the street, and watched Molly push open a partially open inside window and scratch her way out through the screen, poke her body through the hole she had made, and leap into the bushes from the dining room window. Molly, being the friendly thing she was, ran right to the neighbor, and quickly back into captivity.

So I learned to close windows when I went outside for a minute.

A week later, we go out to dinner. And come home to an empty house. No dogs. Thinking someone had broken into the house and taken them, it took us a while to see a window that had been closed tight in the kid's bedroom was wide open and the screen shredded. They had made their escape somehow. A few minutes of searching, and Ginger came back from a dumpster around the corner, covered in blood from hitting the footboard of the neighbor's truck on the way out - and the other two were caught about a block away a few minutes later. Molly had managed to open a closed, but not locked, window, a trick I could not believe any dog would do, until she got brazen enough to try to do it one day right in front of me - she would claw at the window until she could get it open a narrow crack, and then use brute force to push it up with her nose.

So every window on the house got a safety wedge to prevent it from opening more than a few inches.

Over the past five years, we discovered that Molly could shoulder her way out the screen door, taking Grendel with her (Ginger stopped following her after she got hurt jumping out the window), and be gone for hours if we turned our back for a second. And she would not come back, except to Larry, no matter how pleadingly I begged, until she was tired or satisfied that whatever her mission had been was completed.

But she was my dog after a while, totally mine. She started sleeping on the bed, between Larry and I, her head on my shoulder, snoring into my ear all night long. She was always where ever I was, under my feet as I sat at this desk, tripping me in the kitchen, watching me from the bedroom doorway - and outside the bathroom whenever I took a shower or closed the door. Thursday, Thanksgiving Day, she was so weak she tottered when she walked, but I was not permitted to go to the bathroom without Molly guarding the door - I could hear her nails on the floor, slowly, sliding a bit, as she got up from where ever she had been painfully trying to rest, and flopping down against the door with a groan from the other side of the door. After our guest had gone home, I sat here, looking down the long center hallway as Molly struggled to her feet and walked toward the back door and the kitchen where we had been keeping newspaper on the floor because the medication had been making her urinate constantly. When she got to the paper, she turned around and looked right at me as she went, clearly telling me that she was a good girl and knew what the paper was for, dignity intact to nearly the end.

Yesterday, I found her at the foot of the bed, stretched out on the rug, her breathing labored and loud. I called her name and told her it was OK to let go. Her eyes were open, but she never looked at me - she was in some other place, far away. But the corners of her mouth turned up in a smile when I said her name.

She died a half hour later, at home, having said her goodbyes to all of us in her favorite spot.

Smiling.