He got his name because that's what he looked like — a raggedy doll of a dog.
When I first knew him his skin was a mess. He itched constantly and his coat had gone to wire. The vet told us later that his leg had been broken at some point. For most of his life his whole world was a backyard in Texas and a kennel in the kitchen.
He wasn't my mother's dog. Not at first. He just started showing up at her door, every day, and she'd open it and find him sitting there and say, "Go home, Little Buddy. Go home."
He never did.
He had hound in him somewhere, maybe beagle — long in the back, and a nose that never stopped working. Which is its own kind of sad, when you think about it. A dog built to follow a scent, and a yard full of stickers he couldn't walk through without getting hurt.
When I moved my mother up to Washington, I brought him with her. He was about eleven by then, old enough that you'd think the change would have been hard on him.
It was the opposite. I have never seen a dog so happy to smell things. Every corner of the yard, every trail, every patch of grass, like he was catching up on eleven years all at once. My mother kept saying it — "I can't believe you don't have any stickers." She said it like it was a miracle. For Little Buddy it was.
He got five more years. Green fields, open trails, grass he could lie down in. For a dog who'd spent most of his life behind a fence, five years isn't a consolation prize. It's a whole life.
At the end he had dementia, and a back that hurt him, and stairs he couldn't manage anymore. I made the decision. We did it at home. He was close to sixteen, and he went in my mother's arms, and she was crying, and he was home.
That's the part I keep coming back to. Not the leg or the skin or the stickers. He picked my mother. He followed her everywhere — she was his person, and he made her feel like she mattered every single day, without being asked to, for five years.
That's what senior dogs do. And it's why losing a person is so much worse for them than it is for a young dog. They don't understand where she went. They only know she isn't there, and they're old, and they're frightened, and there's nobody.
That's why I support Senior Dogs and Friends Rescue. Somebody has to be there when the person is gone.
