This morning was tough. It is a shift morning, so I was already going to be up early anyway. But this morning, instead of fixing my fireman his coffee, packing his food for shift, and sitting and visiting with him before he left, we woke our girls up at 4:45 and stood outside as a family, shivering in the dark while we said our tear-filled final good byes to our beloved Doberman and laid her to rest underneath our daughter’s weeping willow tree in the front yard.
Even though we knew last night that her time was very near, nothing really makes this sort of thing any easier. Roxanne was a leap day dog, so our girls said that even though she just turned 11 years old, technically she was only just shy of her third birthday. Last week my daughter went on a walk beside our creek while Roxanne traipsed along happily in the water. That same night, we donned snake boots, grabbed flashlights, and a shotgun and headed into the swampy woods at 10:30 on a shift night because Old Girl had run off trailing something and we could hear her distinct, wildly protective bark.
The day before, she ran her final few miles with me. Roxanne has been my running partner for over a decade now. She paused running and switched to walking with me when I was pregnant with my youngest. She took up running again with me when we moved away from neighborhoods and reintroduced her to country life. She appeared to grow five years younger in a matter of weeks after moving here. I attribute it to all of the free time she spent exploring the woods with the girls and traversing the trails with me time and time again.
In some ways, my family will be a little lost without her protective presence. Roxanne came into our lives when we were only a family of four with a 3-year-old and an infant, so she has been there for our three girls’ entire lives. Dobermans are naturally a deeply loyal and protective breed: traits that she embodied beautifully, her entire life. Even if we misunderstood her and thought she was being bossy, she persisted and protected us time and time again. Like when she was still a puppy and our middle daughter was only a toddler. I was doing some yard work and turned my focus away only for a few seconds before I heard Roxanne barking forcefully at her. When I turned around, what I saw would have looked to someone else like she was trying to attack the baby. But that wasn’t it at all. She was face to face with the baby, barking and closing in on her. My speedy daughter had seen that my back was turned and took off at a run for the fence. Since we lived in the desert on a lot of property, our acreage was surrounded by a fence fitted with a string of cattle-strength electric wire. Roxanne was barking and advancing in order to force my daughter back away from the threat of the electric fence and to alert me. It worked beautifully too!
About a year later, I was walking to open the property gate with Roxanne by my side when she suddenly leaped in front of me, put her butt on my leg so she could feel where I was, and started barking at a spot on the ground in front of us. I instinctively backed up and she kept pushing me with her butt backing me up more while barking in front of us. After backing up a few feet, I finally saw the rattlesnake camouflaged into the driveway right where I would have stepped.
Then there are the times when the girls dressed her up in various dress-up clothes, capes, Halloween costumes, and even a Hawaiian lei. Roxanne never one time protested, but spent every second of it simply loving the attention from her girls, no matter how they decorated her. And when she thought her attention-getting was complete, she would sidle up to one of us and do the notorious Doberman lean just to get in one more touch, head pat, or ear scratching.
Throughout the past 11 years, Roxanne has put up with us, loved us, and protected us countless times from snakes, creepy people, vicious dogs, getting lost in the woods, and probably dozens of other threats we never even knew about because she was on the alert at all times, watching out for her beloved fire family whether the fireman was away or home with us. While it is intensely sad to close this chapter in life, especially since Roxanne’s time with us spanned the childhood years of all three of our daughters, it makes it a little easier knowing that we could not have given her a better life. Her final year was spent in the wilds of the Southern woods: the place I think she grew to love the most. She is a part of this land now. A land that will be in our family forever. Her final rest is under the weeping willow where we will plant some zinnia and forget-me-not seeds and I will think about my loyal companion and faithful running partner every time I pass.
“The dog is the most faithful of animals and would be much esteemed were it not so common. Our Lord God has made His greatest gifts the commonest.”
~Martin Luther
Find more on my blog: www.firewifelife.com.
