Valentina

14 Years Of Life With The Best Dog In The World

My dog is dying after 14 years together and I’m heart broken. She’s lying next to me quietly, peacefully. She doesn’t seem to be in pain, but she’s not fully here anymore either. She hasn’t eaten for 3 days, today will be the 4th and I read that dogs can live for up to 5 days with no food. It feels like we’re nearing the end and I’ve been reflecting on our time together. I was 23 when we met and now I’m 37. She’s watched me fall in and out of love, get married, have 2 babies. I was such a young idiot when we met. I told my dad this and he said, “You’re still an idiot.” (Thanks Dad!) I laughed and said, “Well now I’m an old idiot.”

I’m looking at my life now as time before Valentina (we call her Teeny), our 14 years together, and soon to be my life after her passing. For 7 years before I met Teeny, I lived to travel. From age 17-23 I lived in Ghana, West Africa, Costa Rica, Panama, Mexico, Brazil, and Venezuela. In between these trips and school, I worked at a video store, coffee shops, and as a river guide to make enough money to go again. Then I would come back broke and repeat the cycle. I did a few semesters of college abroad and then had an advisor tell me that I should go follow my parents around because they wouldn’t be alive forever. So I did.

I followed my mom to Mexico to study Sensory Awareness and met this incredible massage therapist. I received a session from her that changed my life. I’d never been touched like that before, with so much reverence and deep listening. I felt fully embodied, connected, and awakened. Afterwards I said, “I want to know what you know.” She said, “I’ve been dreaming of an intern. Can you come back in October?” I flipped my life around to make it happen and returned to study massage and energy work. I learned about Craniosacral Therapy in her little apartment on the beach in Mexico, where I could hear waves crashing outside the window, while feeling the waves pulsating inside of people’s bodies, fluids moving skull bones and spinal cords. It was incredible and I felt so open, so alive.

I didn’t know what to do with all of this energy I felt radiating through my body and in the world around me. I was so young and beautiful, vibrant and luscious, and I had no idea how to work with my primal magnetism. I was so innocent, naive and optimistic. I was living in a shitty hotel by the beach and fell in love with a sexy sweaty construction worker with long curly hair and big brown muscles. He walked up to my room knocked on the door and kissed me passionately with his arms around my waist. That was it for me, it was just too romantic and exciting. Then I found out he was married. But it was too late because I was “in love.”

Looking back I think I was just incredibly fertile, hormonal and in the prime of my life (as far as baby-making goes) and I knew nearly nothing about love, sexuality, or self control. I tried to distract myself by sleeping with other men in town but nothing could keep my mind off my sweaty charismatic construction worker. We did so many stupid things. Then his father-in-law, who owned the hotel where I was staying, found out about our love affair (I think) and called immigration to tell them about this prostitute who was making all kinds of money illegally.

Immigration showed up at my internship and I had to drive to the capital to tell them that I was actually not making any money. Just your average slutty American sleeping around for free. The charges were dropped because they said I didn’t look like a whore and I cried a lot. I didn’t know how to handle my intense sexual urges. During this 3-month internship I slept with 5 Mexican locals, a French hippy shirt-salesman, and a Canadian fisherman. I had so much bad sex in such a short time. I flew home feeling disgusting and confused. How could learning all these healing arts and opening my heart and energy lead to fucking this whole damn town and why did it feel so gross? I didn’t have any answers but I felt that I needed a big strong guard dog to protect me and keep me from doing so much dumb stuff.

That’s when I met Teeny dog and at 23 we went off on a journey of adventure and sisterhood. She was my loyal companion, my ride-or-die buddy, my fearless friend. I made countless mistakes and she never judged me. Together we drove around the country camping, rafting, backpacking, and skiing. She was always up for an adventure. Just last weekend we climbed up over a mountain together through a foot of snow. Now she doesn’t want to move. Two weeks ago I took her on her last skiing adventure.

