Of all the many (and somewhat unexpectedly) wrenching, horrendously painful things about the breakup of my first marriage, one of the worst was leaving my dog behind. My first husband and I got the dog when she was a four-month-old puppy, in April 1991. When we split, there was no question that I would get our one surviving cat (my Tim, the best cat I’ll ever know, about whom I hope to be able to write someday; he died shortly after I left my husband, and I miss him every single minute), and that my ex would get the dog. She wasn’t entirely a one-person dog; she adored me and protected me and considered me the alpha dog in the house. But Eric was her person, and there was no way I could have even considered asking to take her from him. But leaving her behind was incredibly difficult; I still can’t talk about the last time I saw her, a year or so after we’d split, because it’s just too painful.
He wrote me today to tell me that he had had her put to sleep, because it was her time to go. She was nearly 15, so she had a good long life (and a very happy one). But I’ve never stopped missing her, and now I’ll miss her even more.
She was a happy, delightful, funny dog—a beautiful and typical example of a wonderful breed, the Keeshond. As an animal lover, I’m a big believer in mutts, and adopting shelter or rescue pets, but because we were bringing a dog into a household with two adult cats, we decided to opt for the predictability that you get with a purebred. I’m a cat person first and foremost, and I wanted to make sure we found a breed that wouldn’t herd, hurt, or (accidentally or deliberately) kill the cats. We also wanted a dog that wasn’t too huge, since our house wasn’t, and we didn’t want a little yippy dog either. (I’m somewhat more tolerant of little yippy dogs, at least some breeds of them, than most people, but I still didn’t want one.) And we wanted one that wouldn’t need too much exercise but would enjoy a good long walk on a regular basis. It also needed to be able to tolerate the climate in Minneapolis, so Italian greyhounds, for instance (a breed I adore), were out.
So I did a ton of reading, and we went to a whole bunch of dog shows, looking at breeds we’d liked in pictures, talking to breeders and owners and finding out about the dogs. We thought briefly about a Borzoi (gorgeous, but too big, and the ones I met seemed sort of aloof), and seriously considered the Vizsla and the Schipperke—fine breeds both, but neither was quite right. I was sold on the Keeshond pretty early on; they were so beautiful, with their wolfish faces and their glorious fur, and they were bred primarily for companionship rather than hunting or herding or pointing or whatever. Eric thought they were a little foofy, till we were at a show and he saw the Kees that had just won its group competition leap up into its owner’s arms and give the owner a kiss on the nose. He was sold right then and there, and we set about finding a Keeshond puppy.
The one we found was Diane, named (by her breeder) for the character on “Cheers.” (She had siblings named Woody and Norm.) We didn’t change her name, because we figured she was used to it already, which in retrospect was silly—over the course of her lifetime, she answered to at least a dozen different nicknames, and we could have changed her name at any time. But we didn’t, and the running joke was that her real name was Dianewedidn’tnameher, because whenever we told people her name, we had to add the disclaimer that we had nothing to do with it. She was a show-quality dog—in the odd little corner of the world where Keeshonden (that’s the proper Dutch plural) can be famous, her father and grandfather were both very famous—and as a condition of our getting her, her breeder had the option to show her for a while, but as it happened, Diane had some fairly serious eye (actually, eyelash) problems, which made her unsuitable for breeding. Which was fine with us, because that meant she was all ours. (It also meant that we only had to deal with her going into heat a few times. Female dogs in heat…yeccch.)
She was my first dog, pretty much. My family owned a dog, briefly, when I was about four years old, but he wasn’t my dog, one I chose or helped to raise. That was Diane, who was and always will be my first dog.
I wasn’t sure we’d survive our first summer together, though. We took her to puppy kindergarten at a place that used the then-standard nylon choke-correction collar method, which works well for many breeds but not for Keeshonden, who need positive reinforcement and encouragement. They can be stubborn, and they respond much better to gentle coaxing and outright bribery than they do to corrective behavior, as we later learned. So she wasn’t doing very well in obedience, and I was finding it frustrating to try to train her—and Eric and I argued nearly every time we took her to obedience class. On top of that, Sophie, my female cat, quickly learned to love the dog, but Tim didn’t, so Tim would be aggressive toward the dog, which would make Sophie attack him, which would make me mad at Sophie, and none of us were very happy. Worst of all, Diane picked up fleas, and our house became infested before we realized it. Diane, Tim, and I all turned out to be wildly allergic to flea bites, and Diane and I were scratching ourselves bloody every day (I still have scars on my legs from that summer). It was a tough summer for all of us, though I can kind of laugh about it now.
But pretty soon, we got rid of the fleas, and Tim learned to tolerate the dog (though he loved to occasionally stand up on his hind legs and box her face with his paws—I wish I had a photo of that), and we started working with the local Keeshond expert at Keeshond-only obedience, which Diane and I both loved, and she turned fairly quickly into a well-behaved (though still impish) girl. And sweet and funny and charming and loveable, all 45 fluffy pounds of her. It’s a cliché, but it really was hard to be in a bad mood when she was around. Tim—like all my cats since—was a Siamese, or a Siamese mix, and cats of that breed are somewhat doglike in their devotion to people, so I was used to being greeted at the door by someone who was happy to see me…but even Tim wasn’t quite as expressive about it as Diane. Keeshonden carry their tails curved up onto their backs, so when they wag their tails, their entire back half wags along with the tail, which is very entertaining and endearing. They’re good-tempered, happy dogs, and being around her made me happy.
Most of the time, that is. I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t sometimes get annoyed with her, or that I didn’t occasionally resent having to walk her when it was -20 degrees out, or that the ubiquity of her fur didn’t sometimes get to me (I used to find Diane hairs on the inside of my clothing when I was out of town and hadn’t seen her for days), or that I never got angry when she misbehaved (which she didn’t do very often). But because of her sweet nature, and because she really did end up being very well trained, she was a remarkably easy dog to live with, and more important, a remarkably enjoyable one. I loved the fact that we could take her cross-country skiing with us—Eric even figured out a way to hook up her leash to his waist and let her pull him, which, with her sled-dog ancestry, she loved to do. Her first winter with us was the year that Minneapolis got 28 inches of snow on Halloween, and it’s one of my favorite memories of her: she wasn’t quite full grown yet (and she was only 15 inches tall at the shoulder even when she was full grown), so she was like one of those little mushroom toys with springs—the ones you push down and then they pop back up—she’d disappear into a snowdrift and then come bouncing out of it, only to disappear and reappear again. She thought it was the best thing that had ever happened ever.
And when we moved to Park Slope in 1998, I looked forward to taking her to the big dog run in Prospect Park every day, because she was a sociable dog, and when she got to the park and saw all those dogs (as many as 100 or more on a nice day, and usually at least 40 or so even in bad weather), she thought that was the best thing ever too. She was a boundless, furry, huggable container of joy.
There’s a Keeshond rescue group not far from where I live, and I know of others around the country, and someday, I’ll have Keeshonden in my life again. But there will only ever be one Diane, and I’ll miss her forever. Rest in peace, my sweet girl. You’re always with me.