Non-fiction / Sassie (Analysis)

Just a little fluff of ratty brown and black curly fur, Sassie shook and gazed every which way, cowering in my mother’s arms as we exited the Atlanta airport, taking home our new addition to the family. Arriving in a pet carrier at 5 am, she had flown across the country courtesy of a breeder my grandfather lined up for us. She was of a champion breed blood line and had the price tag to prove it. None of this mattered to my brother and me as we both took turns trying to get our new dog’s attention in the back seat. Our old dog had died some months before, back when we lived in Texas. It seemed appropriate that since we left the Lone Star state after only six months, and down one member of the family, we would get a new dog once we settled into our new home in an Atlanta suburb. We called our new dog Sassie, just as we had our previous dog, and just like the companion my father had gotten at four years old. Our new Airedale that served, by accident, as my sixth birthday present would make our family complete again, an idea that even at six years old I understood on some level.
Sassie took to us about as well as we took to her. She struggled with the two different staircases we had in the house (one in the front, one in the back), making sure each step would be firm as she planted each paw, hopping up one little landing at a time. She spent the time we were away from the house in her carrier, behind the closed door to the basement, barking when we shut her in and clamoring out once we returned home. She raced around our half acre back yard, getting bigger by the day as she sped along the planks of the pine wooden fence. She also took to a number of the Star Wars figures around the house, chewing them into indistinguishable characters.
During this time, perhaps about three months or so, Dad decided that Sassie—as all dogs must—needed to be lead-broken. She enjoyed this the way cats welcome baths, fighting every command my father gave, yelping for support from the rest of the family who watched from the safety of the second floor window. From where I stood crying my eyes out, not understanding why Dad was seemingly torturing our dog, she looked to being dragged up and down the driveway with my Dad cussing her stubbornness. Although she eventually got with the program, Dad gave up first that day.
She also empathized well. Once, while returning from a vet appointment, my mother got lost finding her way home. Sassie, camped out on the passenger seat of the Datsun 280Z, started to foam at the mouth, looking at mom with eyes that a mother understood said I’m going to be sick. “Don’t do it, don’t you dare throw up in this car,” Mom commanded in-between cursing Atlanta for the way it set up its roads, which, apparently, were organized to intentionally send my mother off the deep end. As Mom pounded the steering wheel and cursed the road signs, Sassie threw up all over the floor in front of the seat.
We left Atlanta after six months. Dad was being transferred again, this time for a short stint in Miami, his company looking to have him get things going in a new office. Frustrated with the prospect of being relocated for the third time in a year, Dad quit the company and we packed up and headed back to California. We made the trip cross country in under three days, and Sassie took turns riding in the moving truck with my dad and the Cadillac with my mom. With the windows down, she stuck her snout out, taking in the rushing wind, absorbing every smell, then snorting it out again. Her enthusiasm made my car-sick stomach feel better, perhaps drawing strength from her wonder at discovering new sights and smells. When we finally arrived back in Los Angeles we lied to a few different hotels about having a dog. She kept quiet and no one ever found out.
Some time soon, little less than a year, we moved on to our second house back in California. Sassie had stairs again to run up and down and a window through which she could watch the world pass from the second story. She also had a good vantage point to see my brother and me return home from our elementary school across the street. Sometimes, during those nice Spring days and warm summer afternoons, with some coaxing, she would join us for a swim, her legs kicking beneath the water, her whiskers floating up, making her face look like a drifting mop. She got out as soon as she did her lap around us, then slumped in the sun.
She was also there to lick my face when I returned home from surgery on my shattered nose. She whined as my parents walked me upstairs and climbed onto the foot of my bed and stayed all night. She also took it upon herself to chew the cast that I had removed and placed on my desk some weeks later. Perhaps she sensed that this was a symbol of me in pain; perhaps she enjoyed the sweat-reeking plaster as a toy. In either case, we never did find the remnants when her body was done with it. On her second birthday, Mom started the tradition of standing a Milkbone up in Sassie’s food bowl in place of the candles Mom would have preferred to use.
When Dad found a deal on a house he had to jump on, we moved again, this time to a beautiful house with a huge backyard. My room, however, would not let me sleep, causing me to pace at night in the light I refused to turn off. I tried to read myself to sleep, counting on my Encyclopedia Brown books to work some magic. When that failed, I tracked down Sassie in the house. Often she would be snoring away in my parent’s room. I roused her quietly and she would look up at me as if wondering what was wrong. I guided her into my room and coaxed her up to my bed. Once I settled, she jumped down and nudged the closed door with her snout. I would repeat the process, as would she. I never let her out of my room, not ‘til morning, and she never barked. She just curled up on the carpet and drifted back to sleep.
