We got them from a breeder in Lubbock. My wife found Odie and picked him out, because she has an eye for that sort of thing, and she was right. He fit right in from the first day. Ollie came out of an oopsy litter a while later. The breeder messaged asking if we wanted a second pup, and we wholeheartedly said yes, and we picked the chunkiest one in the pile.
Odysseus and Olympus. That’s what the names were short for. Greek legends in their own right, which is a lot to hang on two dogs whose legs don’t reach the couch, and which came in handy exactly when you’d expect. Nobody in this house has ever been called by their full name for a good reason.
Odie was the older one, and he took it seriously. He was the best big brother a dog could be, and then he was the best big brother a second time when Penelope came, and by then he had it down to a science. Guardian of the family is what he made himself. Nobody assigned it to him.
He loved my wife’s kisses. He growled at mine. He growled at me generally, honestly, and I came to take it as a term of endearment, because he would growl and then lick me anyway, every single time, like the growl was a formality he had to observe before he could get to the part he wanted.
His bark was sassy. His side eye told you exactly where you stood, and he never bothered to soften it. And any time his brother or sister started up, or any time he got in the car, he’d throw his head back and howl the song of his people.
Ollie was a character. Friendly with everyone he ever met, and always up for whatever came next. Famed enthusiast of the word “walk,” which we eventually had to start spelling out, and then had to stop spelling out too. He loved to dress up and he loved every single thing we ever put on him, no exceptions, no complaints. He had a little gremlin growl that meant he was having the time of his life.
He chased squirrels his whole life and never caught one. He came close a few times. He had a crooked little run, and he’d pin his ears flat back to make himself faster, which is what I always told him he was doing.
Loving, gentle, and the kindest little guy you would ever meet.
Ollie was the rock of love we built this family around. Odie was the earth that held it all together.
Ollie was with us eight years, eleven months. The doctors gave us four to six months when he was diagnosed. He gave us two years.
Ollie’s was histiocytic sarcoma, in his lungs. There was no oncologist in San Antonio I could get him to, so I found one in Austin, and Austin is where we went. They took his entire right lung. The surgeon called us while Ollie was still open on the table, to tell us how bad it was and to ask if we wanted to keep going. We said yes. I have thought about that phone call many times since and I have never once wanted a different answer.
Then it was chemo, every couple of weeks. We’d load up and leave the house at 4:45 in the morning so I could drop him at the clinic and still find a friend’s desk in Austin to sit at and work a full day. That is the stretch when the doctor gave us six months, tops.
He kept eating. He kept following me from room to room. He kept doing the thing corgis do where they lie down in a doorway so no one can leave without stepping over them. He outran that prognosis by a year and a half, on one lung, and then he stopped, the way they do, all at once at the end after months of small negotiations.
Near the end I would sit on the floor with him and talk. About the past, mostly. I’d cry and pet him and keep talking. When it was getting close to his breaking point I told him, “Just let me know and I’ll let you go.”
One day he let me know. I honored it. I told him to keep a watchful eye over all of us, and to guide us to the next place, if there was one.
Odie stayed the earth. He held the house together through all of it, and through the after, when the rest of us couldn’t. He took on Penelope. He took on our child. He kept howling in the car. He kept growling at me and licking me anyway. Two more years of that, gentle and present and loving, exactly as he had been for the eight before.
Now it’s lymphoma, and it is moving through him. He will be a week and a half short of eleven. It took him in the space of seven days, once we could see it. Before that he was Odie. He was fine on a Sunday. That is the part I keep circling, the seven days, as if there were an eighth one hidden somewhere behind us that we missed.
We didn’t get to fight for him. That is its own particular cruelty. With Ollie I had a surgeon and a highway and a 4:45 alarm and something to do at every hour of it. With Odie there was nothing to drive to. Just a week, and the vet’s face, and a family standing around a dog who was still trying to be the guardian of it while it was happening.
A few nights before we knew, I had a dream. I was in a living room, of sorts. The front door was standing wide open. Odie was lying in the sun with his eyes closed, completely content, the way he does. We called him our Sun Pup. And Ollie was there. Happy, chunky like he used to be, smiling that wide smile.
After the diagnosis came, I put it together. I asked Ollie to keep watch. I asked him to guide us to the next place. I think that was him telling me he’d heard both.
There is a saying, you can save everyone in the world except the ones you love. My wife and I have said it to each other more than once this week. It feels true. It has the shape of truth, the way a thing does when you are looking for a reason and the only one available is yourself.
But look at what we actually did with them.
We took them to pools. We took them to parks, to baseball games, to more walks than I could count if I tried. We put them in front of cameras and made them sit still, and they mostly didn’t. We hauled them to family gatherings where somebody’s uncle fed them things they shouldn’t have had. We brought home a little sister for them, Penelope, tri color, who learned everything she knows about being a corgi from two boys who had already figured it out.
They were there when we eloped. They were there again when we did it officially, for everyone else. They were there when we signed for the first house, and they were the first ones through the door of it. They were there when I finished my master’s degree, which I had been striving for. They were there when we brought home our child.
Every threshold this family has crossed, they crossed with us. Not nearby. With us.
So when I say we fell short, I have to be honest about what I mean, because it isn’t the record. The record is eleven years of a dog who appointed himself guardian of every person in this house and never took a day off from it, and nine years of a dog who was the reason the rest of us stood where we stood. Both of them loved by everyone, because both of them loved everyone. What I mean is smaller and more selfish than that. I mean I wanted more. I mean that eleven years is not enough and neither was nine, and that no arrangement of veterinary medicine or vigilance or love was ever going to make it enough, and that some part of me is still going to look for the mistake because looking for the mistake is easier than accepting that there wasn’t one.
That is what the saying is actually about. Not that we failed the ones we love. That we can’t stop it, and we cannot make peace with not being able to stop it, and so we convert helplessness into guilt because guilt at least implies we had a hand in it. Guilt feels like agency. It is a worse feeling and an easier one.
Odie is here as I write this. In two hours we take him in, because he is suffering and because that is the last thing left that we can do for him. He will not have his birthday. What he has instead is today, in a house he helped us buy, with a family he was present for the assembly of, with a sister he raised and a child who does not yet know what is happening. He will go with our hands on him. That is not nothing. It is the one part of this we were able to choose.
Ollie had that too. He asked for it, and I gave it to him. Odie never would have asked. He would have kept holding it all together until there was nothing left of him to hold it with, because that was who he was, so this time the choosing falls to us. I hope he knows we are doing it for him and not to him.
Two boys. Our two little bitty baby boys, Odysseus and Olympus. Two cancers. One family that neither of them ever had to wonder about.
We didn’t fall short of them. We ran out of time, which is a different thing, and the only one either of us was ever going to lose to.
And if the dream was what I think it was, then the door was open and the sun was already on him, and Ollie was there waiting, chunky and smiling, to walk his brother to his next destination: back home.
To Odie and to Ollie, what I’ve always told you…
That is a such a good, good, boy! That is a good, good boy!
Thank you. Thank you for everything you’ve given me and this family.
- Jeff