I used to think Rogue would protect me from anything.
Then one day we were walking through the woods behind our home when a dog howled somewhere off in the distance. I don’t remember seeing the dog. I don’t even remember it being particularly close. I just remember that howl echoing through the woods, and I remember Rogue hearing it.
My brave, loyal companion stopped dead in her tracks.
Then she leapt directly into my arms.
Not behind me. Not beside me. She didn’t square herself toward the sound and growl. She didn’t even give me the courtesy of pretending she was considering defending me. Rogue heard another dog howl and immediately decided that the safest place in the Commonwealth of Virginia was apparently being carried by Dad.
The little coward.
That was Rogue, though. She could be ridiculous. She could be brave. She could be an absolute pain in the rear end. She could cost me money I didn’t have. She could make an entire room uninhabitable. And somehow, somewhere along the way, she became one of those pieces of our family that I just assumed would always be there.
We got Rogue when she was really too young to be leaving her mother. She still needed more care than a puppy normally coming home would, so I fed her mush by hand. She depended on me and Jo for everything, and I suppose that’s probably where it started. I fed her. I carried her. I took care of her. And, despite very clear instructions from my wife, I let her sleep with us in bed.
Jo said no.
I’m sure she had perfectly good reasons. I’m equally sure I listened carefully to all of them before putting that puppy in bed with me anyway. Rogue was tiny, she had been taken away from her mother too early, and she needed to be beside me. What was I supposed to do? Follow my wife’s completely reasonable instructions?
Obviously not. I am pretty sure that was the first time Rogue smugly looked at Jo in a victorious jaunt.
She was so little that even her collar and leash seemed too heavy for her. So instead of dragging this tiny puppy around with equipment that looked like it weighed more than she did, Rogue learned to just walk beside me.
And that’s what she did.
She didn’t run off. She didn’t disappear down the street. She didn’t make me chase her around the neighborhood while pretending she couldn’t hear me yelling her name. She just stayed beside me. Before long I didn’t really have to think about where Rogue was. If I was going somewhere, she was probably right there.
She was inseparable from me. She was the real deal. The kind of dog people are talking about when they say that every once in a while, if you’re lucky, you’ll get one that’s different from all the others. She was my “Little Ann”
Really, she was the perfect dog.
Well.
Almost perfect.
Let me tell you, Rogue could fart.
And when I say Rogue could fart, I don’t mean the occasional little dog toot where everybody looks suspiciously around the room before eventually blaming the dog. I mean Rogue could produce an entire atmosphere. There were times when that dog could make you question whether remaining indoors was medically advisable.
The worst part was that she never seemed particularly concerned about it. Rogue could unleash something that should have required an gas siren and then continue lying there peacefully while the rest of the family suffered.
The perfect dog. Absolutely terrible roommate.
She also had an unfortunate habit of eating things that could kill her.
I remember one day we were already late getting to a kids birthday party. Jo and I loaded up, we were on our way, and then I realized I’d forgotten the gift. Of course I had.
So we turned around and went back home. I ran inside to grab the forgotten present, probably irritated with myself because we were already late and now we were going to be even later.
And that’s when I found Rogue.
She was on a shelf in a closet.
Eating rat poison.
There are moments in life when everything suddenly rearranges itself according to importance. Thirty seconds earlier, the biggest problem in my life was that we were late to a birthday party.
Now I was standing in a closet looking at my dog eating poison.
The birthday party had moved considerably farther down the list. I grabbed the dog ran outside, and well, ill explain it from my wife’s point of view from inside our Prius…
“Austin ran outside holding the dog, pried the dogs mouth open and violently shoved his arm down the dogs throat till his elbow disappeared!”
I’ve thought about that day many times since. If I hadn’t forgotten that gift, we wouldn’t have turned around. If we hadn’t turned around, I wouldn’t have found Rogue when I did. Something that had seemed like one more example of Dad not having his act together may have been exactly what saved my dog’s life.
You would think Rogue might have learned something from this experience.
Rogue did not.
Because there was also the chocolate.
Not a Hershey bar. Not a couple of pieces somebody dropped on the floor. Rogue ate a five-pound block of chocolate.
Five pounds.
At some point, you’ve stopped stealing a snack and started training competitively.
I have no idea what Rogue’s plan was. Maybe she didn’t have one. Based on the woods incident, long-term strategic planning was never really her strongest quality.
That little dietary decision alongside the rat poison resulted in an approximately $800 veterinarian bill so that a trained medical professional could make my dog throw up the enormous quantity of chocolate she had apparently decided belonged inside her.
Eight hundred dollars.
To make a dog puke.
And I paid it.
Of course I paid it. But we had a very close conversation detailing how she had used up all the vet money for her whole life… so, be more careful.