Owning a house disagreed with my parent’s budget, so we moved to a house in the same general area. Dad, coming home from a hard day’s work, flopped down on the chair in the family room and unwound with some TV. Mom would return home soon after, traffic permitting. Sometimes my folks would indulge in a drink or two. Dad enjoyed a 7-and-7 he would have my brother or me make for him. Mom would sit at the bar stool in the kitchen and sip a Harvey’s on the rocks. Sassie always trotted into the family room to watch my Dad drink his drink. When he set it on the arm-rest, she would sneak up and casually lap up her portion. Dad would look at her and ask what she thought she was doing. She turned her head as if she were actually thinking of an answer, then look around, perhaps to see if anyone else was looking, and then, without so much as another thought, she would sample some more. Dad never minded, within reason. He did, however, always manage to get the last bit from the same glass. Of the random times this happened, once in a while she would take one sip too many and slightly stagger off to a warm corner and sink down to the ground and start snoring.
Also during this time, my parents started fighting more and more, sometimes waiting until my brother and I were asleep, sometimes not. During the times when their voices reverberated through the house, Sassie would get between them and bark. She would bark a little, then leave only to return and take up her effort fresh. She sulked in a corner when my parents did not stop or she would slink into my room and whine softly.
Though, even as loving as she was, stand back if you pissed her off. When the landlord wanted us out so he could move back in, we moved again to a huge house overlooking a golf course in the same part of town. Our neighbors had these two Shitzus. Nice dogs, though they seemed to take pleasure in taunting Sassie, barking at her while they trotted up and down the cement stairs that ran up the mountain in which our houses were set. Like most things small, they proved rather brave when protected with something immoveable in front of them, in this case, the wooden planks that made up our wooden fence. However, one day, while I was helping out our vacationing neighbors, I was walking the dogs and Sassie got out our front door. She snapped one dog’s neck in moments and tried for the second one that I was able to snatch into my arms. Though I was traumatized by the event, Sassie walked around like she had just taken out the trash. She never did like sniffing me when I returned from next door. After only three months, Dad could not handle the stairs. Sassie never had so much exercise in her life and looked none the worse for wear. Before we departed, however, the remaining dog never barked again.
She enjoyed our new condo, even with its small cement backyard. We were there for about a year. During the backend of that year, and after moving yet again, our family shifted. Due to a job Dad took in Orange County, and the hour commute each way under ideal traffic conditions, Dad started to lean towards moving on. He left soon after we moved, this time just my brother, my mother, me and Sassie. In that time, my parents officially divorced, Scott graduated high school, I followed two years later and Mom started dating while Dad eventually went on to remarry. A year and a half after high school, on the day I was getting my first apartment, Sassie paced around the packed pickup truck, sniffing around what little I owned then watched from my brother’s window as we pulled away, barking and wagging her tail.
One night, while partying at my new apartment with some friends who were back from college for Thanksgiving, Sassie had a stroke. She had been standing on the back porch, waiting to come in, when she started losing it out of both ends. Mom called me with a strained and shaking voice, “Sassie’s had a stroke, I think, and we’re at the hospital.” She reeled her voice in for a moment, calling her professional skills of maintaining a level head in times of high stress and crises. “Brad, you gotta get here.”
Once we returned home from the vet hospital, at Mom’s house, I sat with three of my friends in the family room. We listened to my mom’s boyfriend tell a story of being on Mushrooms during a Chinese New year celebration in San Francisco. From some street lights, he and some friends were lobbing lit M80s into the crowd. Scott and Mom were in another part of the house, where exactly I do not recall. Sassie was still in the hospital, her chances bleak. My eyes hurt from crying the way your skin feels from a bad sunburn. I wanted nothing more than to curl up with my dog as she fought to recover. My friends were hanging on every word of my Mom’s boyfriend’s story.
In the days that followed, we got together, my brother, mom and I, and visited Sassie in the hospital. She was coming around, though she needed our help to come back all the way. When she was ready to come home, we had built a special bed for her in the kitchen. All cushions and towels, the bed would make her as comfortable as possible. It also helped cushion her as she often slipped trying to get up, the use of her hind legs not quite with her. My dad drove up from Orange County a few weekends and sat on the linoleum floor with her, stroking her head while she panted and looked up at us watching her with the foggy eyes that no longer registered her surroundings like they once did. Every day we took turns using a towel to hold her up just under her hind legs so she could learn to walk again and go to the bathroom. Slowly she returned, even better than she had been in a few years, as if her sickness had blown all the cobwebs out of her pipes. Gradually her tail started to wag and, instead of jumping in your lap and licking your face to say hello, she nudged us when we came by the house.
