Farewell to a Border Collie Underdog

(No, not mine, but i started reading and could not put down.)

Beautiful, sweet Nan passed away Saturday. Our border collie was diagnosed with cancer in February and given a month. They could operate, the veterinarians said, but it would buy her only weeks and her quality of life would be poor. So we prepared ourselves as best we could and tried to make her last remaining days comfortable.

Instead, we had Nan for almost half a year more than we expected—and for all but a few moments, she was herself: energetic, demanding, loving and life-affirming. Mercifully, when the end came, it came quickly. The last thing we wanted was for her to suffer.

Nan was the runt of her litter. The breeder didn’t even offer her up for inspection since she had lost her tail as a puppy, cut off on a barbed wire fence.

But there was something about that pup. Maybe true underdogs have special appeal. The first few weeks, she sat under the furniture and wouldn’t come out. But after a while, she allowed herself to be petted, then took to jumping onto the bed every night and making her personality’s full force felt.

Nan took a special interest in regularly walking us, insisting on long ambles twice a day for our health. I was expected to use the long, plastic Chuckit with the scoop-end to throw balls to keep my arms limber, which Nan encouraged by retrieving most of the balls.

She demanded squeaky ones, not regular tennis balls, so she could mock me, biting the ball to make noise, then dropping it before snatching it as I went to pick it up. Nan was something of a survivalist. Fearing a shortage of squeaky balls, she hid a large number of them in the high grass along our walks. Neighbors took to leaving in our mailbox the balls they’d found in their bushes.

No matter how busy she was, Nan was happy to present her belly, back, head or neck to be scratched. She particularly enjoyed the brain massage, a vigorous head-rub accompanied by neck-scratching.

Nearly half of all American households are blessed with a dog. Dogs teach compassion and patience, both by what they give and what they require. They encourage habits of acceptance: They are who they are, and we must adapt. We learn true unconditional love from them. And given their lives’ relative briefness, they remind us that we must be grateful for each moment we are given.

“Heaven goes by favor,” Mark Twain once said, for “if it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.” RIP, sweet Nan.

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And the writer of this touching tribute? (I hope you will not alert)

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Karl Rove, in his weekly WSJ column

http://www.wsj.com/articles/farewell-to-a-border-collie-underdog-1440627974