Even Bit can’t outrun time.
As I’ve mentioned before, Bit is an old dog. I don’t know exactly how old, but I know she’s been with me for ten and a half years and she was fully grown when we met. She was estimated to be five to seven years old back then, and while that was most definitely an overshoot, she couldn’t have been younger than three.
Regardless of what the actual numbers are, when you add three to seven years I know nothing about to ten and a half years I can’t deny, you come up with a number that hurts to think about. She can’t be younger than thirteen and fifteen is possible. She’s a very senior dog either way, and that has weighed on me in recent years as I’ve seen flashes of what life will be as her time in this world draws to a close.
Bit’s health always buoyed me as the passage of time threatened to drag me under. She’s an athlete. She’s highly–excessively–energetic both physically and mentally. She had a psychological battle with an insect bite in our first year together that caused her to scratch an inch-square patch of skin off the back of her neck, leading to a bloody night on the bathroom floor and an emergency trip to the vet, but a couple weeks in an infant sized protective t-shirt bedazzled “It’ll be Owl Right” was all it took to recover. That was as dire as things ever got for Bit medically.
But things aways get more dire than that eventually. It’s how life works.
Where we started
Bit found her way to me at a difficult point in my life. It was September of 2015. Summer was ending and another long Duluth winter was around the corner. I lived in a great big house on a hill that was empty except for me. I’d reached middle age, there was no longer any denying it, and it wasn’t clear to me what purpose my life and all the stuff in it really had. I thought too much and did too little. I was coasting, maybe a little lost.
Somewhere in the middle of the month I got a call from Border Collie Rescue of Minnesota. Straight out of the blue, I hadn’t talked to them in nearly a year. They had a dog, a beautiful red female Border Collie/Cattle Dog mix, who “needed” me. Her name was Lil Bit. She was about to lose her third home in less than two years for unspecified reasons and they couldn’t place her with another foster family. They said I was her perfect fit. They didn’t say why.
A million questions went through my mind. Why am I the perfect fit? What’s wrong with her? Why can’t she keep a home? Whatever is going on here, can I take responsibility for it? None of those questions were answerable. I spun in circles until I realized that a lifetime of asking such questions might have been why I felt so stuck in life. Maybe it was time to stop asking questions and try something else.
I met Lil Bit at Rice Creek Off-Leash Dog Area in Shoreview, Minnesota at 10am on October 3rd, 2015. I will never forget the sobbing emotional trauma she went through that morning when her foster parents handed the leash she strained against to me and drove off without her. It was as if everything she knew had been taken from her for the third time in two years. She’d seen this before and she was shattered.
As I stood there tethered to this hyperactive animal panicking at the center of her own collapsing world, all I knew for sure was that she needed stability, that she could never be put through this again. She’d have to be with me for the rest of her natural life and I’d have to make that work one way or another.
Who she is
I simplified Lil Bit’s name to Bitsy and that’s who she’s been for nearly eleven years now.
Bitsy is extremely intelligent but also extremely instinct driven and scattered. She’s an unfettered pattern matching machine. She sees a thing happen in the world and expects it to repeat whenever the conditions surrounding it reoccur. She needs to know what comes next. If something doesn’t repeat when she thinks it should, she panics, and it’s impossible to break the association once it’s taken hold. She’s afraid of insects today because she was bit by one a decade ago and obsessively scratched the skin off the back of her neck. She’s afraid of ceiling fans because she thinks they’re insects. That’s who she is and who she will always be.
As I began to recognize and understand it, Bit’s obsessiveness became a window into myself. It was impossible not to see that a lot of the overthinking she does, the false associations that take over her mind, the failures to recalibrate unfulfilled expectations, the inability to just let go when that’s the best you can do, all of that existed in me, too. You can’t fix a problem until you can see it.
Partly because of the mirror she showed me and partly because I was just so darned busy trying to keep up with her energy, over time I stopped worrying about whether there was an overarching grand purpose in my life. Bit didn’t give me purpose; she made me stop worrying about purpose for a while. In so doing she helped me let go and enjoy life for whatever it was at a given moment.
(Eventually purpose did come in the form of three little girls: if I can be a sufficiently positive influence on their lives that they look back after I’m gone and think, “I’m better off because he was in my life,” then that’s all the purpose my life needs.)
I’m better off because Bit is in my life. Can you ask more of a dog?
Where we are
Bit is still very much with me and still has the same personality and the same life in her eyes that she’s always had, but her body has begun to fail her.
Until about two months ago you couldn’t see anything amiss, only the slightest signs of graceful aging. She couldn’t run quite as fast as she used to (in her prime she was the fastest non-speed breed dog I’ve ever seen.) She couldn’t keep a fetch game going as long as she once could. There was little to be concerned about, just slowing down the way everybody slows down as they get older.
That changed about a month ago. She started stumbling. First occasionally, when she’d take a corner too quickly, but then when she was simply walking in a straight line. For the past week or so she’s been stumbling when she’s standing still. She falls down and needs me to pick her up. Her hind legs get tangled because her brain no longer knows where her feet are are in space.
We’re not sure whether it’s related to an acute spinal injury or something like degenerative myelopathy. At this point it seems progressive, worsening; it’s most likely chronic disease that will eventually take her from me.
Mentally, she’s still the same perfectly imperfect dog she’s always been. She just needs some help getting around. I’ll be here to pick her up when she falls and carry her up and down the stairs and clean up her accidents as long as her life otherwise fulfills her. She’s been one of the greatest friends I’ve ever known for more then a decade and she’s earned whatever help she needs.
It is clear, however, that her journey is making its final turn westward.
I don’t know how much road remains ahead of Bit. I only know that my job is to walk it with her, make her as comfortable as she can be, carry her up the next hill as long as there is something she wants to see on the other side. Her job is to tell me when climbing those hills no longer makes her happy.
Bit loves the world and Bit especially loves people. She is an amazing communicator. She’ll tell me exactly what she needs and when she needs it.
I’ll be with her until the end and she’ll be with me forever.
