What I learned from a dog

When I was first becoming more closely acquainted the lovely lady who is now my wife, we began to spend a lot of time together — as we have ever since.  I remained at her house more than it’s perhaps appropriate to mention while attempting to maintain a G rating in this blog post.

My future wife owned a big puffball of a pet — a Samoyed, named Kishka.  Kishka was a quiet dog who spent most of her time lying around the house.  I petted her occasionally, but otherwise paid her little mind.  Until one night, as my wife-to-be and I sat quietly together on the floor by the fire, Kishka walked silently and deliberately up to me and hooked her right front paw over the crook of my arm.  There was no mistaking her message:  “You’re OK.  You can stay.”

My future fiancé worked for a company that was (and is still) one of my clients.  The next day, we returned from their offices to her house together, as had quickly become our habit.  We had been joking around, and as we came in the door I said something teasing to which she responded by acting as if she were about to hit me.  Kishka, usually silent, came running up and barked loudly at her.  It was obvious that she was defending me.

“Who’s dog are you, anyway?!” my wife complained.

“Kishka, you’re all right,”  I laughed.  “You and I are going to be great friends.”

Before my wife acquired her, Kishka had been trained as a companion animal for an elderly lady who had since passed away.  Samoyeds have an uncanny ability to read human emotion, perhaps due to their long association with humans.  They are one of the fourteen most ancient dog breeds, and have been bred by humans for at least 3,000 years.

After our daughter was born, I would keep her on a blanket on the floor of my upstairs office while I worked.  Kishka suffered from hip displaysia that made it hard for her to even get up off the floor sometimes — but whenever she heard my daughter crying upstairs, she would force herself all the way up the staircase to check on her, despite my assurances that everything was OK. 

Kishka was not above getting into trouble, though, often in humorously intelligent ways — but I’ll save those stories for another time.

By the time Kishka was fifteen years old, she had become completely blind and her hip problems were even more disabling.  We began to think that the time had come to extend to her the merciful hand of death.  But she relieved us of that responsibility.

One morning, I fed Kishka and petted her as usual before beginning my work.  It was a bright August day, and she lay down in her favorite sunny spot where the breeze from Puget Sound washed over her and cooled her beneath her double coat of fur.  She fell asleep there, and never awoke.

We buried her in that same spot.  It was my daughter’s first experience with death, and she placed pictures that she had drawn into Kishka’s grave as she mourned.  I think this helped to prepare my daughter for the loss of her grandmother, two years later.

What did I learn from Kishka?  That dogs can be better people than people are.