Lessons from Sadie
/By Nancy R. Fullbright
Savannah, Georgia
It’s a Sunday night, and I’m anticipating the week ahead — the upcoming chemo appointment and the acupuncture to follow. I check the rotation of the chemo medications to assess how bad — or less bad — this week will be. (Unless it’s an off week, it’s never a good week.) I carefully fill up the plastic pillbox — one of those “days of the week” numbers I used to make fun of my mom for having. Unlike hers, though, this one includes slots for AM and PM. Cerenia, metronidazole, metoclopramide, probiotic, CBD capsules, two different Chinese herbal supplements.
Do I need to prepare special food, something that will tempt chemo-tainted taste buds? If so, I fire up the burners and freeze portions individually for use later. For the past three months, I have started each week this way — including filling out multiple insurance-claim forms — because it’s what my Type A self can do to control the situation.
My 13-year-old basset hound, Sadie, has incurable lymphoma.
Sadie came to me in the summer of 2006, and I have to admit that I didn’t love her right away, mainly because my heart was still broken and she had no chance against the memory of Beauregard, my basset mix. Just three weeks earlier, I’d lost Beau to sarcoma, a devastating and fast-moving cancer that took his leg but not his spirit. Beau had been in my life for seven years after he’d turned up at my parents’ neighbor’s house in Macon.
“I’ve found y’all a dog,” Daddy told me over the phone. “He looks like a basset hound but has long hair. You can pick him up this weekend when you come to visit.”
At the time, I was unloading groceries in my pristine, newly remodeled home in Gainesville, Georgia, the first house I’d ever bought.
That night, I told my then-husband about the canine prospect.
“Wait a minute,” he said, pumping the brakes on my excitement. “I thought you said you wanted a golden retriever. You didn’t say anything about wanting a basset hound.”
“I know,” I admitted, but then found the lawyer’s loophole. “But I never said I didn’t want a basset.”
And thus began my love for the noble, loyal, and clown-like basset hound. Beau wasn’t purebred, but he had many of the breed’s trademarks: affectionate, food-driven, and, according to the guidebooks, “highly intelligent and independent, making them resistant to obedience.” In other words, stubborn AF.
Beau chewed up remote controls (13 of them, to be exact), CDs off the shelf (although he spared Milli Vanilli’s debut album), and, most oddly, about 17 grape jelly packets stuffed in a to-go bag from Longstreet Cafe left in the middle of the dining room table — way out of reach of his stubby legs, or so I thought. These were demolished in the middle of my immaculate beige carpet, turning my downstairs den into something resembling a crime scene.
And then there was the day he ate a couch. Upon returning home from work, I found my husband’s car in the driveway, but no sign of him or Beau. A quick surveillance of the backyard fence identified where Beau had managed to slip through and get out, the Houdini of hounds. Just then, my husband barged in the front door, out of breath.
“I chased him over to Green Street on foot, but couldn’t catch him,” he wheezed. “Let’s get in the car.”
Our cajoling and offering of Snausages managed to lure Beau home. I hugged him tightly, burying my tear-stained face in his neck.
“Do you love Beau?” my husband asked. I couldn’t fathom why he was asking such a stupefying question. “Are you glad he’s home?”
“Of course!”
“Then now would be a good time for you to go downstairs and look at the sofa.”
The downstairs sofa was a hand-me-down from my grandparents, a hideous concoction of pale green and peach velvet. It normally was covered with a denim slipcover, but I’d removed it to wash the dog hair and slobber off. Apparently, Beau had found a stray hole in a cushion and proceeded to pull half of the settee’s stuffing out. It looked like a cloud had exploded. That sofa, bandaged with duct tape, was never the same again.
In spite of these doggy derelictions, I dubbed Beau my “model citizen.” He got me through the searing pain of my husband’s infidelity and the subsequent divorce. I often tell people that losing Beau was harder than ending my marriage. When they look at me quizzically, I quip, “The dog was always loyal.” After he passed, I knew I would get another dog eventually, but vowed to wait until I’d been able to grieve properly.
And then, not even two weeks after losing Beau, I started perusing petfinder.com, the Animal Kingdom’s equivalent of Tinder.
There she was. A purebred basset, brown and white, with freckles dotted across her nose. The ad posted by the rescue organization fostering her described her as “playful and sweet,” “up to date on all shots,” and “housetrained.” (I’d later learn two out of three wasn’t bad.) My friend, Shawna, noted the pattern on her right side looked just like an angel, and wasn’t that a sign I needed to adopt her? I drove to Atlanta to meet Sadie and see if she’d be a good fit for me, to see if she’d mend the hole in my heart.
Her bright eyes and friendly demeanor indicated she could at least try, so with that paper-thin promise, I loaded her into my SUV for the hour-and-a-half drive back to Macon. Rather, I wedged her into a carrier my parents’ 18-pound dachshund, Spud, used, which I figured would be perfect for the svelte 20-pound frame the rescue estimated for Sadie. And it would have been, too, had she not been 40 pounds. Still, she managed to fit and even panted excitedly along the way, wearing what I swore was a smile.
“We’re just going to be in the car two minutes,” I lied as I looked straight in her eyes. “Just two minutes and then we’ll be at your new home!”
