Remembering Grimsby

Cheers to Grimsby!  He was our first nonhuman family member.  He was here before we were married when Rosefield was just the house.  Grimsby came into our life because Carly just had to have a dog.  I wasn’t keen on the idea of adding a dog to our family.  The truth is, I am a softy and I hoped that a trip to the humane society would be proof of how unreasonable adding a dog to our family would be.  Well, maybe I was hoping to convince her that a dog would be irrational and maybe I kind of was willing to convince myself that a dog would be okay.  We walked through the humane society dog run and I became immediately detached.  Carly fell in love with half a dozen dogs.  I wasn’t buying it.  By the time we were near the end I saw what to me was a big beagle looking dog named Adam.

Adam was never really Adam.  He also wasn’t a beagle.  He was a vizsla which is a Hungarian breed of hound dog.  Nervous from the beginning, he didn’t respond to his name.  We played with him but he was obviously afraid.  We really liked him and decided to sleep on the decision to adopt.  With a guess of eight years old the humane society admitted that they didn’t know much about the dog that was saved from a reservation in Jefferson County.  They thought that it would be too difficult to home him in rural Oregon.  We were glad they moved him to Portland.  The next day we took him home.

Adam was renamed Grimsby.  Grimsby is the wise old advisor of Prince Eric in Disney’s Little Mermaid.  Grim resembled the character’s stature and nervous demeanor and he quickly learned his name.  On the cusp of Thanksgiving he met his kids, first Josie and then Melody and Ethan.  They couldn’t believe it.  Even though he was brand new we took him across town on his first night to his second home at grandpa Carl’s.  He was a prince to the new family.  After a large Thanksgiving dinner he and I slept together wrapped in an embrace.  He was our dog.

Grimsby was an emotional creature.  He didn’t speak much when we got him but we coaxed him into speaking.  His trademark bark was a “roo roo roo.”  He was given his own speaking voice and we would speak for him often.  In his hoarse voice we would be his confessional, admitting on his behalf that “I like to eat poop.”  One time he was hopping around.  He was excited because people were arriving for Carly and my birthday.  I said something like, “it’s not your birthday.”  In a Grimsby voice Carly said, “It could be my birthday, you don’t know.”  That was true.  We didn’t know when his birthday was, but to us it will always be Thanksgiving.

Always wanting to cuddle Grimsby often ended up in bed with Josie when the kids were home.  He lived to be on the couch with us.  He became obsessive about cuddling me and would nudge and push into my lap.  If Grimsby decided that he would “help” me do my homework I would eventually have a dog muzzle in my keyboard and no schoolwork done.  Grim would raise his paws to reciprocate cuddles and lower his head for a scratch.  For the guests that would occasionally sleep on our couch Grim became a dog blanket.  Michael Romero spent plenty nights with Grim.  Grimsby made himself comfortable sleeping right on top of him.

In spite of his age, Grimsby liked taking walks with us.  A trip to the park would sometimes climax with a leash free run around Rockwood Park.  It was like glimpsing into the life of a dog we never got to meet.  Grim was a puppy running with his slender red body cutting through the air.  His ears would flap against his head and his legs bounded out in front of him to the point that sometimes we were in disbelief that he didn’t fall end over end.  Eventually he would come back to us.  He would have snot on his muzzle and his ear would be flopped up on top of his head.  He looked stupid but God was he happy.

Grimsby tolerated this farm experiment better than any dog could be expected to.  He never attacked the chickens.  When the rabbits lived in the house his ears perk up and he would watch them with a nervous whine.  I never worried about losing a farm animal to Grim losing control, and he proved that he was trustworthy. I’d get so mad when he would trample the garden.  I guess that is how people react in the moment.  He was just a goofy dog that didn’t know that I had baby beets under his feet.

After dark, a late night smoke on the porch was Grim’s opportunity to hunt for cat poop.  He’d immediately go to the horseshoe pit and clean each one.  After that we would watch him roam the neighborhood as we’d finish.  Occasionally he would wander further than we wanted but he always came back.  Rosefield was his home and we are his family.

In July of 2012 we noticed that Grim had developed a limp.  Without any signs of improvement we took him to the vet.  The report was that Grim either had early stages of bone cancer, arthritis, or a bacterial infection.  The earliest diagnosis was that if anything was to be done the treatment would be painful or Grim would lose his leg altogether.  We took him home with some pain medication.  For the rest of the summer Grimsby limped.  He was slower at the park, he was more careful when playing ball, but he was the lively dog we always knew.  When we came home on the afternoon of January 9^th and he whined at us we knew that the pain he had worked so hard to mask was just too much.  We took him to the vet and the same doctor was astounded that it had taken him so long to degenerate.  Our dear Grimsby was hesitantly yielding to the reality of mortality.  When we adopted him we wanted to give a great dog a great end of life.  We found out that end was coming sooner than we wanted, but we couldn’t possibly punish our dear Grim for our own desire to keep him.  So we let him go.

The last few days of Grimsby’s life were filled with delicious food made by Carly who prepared him a dinner of his usual rice mixture, cat food, hot dogs, a bone, and a quail egg.

He slept in bed with Carly and me finding different ways to invade the bed.  We sang him songs and cried over him, we talked to him and he was calm.  It was strange to see him so calm.  On his last night he walked through the January frost during a smoke.  He walked over to the horseshoe pit for one last treat.  I walked over to watch him and he followed me around the perimeter of the yard.  The grass was crispy under our feet and crunched as we walked around for one last night.  A hundred nights at least with him, some in shorts, some in coats, this was the last.  I was so happy to spend it with him.

Grimsby started his last day sleeping next to me while I wrote some of this.  We picked up the kids and went to get him some treats.  He had a lunch of canned dog food and dog treats.  He took a couple more trips outside with his kids that he was always so excited to see.  One more day of cuddles and songs was comforting to all of us.  In spite of his big lunch Melody kept giving him cheese and Ethan decided to fry him an egg.  Food is love.  Everyone in the family believes that.

Surrounded by the ones he loved Grimsby died a little after 2:00 on January 13, 2013.  He was covered in Carly’s baby blanket and cuddled Fabio, her stuffed bunny. 

 He was touched by us all.  He fell asleep and gave a twitch.  Chasing the squirrels he so often dashed after in the yard, I guess.  We wrapped him in a sheet and took him to where he first met his family, Grandpa Carl’s.  We offered him one last goodbye.  He was tucked in his sheet, warm and peaceful.  In a spot already prepared for him he was lowered into the ground by two of his favorite guys, me and Carl.  Carly and Josie watched.  We will always love Grim and know that we can visit his body there, but his spirit lives on in our family for all our lives.