The Life and Death of My Dog, Delilah (A Series)

Part 2 - Delilah Discovers Treats and Playing

Delilah May Diaz, June 2013

The previous installment can be found here.

That next day I parked my car in the garage. As I pressed the garage door button I heard the whir as the chains moved to close the stall door and I mentally prepared myself for the gauntlet of the last few days.

I walked in the door, crossed the tile of the entry level, and took the few steps up to the landing slowly, cautiously moving my head into view.

And there she was, looking me dead in the eye, silent, her tail wagging, her mouth slightly agape in a happy pant, her body slightly writhing left to right in excited anticipation.

“Hey girl, how are you?” I asked pleasantly and I continued up the stairs.

Her tail wagged harder.

I continued upward. Voluntarily she backed up slightly so that I could enter the room. Pressing my luck, I reached out and scratched her behind her ear, and she panted happily.

It took her five days, but Delilah had accepted me.

Now that I no longer had to worry if a massive dog wanted to eat my face when I got home, we were able to focus on exposing Delilah to dog-type things. As I noted, she was at the very least neglected, at worst abused. But, she was still a dog, so there were certain assumptions made because of this.

For example, we just assumed that all dogs loved dog treats. I mean, they’re food, and dogs are always looking for food, so treats should be no big deal, right?

If only that were true.

Soon after joining our family we called the dogs over to give them treats, just some small, hard dogs biscuits. They happily came over and Sam, being the alpha, got his first. Then, Dellah got hers, which she happily accepted into her mouth, then with a smile, she dropped her head down and let the biscuit fall from her mouth onto the floor. Samson loved this, of course, because he would quickly swoop in to consume the discarded treat for himself. Two treats!

It was about this time that we realized that Delilah may not know what a dog treat was. Sure, she recognized it as something that Samson may want, and perhaps due to the scent she recognized it as food, but she didn’t really know what it was.

How sad is that? A dog, now two years old, having no clue what a dog treat was?

Eventually we found that perhaps the small, hard biscuit-type treats were just not her preference. Delilah always sniffed anything and everything, she was very much controlled by her nose. Recognizing this, we bought some smaller, softer, more fragrant dog treats. We quickly found that she loved those very much. She would happily chomp them down, never letting them fall to the floor for Sam to swoop up.

Sadly, this was not the only thing that was unknown and new to our poor girl.

One day we were all outside, working in the yard, when Delilah started barking very loudly at something. I was just outside of her line of sight, so I ran around the side of the yard toward her where I heard her making a racket in the front yard. Her barks were loud and almost fearful, but I looked around and could not discern initially at what she was barking. There were no animals nor people nearby to grab her attention, and yet she stood her ground, barking at something.

I followed her eyeline, but all I could see was a white mushroom, about three or four inches high, growing in the middle of the yard. I looked at it, then back to Delilah and realized that this poor beast had never seen a mushroom before, and as such, she did the only thing she knew to do when she encountered something bizarre to her.

She barked.

And barked.

I laughed out loud to myself at the inanity of the situation.

“Are you seriously barking at a fucking mushroom?” I asked her, knowing full well that she couldn’t respond in the affirmative or the negative.

Again, she barked.

I walked over to the mushroom, giving it a good kick. It exploded into a puff of white shrapnel.

Delilah, still staring at where it had been, her brow still creased with concern, stood there, locked into position, panting and concentrating. This lasted a moment or two, but eventually she came to terms with the threat of the mushroom being gone, and moved on.

She had saved her new family from the evil mushroom.

Fast forward a couple of weeks.

My ex-wife and I were in the house when suddenly the dogs came barreling into the TV room, mouths wide open as they mouthed at each other. Kristin backed up on the couch, asking me to stop them, worried that these two idiots were in the midst of a fight.

I noticed the energetic but not necessarily aggressive tussling going on between Samson and Delilah.

“Hold up a second,” I said to Kristin. “Just watch for a moment.”

It took a few minutes, but after a bit it became obvious that with all of the wrestling and soft biting that the dogs were definitely not fighting, they were playing. This dog, who had to be taught what a dog treat was, who barked incessantly at an immobile mushroom, was now rolling around on the ground with our other dog, even performing the infamous “upside-down-bite-face” thing that these two idiots would do hundreds of times over the years to come.

It took her six weeks, but our neglected girl had learned how to play.

Another win for this behemoth of a dog.

At this point you may start thinking that maybe I was mistaken, that she wasn’t a terrible dog, that she was indeed a good dog. While she was indeed loveable, sometimes it felt like there were far more losses than wins.

We tried to crate-train her, but that just never worked; her anxiety was just far too great. It didn’t seem to matter how long we left her in the great, whether it was 30, 20, or even as little as 5 minutes, it always resulted in her urinating everywhere at the very least, and sometimes she would defecate instead. And no, the crate wasn’t too small. I could climb inside of it. Regardless, after a few days we gave up on crate training and eventually gave the crate away to some friends of ours who wanted to crate train their massive Great Pyrenees dog.

I always kind of felt bad for Samson; he still has some strong puppy instincts and would chew/eat things that he was not supposed to, so, when we left, into the crate he went. Delilah was left to roam the house. I wonder if he sat there in his crate wondering what the fuck was going on?

The other awful thing about Delilah was that though she was potty trained, she often had accidents in the house. Again, I believe that most of this was due to her anxiety; if a squirrel was outside on the deck, or if a person dared walk along the street in front of the house, Delilah would bark and bark and bark (see: the mushroom incident).

The messed up thing? Sometimes she would go weeks, months, without an accident. And then one day we’d leave the house for two hours and come home to find an accident. The randomness of it was infuriating.

The girl had her quirks, that’s for sure, and maybe I will go over some more of them in a minute, but despite the fact that she had those quirks, and the fact that she was still a fairly terrible dog, I know this: I would not have survived my divorce without my dogs, and yeah, that definitely includes Delilah.

I won’t go into detail about my divorce, that’s not what this is about. I’ll just say that we were two really good people that just weren’t right for each other. That said, 2010 was probably one of the worst years of my life. In some ways, it was also one of the best.

But after my ex-wife left the house it just felt so very empty. Some people do illogical things when experiencing loss. I found early on that I would just walk through the house and look at the places where Kristin had put her things, just gazing at empty spaces that were once full. This was partnered with a thick silence that seemed impenetrable. She worked earlier that I did, so there was always noise in the morning when I got up; likewise, she got home before I did. Walking in the door was often greeted by the sounds of a TV, a wife, and the pets therein (she also had two cats).

Now, it was just me and the dogs. At the suggestion of a friend (and I’m sorry, I don’t remember who that was, but I thank them for this, because it was everything) I started just turning the TV on, whether or not I was watching it, just so there was the sound of human voices in the house. But that was only part of it.

I started talking to my dogs. Yes, I had done so before, but the television wasn’t alive. My dogs became my therapists and my confidants, I spoke to them about their day, about my day, about what they wanted to do tonight, I would ask them how much they loved being pet and rubbed.

I gave Delilah nicknames. She had that large, lovable, droopy face, so I called her Big Sad. Some days she was Monster Face, Dee, Crazy Lady, Baby, Baby Girl, Pretty Girl, Pretty Lady, Lady, or simply just Beautiful.

I called her Beautiful most every morning.

I called her Beautiful the morning before she passed.

Because, she was.

We would play, rolling around the ground together, or simply playing the game “I’m going to touch your feet and you’re going to pretend to try to bite me.”

I think that one was her favorite game.

I’m so glad that Samson had taught her how to play.

My dogs gave me purpose. I could have sunken into a deep depression, but they would not let me.

To be continued…