Sadie was bona fide, with papers registering her to the Continental Kennel Club. She came with the moniker Sadie, but I added Maybelle behind her first name, a nod to Mother Maybelle Carter. I reasoned such a designation would only add to her pedigree.
I was more than prepared with all of the things a new dog required, but I lacked patience and apparently the memory of what Beau had been like as a puppy. Sadie had a roomy crate where she could spend her day lazing on a lovely floral print bed with an assortment of aesthetically pleasing chew toys, but I was irate when, at night, I’d find shoes shredded to smithereens by canine incisors. At final count, she had obliterated nine pairs of shoes and three pairs of boots by destroying only one shoe in each pair. Her toothwork inspired a string of curse words that made my Southern Baptist mama fear for my soul. To add insult to injury, Sadie had the nerve to escape the confines of the house on a regular basis, pedaling her short legs as fast as they would take her. I took to calling her DoRo, as in dodo and moron. It was almost like she didn’t want to be with me, and, sometimes, the feeling was mutual.
Four months later, I was leaving town to spend some time with my aunt and uncle in Texas. That’s when I began to love that clown. As I pulled out of the driveway, Sadie stuck her nose through the slot in the picket fence. I took one look at her soulful brown eyes and freckled snout and realized I was going to miss her.
And then, in December 2006, after I’d had Sadie about six months, I met someone. Someone I really liked — a Brit named Peter. Someone who didn’t have pets. I was trying to figure out how he felt about me, and, above all else, I wanted to be wanted. But Sadie and I were a package deal. If he couldn’t handle her, he didn’t deserve me. Fortunately, after easing her into our weekends in Savannah (and in spite of her obliterating some tchotchkes around Peter’s house), I realized he and Sadie both were keepers.
The following September, we made our first out-of-town trip as a family to the mountains of western North Carolina, where we took picnics on the Blue Ridge Parkway and explored the Pisgah National Forest, picking wildflowers and traversing mountain creeks, their rocks worn as smooth as Sadie’s delicate puppy paw pads.
Today, Sadie snores with the intensity of a middle-aged man with sinusitis as she slumbers on her bed. I watch her chest rise and fall and grasp her sandpapery paw, its beefiness closely covering my palm. Her two spindly back legs are bandaged with Lilly Pulitzer-colored bandages, their bright green and pink colors belying the toxic stew of chemicals swirling through her system.
Looking back now, near the end of Sadie’s life and after more than a quarter of mine, I see her as harbinger of the good things that were to come. Together, we left my hometown behind and moved to the coast of Georgia so that I could marry that saucy English engineer. We created new friendships together and celebrated holidays — most markedly New Year’s Day, Sadie’s birthday. We saw it snow on Thanksgiving day in Texas. We curled up next to a fireplace in Asheville reading a book. We took walks around Daffin Park in Savannah. We played in the foam of the ocean waves on the sugary sands of Rosemary Beach one Christmas and ate Cracker Jacks at Savannah Sand Gnats baseball games in the summer. Sadie is a touchstone both of my life before Peter and the culmination of a life with Peter.
Of course, I selfishly want one more birthday, one more anniversary, one more trip to the mountains, one more spring day spent digging in my herb garden while Sadie lazes on the run nearby. I barely summon the next event in my imagination, framing it as the last fill-in-the-blank, before tears begin to sting the edges of my eyes.
“Do you think it’s a good idea if we take Sadie one last time to the mountains?” I ask Dr. North, as she eases a willowy needle into the tip of Sadie’s nose to help with her appetite. I can feel my face begin to contort involuntarily as the emotion kicks in.
“You’re looking at this through your eyes,” Dr. North gently admonishes. “Look at this through Sadie’s eyes.” And so, for the past several weeks, though it goes against the very grain of my need to control and manage, I have been trying to be still, listen, and see things through my dog’s gentle but weary eyes.
Here is what I see: a dog who is happiest when her people are nearby. One who sleeps restfully while snoring loudly. One who wags her tail when her Ma and Pa return from an outing. One who eats with gusto, barely leaving the smallest morsel for her sister, a street-smart tortoise-shell cat named Olive who has become an unexpected friend, ally, and nurse.
And I am learning to recognize and name the lessons she has taught me: Stick your nose out of the car window and smell the mountain air. Bask in sun puddles. Savor — and learn to spell — S-U-P-P-E-R. Bark and wag your tail with great exuberance when you have visitors. Don’t write someone off because they typically wouldn’t be your friend; they just might surprise you. Remember you’re a lady: Walk around the mud puddles. Appreciate music, especially soul. Be persistent: A high-pitched whine can break the most indomitable human spirit. Make the most of every day. And finally, have a friend who’s willing to get up in the middle of the night and go out into the dark for you.
I know that when the darkness comes, I’ll be that friend who rubs the cowlick of hair that runs from the tip of her nose to her eyes, tell her she’s been a good girl, and promise to be back in two minutes.
Nancy lives in Savannah, Georgia, with her British-born husband, Peter Hendy, a rescue pup named after Otis Redding, and a trampy, tortoise-shell cat named Olive. Her writing has been published in Cook and Tell: Recipes and Stories from Southern Kitchens and in Savannah, Beacon, and The Bluff magazines. She would like to thank Coastal Veterinary Oncology and Case Veterinary Hospital, especially Dr. Geoff Hall, for the love they showed Sadie.