Moving forward, but looking back
by Janine Adams

Sometimes life hands you some blows and you have no choice but to just keep putting one foot in front of the other. After Scout, our wonderful standard poodle, lost her fight with cancer in October 2001, her adoptive brother, Kramer, tried his hardest to fill the void. He acted lively and a little goofy (which was unusual for him - Scout was the goofy one in the family) and seemed to feel great.

Scout left such a void that after only a few weeks my husband and I decided we needed to add another poodle to our family. Through the miracle of the Internet, we fairly quickly located a dog we knew instantly was the right one: a three-year-old gray standard poodle who'd been abandoned at a boarding kennel in Utah. We decided to call her Pip. I eagerly made travel arrangements to fly from St. Louis to Salt Lake City, rent a car and drive her home. My dog-loving friend, Shannon Wilkinson, agreed to come along for the ride.

Then tragedy struck: the night before we were to leave to pick up Pip, Kramer, who was only nine years old, was diagnosed with cancer. The news, only seven weeks after Scout's death, left me reeling. The cancer had already metastasized to his heart and there was nothing to be done except to love him and treasure him and wait for his time to come. The statistics were brutal: the average survival time after diagnosis after this type of cancer (hemangiosarcoma) has spread to the heart is just weeks.

I made the difficult decision to proceed with the trip to Utah. Shannon and I sped up our trip - we rushed home for fear that Kramer would die in my absence. But he didn't. In fact, he was feeling so well when we got home that he spent the first three hours trying to hump Pip (until she turned the tables and began to hump him).

Kramer lived another three weeks. He and Pip peacefully coexisted (they stopped their mounting mania after a day), but they didn't seem to enhance one another's lives much. Pip seemed much less stressed after Kramer's passing.

Kramer died in his sleep - or at least while I was asleep in the same room. I'd long felt that a dog passing his sleep was the ideal, but the reality was much harder to take than I expected. We'd already made the decision to euthanize Kramer the next day, so I was somewhat prepared for his death. But not being consciously present the moment he passed was an experience I realized I sorely missed. Scout's euthanasia in a loving environment with her mom and dad present was cathartic for me (see my previous column, "Saying goodbye"). Kramer's passing on his own was probably the way he wanted to do it, but oh how I missed being there for him.

Those last three weeks with Kramer were stressful indeed - we were attentive to his every move, looking for signs of the internal bleeding that would inevitably kill him. But I am so grateful for that time. Hemangiosarcoma can kill suddenly - a seemingly healthy dog just collapses and dies. To have the time to get used to the fact that Kramer, our Original Poodle, wasn't going to be with us much longer, to be able to hold him and tell him how much we loved him, to just gaze at his beautiful face and kiss it for 21 more days; it was a precious time.

Our salvation was little Pip, a healthy, lively girl, so different from both Kramer and Scout. She'd been dealt a tough hand but was resilient nonetheless. She needed us - and boy did we need her. The house was never empty of poodles. There was curly fur to cry into. And a dog to keep us in our routine and get us out of the house.

I'm writing this nine months after Kramer's death and nearly a year after Scout's. In a way, 2001 was one of the most difficult years of my life. But Pip helps me concentrate on the positive, on all that Kramer and Scout taught me, and she gives me an outlet to apply all that knowledge. Thanks to Kramer and Scout, she's raw fed, holistically treated, positively trained and will get very few, if any, vaccinations ever again. I know it's not completely within my control, but I'm going to do everything in my power to see that she lives many years past the age of 10, since her track-laying predecessors could not.

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