Jax's Big Life
Ajax was a surprise. His breeder meant to keep him and train him as a competition dog, but she broke her arm, badly, and offered him to us when he was sixteen weeks old. Gus had just died a few months earlier, and we weren’t puppy hunting, but we met him, loved him, and brought him home with us.
From that day, March 21, 2009, until yesterday, he did everything at a hundred miles an hour. A Golden Retriever in every best way, he swam in any water he saw, retrieved everything and anything at all times, and befriended everyone that came in range of his waggy tail and warm brown eyes.
If he could find enough water to get wet in, he’d crash into it. Then he’d tear around the field, wood, or swamp, spraying water and mud and terrorizing the butterflies.
He was a 62-pound dog, but his life was impossibly huge. Eleven summers ago, he and I would speed hike the 1,200 feet of elevation to Abbey Pond after I was done with class at Middlebury for the day, and he’d be out ahead of me and crashing into the pond at the top before I rounded the last corner behind him.
Even this fall, he’d still quiver in place and make squeaky sounds when you said “hike?” or clipped the collar on him. And he still ran up mountains ahead of us, wetting his paws in every stream.
Even last month, it felt like—save for a few white hairs—he hadn’t really aged since his third birthday.
But, of course, he had. He had slowed down a little—just a little—since the days when we sprinted up to the pond on top of the mountain. His eyes had gotten a little goopier in the mornings, and he started asking for an assist into the back of the car at the end of a long hike.
We said more than once that we didn’t really know what Jax would do when he got old and frail. He didn’t seem mentally equipped for it. He’d always ignored that he was getting older, and we loved him for spinning that illusion, but a 12-year-old Golden is an Old Dog, whether he knows it or not.
When I flip back through the catalog of hikes and swims in the last year, I can’t tell you the last photo that captured him healthy and the first photo that’s hiding his cancer somewhere in its frame.
I can tell you, though, that we didn’t see it in his bright eyes, or notice it when he used to quiver when you said “walk?” We didn’t hear it in the drumbeat of his paws as they pounded the leaves, or in the “Woowoo!” barks he would make when he was happy. I didn’t feel it when I ran my thumb along the marks his teeth left on the sticks he carried so carefully through the woods, and I didn’t smell it when he jumped up in the bed in the morning and butted my face gently with the top of his head for attention.
It hid from us until yesterday, when it tore open inside him, and I found him weak and hurting when I got home from work.
After twelve years of big adventure days, he had one really bad day, but I’m glad I got home in time so he wasn’t alone at the end. I called Andy, and he left work to meet me at the hospital. There was Jax’s pain and confusion, our dread, the waiting, the worst news, the list of things we could do with only one real choice on it, then the cold floor of the exam room, and the white solution in the IV followed by the pink.
Jack went out quietly, surrounded by love and cuddled up with us. He heard he was a good dog over and over and then slipped away. But while I’ll remember that moment forever, and I’ll struggle with the guilt over the minutes or hours he waited for me to get home and help him, I certainly won’t picture him that way.
I’ll picture him the way he was the other 4,316 days I knew him.
I’ll picture him flying out over the water to grab a beloved tennis ball ahead of his brothers, or muddying his face on a hike, or exploding through the snow to return when whistled for, or being the best big brother and mentor dog we could have imagined.
He was a therapy dog for over half his life. He knew when to be silly and beg for belly rubs and when to be serious and rest his head on the hand of a quiet patient in a hospital bed.
So I’ll also picture him calming down kids between their exams, brightening the days of long term care residents, or comforting the families of the dying.
Early in his life, Jax, with his joy for mud and water, made me think of a few lines from Walt Whitman, and I wrote that I thought the poem was saying that long after we die, we may be found in the earth we have returned to. And now that he has died, I think of it again:
Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another;
I stop somewhere waiting for you.
-Walt Whitman
“Song of Myself (52)”
As fast and intense as he was, he always waited just ahead, sometimes before the next bend of the trail, and sometimes after, just out of sight. So I’ll keep encouraged, even though I will miss him in each place and in every place. And I’ll picture him free, racing the wind toward the next peak.