Rosie Cotton came into our lives broken, the victim of some unknown puppy mill. She’d spent most of her life in a concrete cell — somewhere in North Carolina, we think — churning out Frenchie puppies. When her little body couldn’t handle it any longer, she was discarded.
Her back was deeply swayed by then. Her back legs hardly functional. One ear was badly mauled. One eye no longer produced tears, and it was hard not to think, knowing what she’d been through, that she’d simply cried out all the tears she ever could.
She couldn’t walk more than a few feet at a time at that point. The threshold between the porch and the inside of my house — a rise of two inches — was a hill too high to climb.
On her first visit to the vet, the doctor said she was too abused to know how old she was. He also said not to get too attached. She might only make it a couple more weeks. I told him my family would make it the best few weeks of her life.
That was five years ago.
We’d laugh about it sometimes, how we spoiled her for those first weeks and then couldn’t ever bring ourselves to dial back the level of love as weeks turned into months turned into years.
Laugh about it, but not regret it for an instant. Wouldn’t change a damn thing.
She learned to walk. I’d love to say we taught her, but all we really did was hitch her bottom up on those unsteady legs, back away a foot or two, and then pick her up and love on her after she managed to reach us. Training with affection, I guess. It’s all she ever wanted. To be loved. Fear, stress, pain … it flipped off like a switch the moment she was in our arms.
We often said she only had one marble rolling around in her head, but it was on a roulette wheel with only one slot: cuddles.
I remember our joy when she first managed to climb the threshold from the patio to the living room, then our astonishment when she managed to climb the four steps — full steps! — up to the patio from the yard. All of it, she did for the cuddles. And she got them.
I remember, too, when she found her voice. For the first months the only sounds she made were snorks when she slept and the tiniest of shaking whimpers when she was uncomfortable. And then one night we’d not been quick enough to let her majesty up onto the couch and she yipped. A bitch move, I suppose, but we loved her for it. For years in that cell she’d suffered in silence, the neglect stealing her voice. But she had it back now: these people would answer her cries, by god.
Eventually, she got strong enough that she’d occasionally try to be playfully feisty, slapping at our hands for a few minutes until she tired out and went into snorking sleep mode … smiling and cuddled by those hands, of course.
That smile is what I’ll remember most. An unbelievable smile. A few hours ago, moments before we rushed her to the vet, as she was wracked with fever and pain, I picked her up and she gave it to me again. That’s the picture you see above.
The end, when it came, was quick. Doesn’t make the loss easier — nothing really does — but it’s a small mercy.
That’s what we look for first in loss, I guess. The small mercies. And then, hopefully, we turn to the big mercies: the blessing of sharing our lives with someone, and the memories that make us smile and tell us that no matter that it ended it was time well spent.
So raise a glass to Rosie Cotton, friends.
And fuck puppy mills. Fuck them to fucking hell.