Zibby Mag

By Kelly I. Hitchcock

Hazel was my divorce dog. I was 25, living alone for the first time in my life, and trying to figure out who I was. Maybe I was a dog person? Did I know the first thing about training a two-year-old rescue dog? Absolutely not, but the shelter’s only concerns were that I had a fenced backyard (check) and no young children (check), so Hazel came home with me on Halloween.

I made a lot of mistakes with that dog, but day one was by far the biggest.

Don’t adopt new pets on Halloween: they will not appreciate all the costumed tiny humans showing up at the door of their unfamiliar home.

I did not have kids, and I didn’t think I would ever have them. I also didn’t think I would move about once a year for several years after adopting Hazel, but life is unpredictable like that. By the time I remarried, stopped moving, and had my kids (identical twin girls), Hazel was in her second decade of life. She wasn’t interested in doing the playful puppy things my girls saw on TV. Apart from the mutual understanding that the children drop the food and the dog eats the food, Hazel was disinterested in the tiny humans and preferred to have her space, especially once the energetic toddlers became mobile and began running in opposite directions. My girls (still) may not have figured out how to consistently flush a toilet, but they knew and understood from a very early age to “leave Hazel alone; she needs her space.”

Not many people get to have 14 years with their pets, and our family continued to be surprised as Hazel coasted into senior citizenship with pawgress reports that showed little more than minor arthritis. Shortly after her 16th birthday, however, Hazel’s health began to deteriorate in a domino effect of declining quality of life. She’d lost nearly all the muscle tone in her back legs, so getting up and walking was difficult. The lack of muscle tone and the nerve damage in her hindquarters led to her becoming incontinent. Her kidneys were failing; she barely ate or drank, and her stinky azotemic breath could clear a room.

Hazel’s inevitable crawl toward the rainbow bridge was our kids’ first and closest encounter with the concept of death. They had a lot of questions ; one of which, to my horror, was can we watch her die? It turned out to be nothing more than typical five-year-old curiosity, but I felt my heart sink when they asked, “After Hazel dies, can we get another dog who likes us more?”

It was no secret that there wasn’t a lot of love lost between Hazel, my husband, and my children. After all, Hazel had been my first baby, and she’d gone from first to fourth place as our family grew. I worried that though I would be relieved when Hazel was no longer suffering, they’d just be glad she was gone.

In preparing for her euthanasia, I found a stuffed animal that reasonably resembled Hazel’s odd breed — Chow Chow and German Shepherd mix — for the girls to remember her by. I just had to wait for it to ship overseas, and then go about the gut-wrenching business of watching a nice, sympathetic lady administer heart-stopping drugs to the dog who had been with me for over a decade. Then an equally nice, sympathetic man lifted her limp 50+ pound body and all its overgrown fur into a nondescript white van and transported her to the crematory.

And just like that, the dog I’d had for 14 years was gone in less time than it took my husband and kids in the grocery store.

By the time Hazel’s stuffed facsimile arrived from China, I worried my kids had already forgotten their first pet, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. They had just finished reading The Velveteen Rabbit in their respective kindergarten classes, so their immediate response to the stuffed dog was a look of wonder followed by a promise that they were going to love her so she could become real. They took her outside, swung her on the swings, and held her on the teeter-totter, before bringing her inside to enjoy hot chocolate with them — all the things they never got to do when Hazel was alive, because she was too old and uninterested (plus the whole canine chocolate toxicity thing).

With Hazel, they may not have had the kind of playful relationship portrayed in commercials for arthritis meds, but I can tell from the way my girls play with Stuffed Hazel that they loved her in their own way, just as Hazel loved them from her own aloof distance. And I know they appreciate that Stuffed Hazel won’t ever poop in their room.

It will be a while before my heart has space for another dog, but it warms my heart that my girls have so much love to share with all their pets, alive and plush.

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Kelly I. Hitchcock is a literary fiction author and poet in the Austin, Texas, area. She has published several poems, short stories, and creative non-fiction works in literary journals, and is the author of the coming-of-age novel The Redheaded Stepchild, a semi-finalist in the literary category for The Kindle Book Review’s “Best Indie Books of 2011,” and Portrait of Woman in Ink: A Tattoo Storybook. Her newest novel, Community Klepto, releases this month, courtesy of She Writes Press. She is world-renowned among a readership of ten people and growing. Raised by a single father in the small town of Buffalo, Missouri, Kelly has fond memories of cash-strapped life in the Ozarks that strongly influence her writing and way of life. She’s a graduate of Missouri State University, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing. She has six-year-old identical twins and a full-time job, so writing and picking up LEGOs are the only other things she can devote herself to.