I got my first dog, Teddy, to make my husband happy. We got Lily when Teddy became ill and I was terrified of being dogless. Tucket was to provide support and stability after Teddy’s death to help our young son manage his autism. Instead, Tucket changed everything. He brought us into a better future than we could have imagined.
When Teddy was 5 and Joseph 4, Ted seemed to be dying. My son had severe neurological and psychiatric issues. I had compartmentalized Teddy into conversation with our vet and his specialist. I discussed Joseph with a larger cast, from medical specialists to special education staff.
At one visit with Joseph’s psychiatrist, I drifted into talking about my grief over Teddy’s looming death. The psychiatrist, who was never shocked by Joseph’s staying awake for 36 hours at a time (probably will be bipolar but he is too young to say that now) or self-injurious behaviors (it looks like a mask of blood on his face because there is a combination of blood and saliva. You might want to see if you can get his fingernails shorter), looke surprised.
He confirmed I meant Teddy, the loving dog who had guarded Joseph as a baby and had been his support when he began to run (he never walked) or when he needed something to grab for comfort, and then he said
“Well, you will need to have another dog in place who can be calming and centering the way that one is.”
We had gotten Lily to make sure we weren’t left alone. Lily, though, was the center of every party. She was not calming.
What followed was either good luck or a small miracle. I wrote a note about the same time to friends who had nearly lost a dog of theirs. In reply, they noted that Lily’s breeder (a friend and neighbor of theirs) had decided to keep a male puppy from her most recent litter until she could find the right home for him. Four e-mails and one telephone call later, a little brown boy named Tucket (Jeff’s choice because it was a T name like Ted’s and reminded us of Nantucket, the island we had visited for our honeymoon) was coming to live with us.
Unfortunately, he came the day after we had nearly put Teddy to sleep because we couldn’t get the current outbreak of skin ulcers under control and Joseph could not keep himself from touching them. My worst fear was that Teddy would need to die and we would never know if Tucket was the weight that finished him.
As I held Tucket on the ride home from the airport, I remembered a line from the e-mail my friend had sent initially describing him: “It is quiet now, and no one calls about puppies. I have been thinking about that, and, you know, I found myself wondering whether he was waiting for a place in your home.”
Both Ted and Lily were black with white markings, and I found it a relief that Tucket was brown. It was harder to make the mistake of hoping he would be Teddy II.
We introduced Tucket to Joseph as the puppy Teddy wanted him to have. Joseph’s joy gave Teddy physical and emotional space to rest. Tucket focused primarily on Teddy, rightfully figuring out who was Number One, and he would lie for half an hour beside Ted, legs sprawling while he licked at Ted’s mouth in submission and adoration. Tucket treated Lily as a big stuffed toy and she seemed unsure whether we should send him back or not, but she got more brisk exercise with him chasing her than she got with Teddy.
And Ted? Jeff and I both noticed the change immediately. He took stock of the little brown guy and you could see him thinking, “I have got to get it together. They brought me another puppy to raise.”
Teddy defied the vets’ expectations and went into remission one more time. The liver was huge and the toes twisted, but the skin sores resolved and his energy improved. Tucket became his first mate. Teddy lived over a year, long enough for Ted to be happy, Joseph to have a transition, and me to feel hope that we would have a future, even if I could not quite imagine it.
Tucket could have gone to a show home, and in thanks to his breeder I moved from at-home dog mum to handler — taking Tucket to a place in a large Open class at our national specialty (single breed show) in our fifth show overall. He never finished his championship, but he brought us beyond home into the world.
Joseph wanted to come to shows. Sometimes he did well, especially when it was outside, and sometimes he melted down and Jeff philosophically put him over his shoulder and carried him out to the car. Once I was mortified when I gave Joseph the blue ribbon Tucket had won only to have Joseph demand red, the preferred color. I had to explain this was not McDonald’s and we could not trade for what he wanted.
Once we mastered the controlled chaos of dog shows, we tried taking Joseph to movies. We had safety talks with the psychiatrist (Joseph was short, fast, and had no common sense amid cars and in public places) where we discussed whether it was better to have Joseph safe at home or at risk but living life in the real world.
With counseling, we decided we all needed quality of life as much as safety, and our family universe expanded. Dog friends I had made online became real-world friends as I did advanced obedience training with Tucket and continued to enjoy dog shows even when I realized I could not handle him to a championship. We chose to bow out as a family and move on.
What I could not know until Joseph left home for a residential school program at age 14 was that Tucket, then 10 years old, and I would have an entirely new chapter, an amazing life. We became a therapy team in the huge urban hospital where all three family humans had been hospitalized at least once and I had interviewed, in a previous life, for a medical residency….. oh so long ago when I was an ambitious med student and cat person, before the accident, before a baby, before the life that came.
Our last act together, Tucket’s and mine as a therapy team, has been written about before. He was magical. I was Elvis’s girlfriend and chauffeur. And that story will be my next in the series on looking at my life through my pets.
Elizabeth Coolidge-Stolz, MD/ (c) HealingWoman.net