Goodbye my sweet, beautiful girl...

We had to say goodbye to our sweet Emily Elizabeth about three weeks ago. My heart still hurts. I haven’t wanted to let her go – she meant so much to me and my husband. It’s only now that I can bring myself to even write about it, and that’s partly because I’m hoping it might help me start feeling better. Em has appeared so often on my blogs I felt I must give her a proper send-off and tell everyone our sweet girl has left us. 

Emily spent most of the past year ill. She was diagnosed with congestive heart failure at the end of 2017 and though she responded well to the medication, other complications arose. Getting her to eat this past year was a trial, and then she developed IBD, which only made things worse. She was an incredible trooper and fighter through it all and outlived her prognosis. Our Em loved life, every minute of it, despite some serious health problems. She battled chronic pancreatitis for years, and her last physical showed signs of cancer on top of everything else, though we never bothered to find out for sure because at that point it didn’t matter.
Emily was the daughter of show dogs, with a very pure bloodline – perhaps a little too pure. I sometimes wish she hadn’t been so purebred so those health problems could have been diluted.
Despite all that, she led a very full, happy and wonderful life. She brought joy everywhere she went. She was full of love for the world – meeting new people was quite possibly her favorite thing, after eating. Until the past year, Miss Em never missed a meal. She also loved to play, go for rides and be in the thick of things – she couldn’t abide a closed door for fear she might be missing out on something.

Though she was born in the desert in California, she loved cold weather and snow. She would sit on the front step in the cold, dressed in one of her many sweaters, and watch the world go by. Because she loved being outside and loved people, we had to fence in our front yard – she thought nothing of taking off like a shot when she saw a new person or one of the neighbors. Even though she knew better than to run off, her exuberance would take over and she would forget. The same thing happened when meeting people – she had manners but would forget them in her excitement. No one ever seemed to mind.
Miss Em was funny, too. She hated loud noises and would literally shush my friends if she felt they were being too raucous. And she had no qualms about putting me in my place, either. One day when she was quite young, she was running around like a lunatic, all excited and barking, and I tried to get her to calm down and stomped my foot at her playfully. She stopped, looked at me, and stomped her paw at me and barked. I stomped my foot again, and she stomped her paw back. I had to laugh, realizing I had met my match. And from that moment on, I was hers and would have done anything for her. My husband was equally under her spell and she worshipped him. I would catch her gazing up at him adoringly and joke that she worshipped at the Temple of Ed.

We are so lucky to have had you for nearly 13 years, Emily Elizabeth. Thank you for bringing so much love and fun into our lives. We will miss you forever, my sweet girl.

Photos by The Pink Home