That’s the strange thing about having a dog in the family. They can destroy something, eat something poisonous, wake you up, scare you half to death, make you spend money you absolutely did not intend to spend, stink up an entire room, and generally make your life more complicated. Then they walk over, put their head against you, and somehow the account is settled.
I could probably tell a hundred stories about Rogue. Some of them are ridiculous. Some of them aren’t. I remember the times she protected the kids, when something in her seemed to understand that those little people belonged to her and that watching over them was part of her job. I remember the bad days when I didn’t particularly want to talk to anybody, but Rogue was there anyway.
Dogs are pretty good about that.
They don’t need an explanation. They don’t need you to tell them what happened. They don’t offer advice or try to fix anything. They just seem to know when their person isn’t having a good day, and they stay close.
Rogue was around for life. Not just the big moments—the ordinary ones. That’s what I remember most when I think about her now. She was there. When I came home, she was there. When I had a bad day, she was there. When the kids needed protecting, she was there. When we were doing absolutely nothing worth remembering, Rogue was probably somewhere nearby.
At some point, without me really noticing when it happened, my dog became the family dog.
That’s a different thing.
The kids had a dog. Jo had a dog, despite the fact that she’d once made the perfectly reasonable request that said dog not sleep with me. Rogue had her people, and her entire life revolved around those people.
I think that’s something we sometimes forget about dogs.
Our lives are enormous compared with theirs. We have work. Bills. Friends. Church. Errands. Vacations. Projects. Bad days. Good days. Kids who need something every fourteen seconds. A thousand things constantly demanding our attention. We leave the house and go out into this huge world, and then eventually we come home.
To them, we are the huge world.
They spend their lives waiting for us to come through the door. They learn our routines. They know when we’re upset. They watch our children grow. They sit beside us through parts of our lives that we’ll eventually forget ever happened.
And then, unfairly, they get old much faster than we do.
Rogue’s last day was a Saturday morning.
I remember her struggling. And I remember Rogue walking around the corner, away from me, where I couldn’t see her struggle.
I don’t know what was going through her mind. Maybe nothing like what I’ve imagined. She was a dog, and I don’t want to turn that moment into something it wasn’t. But I’ve always felt like she didn’t want me to see her that way.
After all this time of following me everywhere, Rogue walked around that corner.
And I lost my very dear friend.
I still remember that Saturday morning. I probably always will.
But I don’t tell you this because I want you to be sad. And I certainly don’t want you to sit here thinking about the worst day you had with a dog you loved. Those memories have a way of finding us all by themselves.
I think it’s more important to remember all the days before that one.
Remember the dog that followed you from room to room. The dog that greeted you like you’d returned from war when you’d only gone to Kroger. Remember the walks, the muddy paws, the things they destroyed, the food they stole and the ridiculous veterinarian bills they caused. Remember the dog that slept where it wasn’t supposed to sleep and somehow occupied three-quarters of a bed. Remember the stupid things they did that made you laugh.
Because those were their lives, too.
Rogue’s life wasn’t that Saturday morning.
Rogue’s life was all those years before it.
It was a puppy eating mush out of my hand because she’d left her mother too soon. It was sleeping beside me despite Jo saying no. It was a collar and leash too heavy for her, so she simply learned to walk beside me instead. It was protecting my kids and sitting beside me after I’d had a bad day. It was rat poison in a closet, five pounds of chocolate, an $800 vet bill, and flatulence powerful enough to make me reconsider whether I actually wanted to own a dog.
And it was a howl somewhere off in the woods followed by my supposedly fearless protector launching herself straight into my arms.
That’s the Rogue I want to remember.
We’ve had other dogs. We’ve loved other dogs. Dogs are still an important part of our family, and I hope they always will be. Loving another one doesn’t replace the one that came before it. That’s not really how it works. Each one seems to occupy its own strange little place in the history of a family.
Dogs don’t get nearly enough years with us. But during the years they do get, they seem to spend an awful lot of them trying to make ours better. Their lives revolve around us in a way ours can never completely revolve around them. We go to work. We raise children. We run errands. We get busy. And through all of it, they’re just happy when we come home.
So if you’ve had a Family Dog of your own who isn’t here anymore, don’t spend today remembering the last day.
Remember a Tuesday instead.
Remember some completely ordinary day when nothing important happened. Your dog was lying at your feet, following you through the house, begging for something it wasn’t supposed to eat, stinking up the room, or doing something so incredibly stupid that you couldn’t help but laugh.
Those ordinary days don’t feel important while we’re living them.
Turns out, they were.
Rogue wasn’t my child. She didn’t need to be.
She was my dog. Then she became our dog.
She was the Family Dog.
And I still miss that little coward.
But most days when I think about Rogue, I don’t want to remember that Saturday morning. I’d rather remember the dog who heard a howl somewhere in the woods, decided she’d had quite enough of being brave for one day, and jumped straight into my arms.
And when I remember that, I laugh.
That’s how I want to remember her.