Lucy
The goodest girl
I started writing this 6 months ago right after Lucy passed, but I couldn’t finish it because it’s hard to write through sobs. But I want to get it out now, on what would have been her 15th birthday.
Our family had been waiting to get a dog for a while, and we knew we wanted a Labrador retriever, the gentlest of gentle breeds. We found a woman who only bred English labs up in Madison, Wisconsin and had placed our names on a waitlist in early 2006. We wanted a chocolate female, so we patiently waited until they came to our name in the queue. We got the call in October 2007, but the breeder insisted her pups were picked up when they were between seven and eight weeks old, and you had to be there to bond with them right after. Unfortunately, we had planned to be away during our sons’ school break during that window, and the breeder, Shirley, would not allow us to take our assigned girl. But she did say they had a litter coming that would be ready in January 2008, if that worked better for us.
I’m a big believer that things (mostly) happen for a reason, and so it was with our darling Lucy. With temperatures near Madison hovering around 2°F, we went to fetch her just 3 days after I said good-bye to my career in finance. Our boys were just 7 and 9 years old and I’d decided it was time to stop going to an office at 5:30 am and coming home at 5:00 pm. The newest member of our family arriving just as that happened was kismet, in all the ways.
We put her crate up in Eric and my bedroom and instead of sticking a ticking clock in with her (who came up with that??) I simply laid down next to her and kept my hand on the screen door so she could feel me there all night. She was immediately and forever Mama’s girl after that.
Lucy was just one of two in her litter, and very shy when we first got her, the very opposite of an Alpha dog. She was docile and sweet, or as we used to say she was “a lover not a fighter.” In fact, her whole life she was the peacekeeper in the house, getting spooked from and feeling every raised voice and reminding us to settle down. She also never barked. Well, almost never. From the beginning we taught her to tap the door to go out, and her general nature just wasn’t very vocal. Except for alerts like the few times we left her outside and no one was in the family room to hear her tap to come back in, or when she was young and excited as we drove up to the park for her daily walk after school drop-off. But don't let her lack of vocals fool you. She knew how to communicate and she had us trained very well!
From the beginning, she hated the sound, and likely the vibrations, of the El trains in the city, so she made sure we never walked too far east towards the tracks. She’d let us walk maybe up to 2 blocks away before she’d hear the roar of the tracks (or even just remembered the roar might come) and then she’d come to a dead stop on the sidewalk and refuse to move further, unless it was to head back home. When she wanted attention she’d just come up and put her head in your hand, or start licking it like it had steak all over it—one time my watch went off and congratulated me for washing my hands for 30 seconds due to her affectionate kisses! She knew how to get snacks, which consisted of “herding” whomever was the biggest sucker in the room over to the treat cabinet and waiting with those sweet brown eyes and chonky face for just a few morsels of what she knew lay within.
Which brings us to her love of food. We all know labs love to eat. Lucy was the labbiest in that regard. There weren’t many things she wouldn’t want to nosh, which we found toward the end of her life included even fruits (strawberries, apples, oranges, watermelon, banana—but not blueberries) and fish, and whatever was left in the salad bowl. Lucy seemed to teleport to wherever a meal or snack was being had, and we’d always say (in her voice, natch) “Oh, I like chips!” “I like hot dogs!” reminding that you had to share. Her signature move was to simply stare, or if you were sitting on our step to the family room (like this picture below) she applied the added pressure of both getting in your face—I mean you had put yourself at her level!—and using that one-paw-to-the-arm move to plead for a taste. She was very hard to resist but Alex tended to make her work the hardest for it. Guess who was the biggest pushover? I’ll give you a hint it starts with M and rhymes with llama. She was my sous chef, always at the ready to catch a stray piece of chicken or whatever I “accidentally” dropped on the floor for her.
We discovered Lucy was allergic to grass, cats and pollen, among other things, from an early age. She got monthly injections, and had to take other meds like steroids to treat them. We did this because she loved being outside and like most labs, she was what is known as a “labracow” that loved to eat grass. How could I not let her enjoy one of the great perks of a walk in the park?? The park was truly her happy place, where she flopped into every mud puddle, jumped into every fountain, swam at the beach any chance she could, and always ran to drink from a bubbling spout.
She also loved the snow, which we attributed to her winter birth and hearty Wisconsin, excuse me CheeseHead, roots. Whether it was playing with her brothers when they were little and had a snow day, or just hanging out with her cute plaid coat in a snowdrift eating some fresh powder in the neighborhood, it was one thing she could never get enough of.
As she got older, other ailments popped up, like the one where her larynx was not opening properly and causing her to have trouble breathing. We had it opened surgically (called a tie-back procedure) when she was 11, and that saved her life even if she could no longer be allowed to swim. To be honest, there was nothing we wouldn’t do to make her more comfortable or to give her more time with us. Her last procedure was during the middle of the pandemic in January 2021, where a biopsy showed liver disease that would have likely taken her within months. Our wonderful veterinarian Dr Amy Ujiki prescribed her some meds that gave us another 18 months with her, and for that I am so grateful. A little bit of her fur never quite grew back but it was a small price to pay for our beautiful girl.
The last two years of her life Lucy slowed down considerably. No more long walks in the neighborhood or the park, but she still managed to scoot her tushie up the street to visit a friendly neighbor who had set up a trading room on Webster Avenue. Bud and his team kept a stash of Milkbones to give to all the good doggos when they came to visit, and it was the one thing I could count on to motivate her to walk at greater than a snail’s pace. I recorded her running to the trading desk as a #MotivationMonday clip and posted to twitter, where a tag and RT by the dog-obsessed @darth account made her go a bit viral. I also tweeted a great video of Lucy and her cousin Roxie walking near my mom’s house in Michigan, and that one always makes me smile too.
I don’t think this post even comes close to showing all the love and happiness this little gal with bad teeth, no respect for personal space and a voracious appetite gave me and our family, but I hope you got a little sense of who she was. We got to spend 14 and one half glorious years with her, and she made our family better. The hole we feel without her is immense, and while I will always be a “dog mom” right now we are still mourning our dear Lucy, a/k/a Dat Boo, who loved us well and was loved by all. Rest in peace my sweet angel.