99 New: The Widow Minnie

She is an old girl herself, the widow Minnie, and yesterday, she sprang a limp out of nowhere.

We’d taken just a two block walk, no chasing or sudden moves, but when we got home, she had that old hitch in her right back leg. We right away dreaded she’d re-injured the ACL she’d torn a year ago chasing down a squirrel in our backyard. The vet diagnosed a $5,000 problem that could possibly heal itself, it wasn’t inconceivable, just very unlikely. So we spent the winter hunkered down with her resting on thick blankets in our living room, dosed up with painkillers. Sometimes, we had to carry her upstairs to bed at night.

The long rehab worked. By spring, she was walking well on all fours and by summer, she’d gallop now and then. We stopped the pain meds and all was well. And still is, it seems, since yesterday’s limp seems mostly gone. But we still have the thick blankets on the floor because we feel sorry for her, because we think she is grieving the loss of her long time companion, BowWow, who died two weeks ago.

A quiet dog, Minnie shows few overt signs of being in mourning. Sometimes, I wonder if she is sad or relieved. Early in her relationship with BowWow, she had acquiesced to the fiction that he was the alpha male. This meant that when she was comfortably settled in for the night in her dog bed in our bedroom, BowWow would stand next to her whining. She’d look away for a while, try to ignore him, but eventually, even with me telling her to stay put and telling BowWow to go away, Minnie would get up and move to another place to sleep. She deferred to BowWow – not always but a lot of the time. He was a small dog with an outsized personality which often made for fun and adventure. Minnie often seemed muted beside him.

Now Minnie seems increasingly unmuted and I see emerging in her a bit of queenly-ness. She may miss BowWow or she may not, she doesn’t reveal her feelings, there seems to be no weeping or pining, and no melancholy except that which we ascribed to her. Our feelings of loss projected on to her? I’m not sure.

The Minnie that lives without BowWow seems to be becoming more of her own dog. She acts, in her sweet, mellow way, as if she now owns the place. There is a quiet, gentle air of entitlement about her and I am glad that she is getting this chance to be an only dog and lie wherever she pleases for as long as she likes. That’s her widowhood so far. Liberating.