Three Years

Photo copyright Wings, 2011; all rights reserved.

Monday was the actual day. Between the killer pace of prepping for the show and having lost Lilith four days previously, I was in no shape to post anything.

But April 14, 2011, was the night this little girl left us. It was too late to do anything then, so we laid Dom to rest the next morning. Lilith is now resting between Dom and Major.

This was another little being with a heart to match any human warrior. She survived horrors (as a bait dog, among other things) before finding her way to me. That raised paw? That's because it was broken in puppyhood, and her [alleged] humans couldn't be bothered to fix it. By 2.5, when she came to me, the shelter/rescue had had to rebreak it and pin it, and they screwed it up so badly that it had to be fused. Bleeding and infection followed; I took care of fixing that on my own.

Pit bull/rat terrier, as nearly as we could tell. Liked to play scaredy-dog, but really had a hell of a lot of heart and strength. And once she wormed her way into your heart (and your lap), you couldn't remove her, even surgically, if you tried.

We found out she was sick roughly two weeks before she left us. It was the same thing that took Lilith's life: pyrethrin toxicity, leading to tumors throughout her body. Lilith first showed sign of having developed it two months after we lost Dom, and the first death scare with her was on June 17th of that same year. She hung nearly three more years, but Dom's little body couldn't hold out that long.

I still feel her sometimes; we both do. A few days ago, a sudden image of Lilith flashed into my mind's eye, wholly unbidden: She was walking alone, westward, down a road that I'd never seen before, when suddenly she saw someone she recognized. She broke into a run, that big doggy grin on her face, and I could see that she was running like she used to — healthy, tumors gone, gray gone, her coat back to full black and white. And I knew she'd just seen Dom, and they were running to greet each other.