The finest of all possible dogs
They called her Mama at the shelter. She’d been found as a stray and taken to Protectors of Animals and the most apparent thing about her, aside from her enormous head, was that whoever had owned her up to that point had used her for very little other than breeding. The skin over her stomach sagged until it touched the floor and the muscles near her rear were obviously far less-developed than the bodybuilder chest she’d gotten from being a pit bull. The shelter got her a tummy-tuck, fattened her up, and in an inspired bit of marketing, changed her name from “Mama” to “Marmalade.”
Because she was so sweet, you see. We called her “Marma.”
Adopting a dog gives you several mysteries that are impossible to solve. Sometimes she would growl and howl in her sleep, her legs churning after something … or away from it. She never told. The shelter thought she might’ve been five to seven years old, but the stress of her life as a breeding dog made that difficult to estimate. There was some suspicion that the person who brought her to the shelter was also the person who’d overbred her, having her churn out puppies who shared her rare and beautiful brindle coat, but the shelter didn’t have the resources to investigate, and by that point the focus was just on keeping her healthy. She probably had a name. Who can say what it was? She was only ever Marma to us.
She might have lived for 10 years before she met us. All I can say for certain is what happened in the three we had her.
I can tell you that she was utterly charming in a way that only dogs can be, a kind of constant low-key demand for attention that comes off as adorable instead of infuriating. Marma’s secret, I think, was that she played a long game — instead of jumping on you when she wanted pats, she would insinuate herself in your peripheral vision, steering her huge head at a comically slow rate until she appeared in front of you, her prime minister’s jowls entirely covering up TV screens or engulfing laptops. Usually you’d find she’d used the distraction to maneuver her entire front half onto your lap, and by then the act of not patting her was rendered impossible both physically and emotionally. She pulled this trick on everyone and got away with it every time.
Some dogs see prolonged eye contact as a threat, but Marma was perfectly happy to stare into our eyes for hours on end. Hers were wide and wet and so brown that they sometimes looked entirely black and if she detected one of her favorite people above or behind her she would crane and bend her long neck into bizarre angles just to gaze at them. I would try to decipher what those eyes were saying during the times when we had our attention entirely focused on one another. She had no guile or envy or anger — just an oscillation between contentment and anticipation, depending on whether or not she was getting pats.
At her heaviest, Marma weighed perhaps 50 pounds — not a small dog (though I couldn’t help but call her “little dog” while Katie preferred “baby”) but not remotely a large one. She was smaller than the average pit bull, owing to her history, but somehow that and her otherwise gentle nature combined to form a sense of extreme protectiveness around those she considered her pack. If Katie or I laid down anywhere other than the couch, Marma would stand guard above us, her ears swiveling like radar dishes searching for signs of a threat. She would play with other dogs when off the leash, but the sight of another one ambling toward us on an evening walk made her a missile, restrained only by our firm grips on her leash and the distraction of a treat twenty feet up the trail. She was a mother, you see, and mothers are fierce if their loved ones are in danger.
One time, we’d cancelled weekend plans but forgot to cancel our dog-walker. Katie got up in the early morning to grab a drink of water when the door to our front hall opened. Not knowing it was the walker, Katie let out a brief cry, and within an instant Marma had gone from a groggy lump on the couch to a shield between Katie and the door, barking her head off and summoning her deepest and most intimidating growl.
The walker was an older woman. It wasn’t her fault. Marma stayed in her vanguard position until we’d cleared everything up, then obligingly received our gratitude.
Do you know what it’s like to know with absolute certainty that another living creature would die for you? It’s a hell of a thing.
After Katie and I broke up, we agreed that Marma would go with her, and though it wasn’t an easy decision, I know it was the right one. Marma’s always been able to bring people together, and even after we went our separate ways we still remained mutually supportive, in no small part due to our shared history with this particularly good dog. One time, when Katie was on vacation, Marma pitbulled her way out of a screen window her otherwise well-credentialed dogsitter had left open — my number was still one of those listed on her collar, so the person who found her wandering along Rt. 5 in western Massachusetts called me. Katie didn’t trust the sitter to take care of Marmalade after that, so I took her for the week, a week which remains a highlight in a time period where it’s often been hard to get out of the shadows.
I’m writing this a few hours after we took Marmalade to her final visit to the vet. Her kidneys had failed dramatically and when she began refusing food and water and struggled even to stand, we knew it was her time. It was a monstrously hard decision, and the procedure itself was difficult and frightening. It’s a selfish thing to force your dog to play out the string when she doesn’t want to chomp on some chicken and can’t zoom recklessly around the yard, but seeing her through her final moments was devastating.
It’s the burden we take on when we adopt them, you know. We made them from wolves. They can’t live without us. It’s not right that they should die without us either.
One final note.
Protectors of Animals, the shelter that took her in when she was a stray, has seen thousands of animals pass through their doors throughout the years. Marmalade was the first adoption Noelle, our adoption counselor, had ever handled, and (like most everyone else who met her) she had fallen for Marma so hard that she very nearly adopted her herself. We let Noelle know that Marma was sick, and she asked us if she was well enough to make one final trip. The vet had told us she had anywhere from two to seven days left. This was day eight. We decided that she was.
They started to trickle in just as I got to Wethersfield Green. First one, then three, then a dozen staff came out to send off one dog out of thousands that most of them had not seen for years.
Who does that? They’re wonderful. It was wonderful.
We loved her, and she loved us, and I would not trade my time with Marmalade for anything. She was the finest of all possible dogs.