When I first got Teeny we stayed at my parent’s house in California for a few months and then drove to Ashland, OR and lived in a tent in my brother’s backyard before house-sitting for him and his cat and then for his neighbor’s. One of my friends was starting a rafting company there that year and I got a job as a river guide for my 4th summer. My brother passed on his job at the local video store and I found out about the massage school. Then I had a plan and Teeny could come with me every step of the way, except on the raft when I was working. She came with me every day to the video store and in the evenings to massage school. We lived in Ashland for 5 years in a bunch of different houses, a tent, and a camper. Our coolest home was in this renovated trailer right on the creek surrounded by bamboo. There was no bathroom so we both peed outside and I pooped in the art studio next door. I showered in my landlords’ house, but mostly I rinsed off in the creek and embraced being stinky.

We were wild wolves together and now it feels like part of my soul is dying. That I’m losing this old self that lived in tents with Teeny Dog. We lived by rivers in California, Oregon, New Mexico, Washington, and Montana. After breaking up with my second long-term boyfriend in Ashland, OR, we drove to New Mexico so that I could study with an amazing osteopath in Santa Fe and work on the Rio Grande. That’s where I met my husband.

When we met I was living in a tent in the desert with Teeny Dog, on a platform by the boatyard of the rafting company we both worked for. I had a tiger lily plant outside my tent door. It was the same small orange backpacking tent that we’d lived in when I first moved to Ashland, OR. We would live in it one more time in White Salmon, WA, this time with my husband-to-be and his little asshole-chihuahua-mix, who we’d grow to love even though he bit us sometimes.

When I met my husband I was sad and heartbroken and it felt right to be alone in the desert with my husky-mix smoking cigarettes and looking out at the vast emptiness of sand and rocks. I didn’t expect to fall madly in love with this wild river guide ski-patroller with a feisty chihuahua, but Teeny Dog probably knew before I did. Soon we were roommates, coworkers and lovers. A lot of my life journey has felt like doing everything wrong and having it work out sort of beautifully anyway.

I got a dog when I was too young, immature, and unstable and we went off on an epic adventure together where we challenged, protected, and loved each other through it all. Before all this I took my GED, dropped out of high school and went to Ghana, West Africa with a one way ticket when I was 17. My husband and I did all the wrong things (well not all of them) to forge our relationship journey and somehow fell in love and still love each other, even in the midst of parenting 2 little boys and struggling to make a living.

All along the way people have told me, “Don’t do that! That’s stupid, it will ruin your life!” They might be right, I’ve done a lot of stupid things but somehow I think that’s what’s made my life beautiful. All the reckless wild things I did to answer the call of my expansive soul. The wild wolf part of me that doesn’t know how to be a quiet gentle mommy in the suburbs. The part of me that longs to smoke cigarettes in the desert outside my tent-home with my wild beast dog by my side. How do we reconcile these parts of ourselves? I don’t want to go back. I don’t actually want to be heart broken, single, and chain smoking in the desert. It’s the freedom that I miss. The expansiveness, the unknown, and wildness of it all.

Now I sit heartbroken and writing in my beautiful cozy comfortable home next to my dying dog, trying to accept the current unknown. The slowness and quietness of it all. This imminent death that I can feel all around and inside of me, the emptiness calling. I love Teeny Dog so much, with all of my heart and I know that her death is just the simplicity of life leaving her body. That it doesn’t actually represent anything about my soul. And yet there is part of me that wants to scoop her up and race her to the emergency vet to do all the tests and radiation or surgery to fix her old body and keep her with me for longer so that my soul can be intact. I’m fighting this urge to medicate her peaceful death and disturb her beautiful slow natural process of leaving this earth. Because that’s what I think she would want. To die the way she lived, with strength and grace.

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*Update: I began writing this last week and as of today Teeny Dog is still alive and miraculously doing a little better. She has started eating again a little (after 6 days with no food) and is walking down the stairs into the yard. It does seem that her adventure days are behind her, but we are happy to have our sleepy old lady dog around for as long as she is willing to hold on.