A Dog’s Life
A tribute to Aria, my beloved companion of 13 years
Cari amici,
Thank you to all of you who sent kind comments after my last post about my dog’s decline and probable final days. Yesterday I said goodbye to Aria, and the only thing that’s helping me cope today is writing about her. Here’s her story, to honor her life.
The backstory
We met in December 2012, shortly after my second herding-dog mix died. I was working two jobs and in grad school, so the last thing I needed was a new dog, not to mention one with a fair amount of baggage. But I couldn’t stay off the rescue sites, and when I saw a picture of 2-year-old Aria (then called Liberty), a striking combination of the two dogs I’d lost recently (an Aussie mix and a blue heeler), I silenced the voice in my head that said “at least wait until you’re out of grad school” and went to see her. When the rescue staff found out I was an experienced herding dog owner, they couldn’t shove Liberty and me out the door fast enough. As anyone who’s owned such dogs knows, they’re an endearing but sometimes challenging mix of devotion, obsession, and anxiety.
Liberty, labeled an Aussie shepherd/border collie mix, had been found on the streets of a San Francisco Bay delta city with her nine pups. She wasn’t friendly when I went to meet her, her teats still engorged and her anxiety ratcheted up so high that she barely noticed me. That didn’t deter me. The adoption went quickly—I signed the papers, Liberty weaned her pups and got sterilized, and mere days later I took her home. She wouldn’t get in the car, so I hoisted her in. She wouldn’t go into my house, so I lured her with chicken. I believe she’d never been in a house, had probably been tied up in a yard or had lived her whole two years of life on the street.
She’d had a rough time of it, to say the least.
Boyfriends and people friends
After a while, Aria proved herself a social butterfly. She was a people magnet—we never once, in her entire life, went out without someone complimenting her on her extraordinary beauty. I think she got a bit of a swelled head, to be honest. In Italy, children would always point at her excitedly, shouting, “Un lupo cane!” Any explanation that dog-wolf mixes aren’t a thing in the United States, thus Aria wasn’t one, failed to deter their joy.
In Berkeley Aria went to a daycare whose owners loved her so much they would take her on a moment’s notice, whether for a few hours or a few weeks. Aria was the yard boss, policing the grounds and breaking up squabbles. On outings to an enormous bayside park, when the clueless pack didn’t respond to the daycare owners’ calls to come back, off Aria would go to round them all up. She had fantastic recall and loved nothing more than those long, loping runs to collect her “sheep.”
Aria met her first boyfriend, Cielo, at the daycare, and they were pretty much an inseparable pair there. Here in Italy her bestie was Tequila, a mellow yellow Lab much younger than she (apparently not a problem). They shared long walks, tennis balls and sticks, and, sometimes, when we stopped for coffee, a highly coveted, gloriously unhealthy cornetto.
Aria had friends all over town whom she greeted enthusiastically. Even when far too much time had elapsed between visits from my sons, she was always overjoyed to see them. But herding dogs are typically one-person dogs, and I was hers. She followed me from room to room, watched me leave the house with betrayal in her eyes. Basically, if I moved, even just to stand, she moved.
Skills and pastimes
Aria didn’t run, she flew, tongue out, ears back, her face and body radiating joy whether she was herding the daycare dogs or chasing her Frisbee. She also enjoyed running down a children’s slide at the park, not relinquishing her Frisbee, vacuuming up crumbs in bars and pasticcerie, shredding wrapping paper and paper towel tubes, eviscerating stuffed toys, and barking at every cat we ever saw, anywhere. (Her obsession, oddly, got worse after my cat died.)
After our move, Aria quickly became bilingual. I taught her a bunch of commands in Italian and spoke to her in a mix of Italian and English, and she always understood what I was saying. She even understood the German one of her dogsitters used to speak to her. (Okay, it might have been the tone of voice and body language she understood, but I prefer to think she had exceptional language skills.)
Though skilled at running, staring, and herding, she was a terrible swimmer. She fell into San Francisco Bay once and did the worst dog paddle I’ve ever seen. After that, she stuck to the shallows.
Obsessions
Cats.
Soon after I brought her home, I discovered that Liberty-now-Aria was interested in one thing, and one thing only, when she was in the house—my cat, Aurora. A rescue staffer came out to assess her prey drive and labeled it low, which made the trainer I later worked with laugh in disbelief. Aria, she said, had the strongest prey drive she’d ever seen in her many years of training difficult dogs. Not that Aria wanted to hurt my cat—or at least we didn’t think so. Herding dogs have the kill instinct bred out of them, the trainer said. What they crave is that eye contact—they get the prey in their laser beam gaze and it’s like being on crack.
Thing is, Aria, along with her Aussie shepherd/border collie looks, also looked like she could have had some German or Belgian shepherd in her, breeds that might not be quite so kind to their prey. Aria never did try to hurt my cat, but she did make her life miserable by following and staring at her constantly.
Covid and the turning of the tide
Aria endured the long trip from California to Italy in the hold of a plane, then three changes of habitat in two years—admirable for a dog prone to anxiety. But her behavior changed after we spent nearly two years in isolation (or semi-) during the Covid lockdowns. Already protective of me, she became extremely so. No one could enter our house, even friends she knew well, without her barking and signaling her extreme displeasure.
Though I haven’t looked back to see exactly when her decline began, I think it was about that time, post-Covid, in 2022.
Aria had been diagnosed with IBD (inflammatory bowel disease), an autoimmune disease, early in life, but for years it was well managed with low-dose steroids. Gradually her symptoms worsened and the meds became less effective. The steroids caused pancreatitis, then a liver problem. But she couldn’t live without the steroids, so we tried to find a balance. A few years ago we began what would become a long cycle of trying different meds, treatments, and diets. We added a cyclosporine to suppress her immune system; did a fecal transplant (effective in humans but experimental in dogs); tried every hypoallergenic and/or highly digestible diet known to veterinary science, along with a casalinga diet of home-cooked food. Eventually nothing worked. In the months before her death, diarrhea and vomiting had become her too-frequent reality.
Aria took her last walk on December 27, weakened by weight loss and, we later discovered, a profound anemia due to internal bleeding. We tried one final treatment—massive doses of IV steroids—and she made a brief, partial recovery. “I was hoping for a miracle,” the vet said. So was I.
She had a few good days, so I thought she might have a bit more time. But when the diarrhea returned the night of the 15th, black with blood, and in the late morning she vomited her completely undigested dinner of the night before, I knew it was time.
We made our final trip to the vet that afternoon. Once there, even sedated and with me comforting her, she held tension in her body, a sign of how her suffering. I didn’t realize how much until I felt her muscles release with her last breath.
The last thing I said to her was this: wherever you are, I hope there are many, many, many cats.
This morning I woke before dawn, my body still programmed for her medication schedule. It will take time to adjust.
The house is so empty.
Alla prossima—
Cheryl
May her memory be a blessing to you, cara Cheryl! I felt your love for her in every word.
We loved Aria, too. I’ll always be thankful for the joy she brought during Covid lockdown when she would stop by for her treats I lowered down in a basket from our balcony. She made me smile every time. Our cat Gino is waiting for her. 🐈⬛💕