Two months later, I moved to San Diego to transfer to a new college. I called my mother often and she would put the phone up to Sassie’s ear; I’d say hello, pretending I was right there with her with her head in my lap, wishing she were there with me in San Diego, just as she had been when, during summer days when all my friends were away with their families on vacation and my brother was out with his friends, I would curl up with Sassie on the couch, watching game shows and MTV, Sassie being my only company until my parents got home from work. On those days, when I talked to her or called out answers, she looked up at me as if she were agreeing with me or thinking I was crazy. Then she would reposition her head in my lap and close her eyes again while I stroked her fur. Yet, now at thirteen, she was brushing closer to things, moving her head slower when called, and taking more time to prop herself off the carpet when I returned home to visit, resting against me with a heavy breath, as if the few feet she walked to greet me overextended her exercise threshold for the day.
At this point, Mom was the only one there to watch her every day, as Scott had moved into his own apartment and my trips from San Diego were growing less frequent. Also, during this time, a cancer developed in Sassie’s mouth. Surgery would not save her; there would be no chemotherapy. She would not be around to see her stocking hung on the mantle another year. The best way to love her would be to put her down. After returning home from a vacation for my 21st birthday, mom called and forced herself to whisper, “Brad, it’s time to come home.”
I arrived in the house first, my mother embracing me the moment she saw me, the tears forming in her eyes, the strain on her voice building. Sassie lifted her head and struggled to her feet, her head wobbling in confusion as if trying to see what her nose told her was there but her polluted eyes were not able to confirm. I sat with her in my lap in my mother’s bedroom, petting her, holding her as she panted. My brother would arrive soon after, followed by my dad and step-mother. We all gathered around Sassie. I held her while my brother joined us on the floor. My mother slumped down on the corner of the bed while my dad and his wife stood by the door. I could not wait for this to be over and did not want to move a muscle from the floor, not wanting to take my arms off her, wanting this moment to last forever, wishing I could protect her from what was destroying her body, the way she had helped me through the nights where the dark terrified me, the days where I huddled with her in the corner of my bedroom when my parents would fight, the moments where she was the only friend I had in the world, before I had come out of my shell. Now she was leaving the family she helped define, the one that had long since moved on but had come back together to take care of her. I hated that the last thing we could do for her was put her out of her misery. Our last act as a family would be to end her life.
On the drive over, my brother and I sat in the back of Dad’s Explorer with Sassie. When we arrived at the vet hospital, Dad carried her in. A nurse came out and scooped up Sassie. We waited. After a short while, they called us into the room. Nancy (my stepmother) waited outside; Mom’s boyfriend had stayed home. Sassie rested on the steel table, calm, her eyes drifting around the room without raising her head. They shaved part of her leg and inserted a needle. The nurse watched as the four of us gathered around our dog. She excused herself and told us to knock when we were ready.
Dad gave his good-bye between stutters. I stroked Sassie’s head, her eyes scanning around, not sure where she was, her heart speeding up one last time. Scott and I held her, telling her in sobs that we loved her, thanking her for being our dog. Moments later, the doctor eased the door open, administered the shot, and tried to make us feel better, “You folks did the right thing.” Sassie’s heart gradually crept to a standstill. At some point, after she had stopped breathing, her body going limp in our arms, my brother and I let go of her. Our family left the room, not noticing that we were walking out on the last time the four of us would ever be alone in a room.
After tears and hugs, we went for dinner at The Pizza Cookery; Mom’s boyfriend joined us. The six of us gathered around the table, telling stories about Sassie, all of them starting with, “Do you remember when…” I ordered a Coors light from the menu’s meager selection, the first beer I ordered in front of my parents. Although it tasted like crap going down, I enjoyed being able to order a beer. This moment passed without comment. After dinner, Dad returned to his life with my stepmother in Orange County and I made the long drive home to San Diego. I cried the whole way.
A few days later, Sassie’s ashes arrived in a brown box, and today she sits, next to my grandmother, tucked away on a bookshelf on Mom’s bookshelf, amidst pictures of graduation photos and senior prom, photos of me running track and Mom as a little girl, snapshots of my aunts and uncles who have passed on, along with Mom and Woody’s (my step-dad) wedding picture. In the picture that guards her box, Sassie’s curled up next to the fireplace, her head up, her eyes looking at the camera, and she’s smiling.