Rroger

This will go in War Bride, but much further along than where I'm at now. But the memory is on my mind, so I thought I'd write it down and share while it's there.

We had the most amazing dog, a Belgian Malinois named Rroger. Rroger was a combat search and rescue (live and cadaver) Lance Corporal Marine, cross trained for bomb detection and drug detection. Rroger did 8 combat tours in Afghanistan before he developed an allergy to his food and retired at the age of 6. He never had a dedicated handler and he was not bite trained, so he was put up for adoption through a military working dog program. We happened to know the person who started that program (it’s all about who you know) so we beat out a couple of police departments to get Rroger. Mic picked him up from Camp Lejeune and brought him home; Rroger took one look at me and said “oh, you’re my mom.” And that was that. Rroger was my best friend.

Rroger had never met a child or a cat, had never seen a back yard or a couch. It was quite an adjustment- over the course of the first couple of years Rroger bit everyone except me. He didn’t really bite the kids- more scratched them as a warning when they were being stupid. They learned quickly. He once put two good holes in my assistant manager though; he was protecting me, or thought he was. He was a good dog. The best, really. Incredibly well trained, loyal, sweet… he would crawl inside my skin if he could. He loved to rip up tissues- he’d steal them directly out of the box and tear them up. Napkins and paper towels too, but tissues were his favorite. He was terrified of thunder storms and loud noises, and he would spin in circles when he was freaked out.

We had another dog- an awesome old husky named Killian- when we first got Rroger; Rroger respected his age and experience and Killian helped keep him calm. Killian lived to be 18, one of the oldest huskies ever, but eventually he left us. I couldn’t leave Rroger alone all day, and Mic was deployed, so we pretty quickly went to the pound and got an older lab/bulldog mix we named Sam. Sam would pin Rroger against the wall when Rroger would freak out; we joked that Sam was Rroger’s therapy dog, but it wasn’t really a joke. After four years Sam developed a brain tumor and we had to put him down. Rroger went downhill pretty quickly after that.

I worked a lot, and he would sometimes come with me, especially if there was an emergency. One hurricane I stayed at the hotel for a week as everyone evacuated; we opened for refugees fleeing Florida and Rroger designated himself as the therapy dog for anyone who came in. I would check them in with Rroger laying at my feet, then he would get up and walk around the counter and lean against them… and I would watch the stress and trauma melt away from these strangers. He got a lot of hugs that week; some people even cried into his fur, and he just licked their tears away. Rroger was not a kisser, but this was a special situation, and he was a special dog.

Then one day when Rroger was 13 (we’d had him 7 years), I got out of bed to get ready for work. Mic had been at the firehouse the night before, so Rroger slept in the bed with me. I heard Mic come home and say good morning to Rroger, but something was wrong. I got out of the shower and came to see Rroger, but he didn’t know me. He was snapping and snarling and terrified. His body was alive but Rroger was no longer there. We calmed him down, dropped the kids off at school and then we rushed him to the vet, who said he’d had a stroke and we should put him down. Her exact words were “It’s so sad when the soul departs but the body is still living. He won’t last long.” But I couldn’t do it- I needed time to say goodbye to my dog. So we brought him home (I called out of work) and I stayed with him all day. I laid on the couch with him and cried for hours. Then we went out to the back porch, our favorite place, and I sat on the ground on his bed with his head in my lap, just sitting in the sun for the afternoon.

The kids came home from school around 3- they walked home, it wasn’t far, just over a mile. Liam was devastated- we had gotten them to school so quickly they didn’t really understand what was going on then. But when Liam saw Rroger he started screaming. Not a normal scream, but a blood-curdling Celtic scream of mourning. He screamed Rrogers name over and over, a guttural cry I couldn’t believe came from an eight year old child. I asked Connor to take over for me sitting with Rroger for a bit so I could take a break, both emotional and physical- my legs were killing me from sitting on the ground for so long with 100 pounds of almost dead weight draped across them. I asked Liam to go outside - he was still howling - I told him Rroger could hear him better there.

After about an hour of Connor sitting with Rroger, playing him music, showing him pictures on his phone, talking to him, all of a sudden he called out to me - “Mom! Rroger’s back!” I rushed outside to the porch, and sure enough, Rroger’s soul was back in his body. He recognized me, then he stood up for the first time in 18 hours, walked over to me to rub against my legs and went outside to pee. Liam came in the from the yard- I hadn’t even realized he’d stopped yelling- and he said “I saw Rroger in the air and I told him to go back to you. That you still need him.” I gave Liam the biggest hug as I wept. This little child snatched my dog’s soul out of the aether and put him back in his body. For a while anyway.

For the next 6 weeks Rroger didn’t leave my side. I brought him to work with me and he’d sleep in my office during the day. He was no longer scared of thunder or lound noises- I think he was deaf, but he’d always heard me in his head, not through his ears, so he could still hear me. He panted constantly, which he had never done before, but he still loved ripping up tissues. We gave him his own box, every day. Then one morning we woke up and Rroger was gone, sprawled out across his bed not breathing. Liam tried to Celtic yell him back again but I stopped him- his body wasn’t alive, so there was no use. We brought him to the vet to have him cremated; she couldn’t believe he’d lasted as long as he had, but that was God’s gift to me, to us.

Later that day Liam was outside; I watched him talking to something I couldn’t see, and then he leaned down and petted the air. I went out and asked him what was going on, and told me he’d seen Rroger in the yard, that he came to say goodbye. And then he saw Rroger run over to Killian and Sam and Tigger (our cat that died the year before) and they all disappeared. I told him that Rroger may come back to us eventually, and that we’d know by the tissues.

Aine loves to rip up tissues.