Saying Goodbye to Greta

What can I say about our English Springer Spaniel, Greta?  She has been with us for 15 years and I can’t imagine a better companion.  She has beautiful soft fur and her forehead smells like grapes, I kid you not.  She has always played hard and rested easy.  We picked her from a litter of 9 puppies and she was the runt (the breeder’s name for her was “baby”).

She was our first baby, a full three years before we had our first human baby.  She loved to run and wore a dirt track in our back yard in Washington DC.  We’d take her to the park to socialize with other dogs, but she was not interested in other dogs.  Instead she would run a football field-sized loop around all the other dogs and their owners while we stood in the middle and watched her circle for the entire 30 to 45 minutes of time we were there.

She loved to snuggle and chill, but could be quickly coaxed into a more playful mode when we were in the mood for that kind of thing.  And she would never leave the yard without us.  I could let her out the front door and she would do her business and bee-bop around without wandering or running away.  When she was done and ready to come in she would stand at the door and wait patiently for us to reappear.

She was quick to train and eager to please.  For a time she would poop and pee on command.  We hired a teenager once to watch her at J’s parents home and he told the story that he let Greta out and she began running around the yard.  He told her “pee Greta” and she immediately stopped running and squatted to pee.  He was duly impressed!  And Greta loved visits to her grandparent’s house out in the country near Dayton, Ohio.  It was always the same place even though we moved her with us from DC, to Tennessee, and then to Ohio.  

These past few months and weeks have been hard.  She lost her hearing a few years ago and more recently has been losing her sight and also her mind.  She frequently wanders into corners and dead-ends in the house and does not know how to back out of them so that we have to rescue her.  B/c of pain (despite medication) and worsening coordination she must be carried off the porch into the yard and carried back in.  She falls frequently and in just the past day or two she has had less and less use of her back legs.

Tomorrow I will take her to the vet to be put to sleep.  We had her 15th birthday party on Saturday with a cake and candles.  Tonight Jennifer gave her her favorite human food, homemade chicken noodle soup.  She has been a precious member of this family and I can’t imagine we will ever find another dog as “perfect” as our beautiful girl.