Some Blues for YaYa
About six months ago Rachel and I started fostering an older dog named YaYa. They just put her down a couple days ago and even though we just had six months with her, I’ll still miss YaYa. We have our steady dog, Warren. Warren started out as a rescue, but we adopted him years ago. We knew that this new dog YaYa was probably not getting adopted by another family. She was older and she looked old. Dogs who are old just have little tags that grow on them, little chunks of their body that are just kind of wrong shaped. This dog looked like she had seen some shit. And she had. When she was found and rescued she was covered in blue house paint. All I can hope is that people who covered beautiful YaYa in paint was a bunch of young kids. Kids who didn’t know better. Kids who don’t know how many chemicals are in house paint. Because if some grown up or group of grown ups covered a dog in blue paint you just have to know those humans are the worst, lower than low. Vermin. But it was probably kids.
But YaYa rolled with the punches, I don’t know everything about her life. But I think she had gotten a lot of punches. By the time we started to take care of her she was deaf, she was tired, and she was really overweight. Rachel worked on getting her on a better set of food and getting her more comfortable taking some walks longer than a block. What came out kind of quickly was that LaLa was awesome. She pooped when she wanted to. Exactly when she wanted to. She was house trained. But if I was late with that walk, she dumped where she was. Dogs are usually somewhat choosy about where she would poop. Not YaYa. Sidewalk, great. Some pile of wood that was in her path. Now it’s poopwood. She liked to chill a lot. She liked to sleep. She liked to eat. She liked to eat food she wasn’t supposed to eat. She liked to bark when Warren barked. I don’t think she generated much barking energy herself. But she channeled the energy and zest for life into just being a good dog. She liked to watch TV. She liked to chill. She slept a lot.
I hope for the last couple months, she was enjoying her home. I hope she was feeling good, she got along with Warren, she laughed with us. She knew the neighborhood. In the end she started struggling to breathe. They figured out that it was this huge mass in her throat. Too huge. They couldn’t remove, it would kill her. They offered to wake her up, so we could say goodbye. And maybe if we had known her longer, maybe if our kids were a different age. But what are you going to do, wake her up, remind her that she’s in pain. Look her in the eyes, tell her we love her. It was better to just let her stay asleep, she was down, and then she was gone. I don’t know everything about her life. I don’t know about her previous owners. I don’t what was at the center of her life. But I am thankful for the last couple months I got to spend with her. Maybe some cruel humans poured paint on this beautiful creature at some point. But my kids treated her nice. My other dog treated Yaya nice. I sing some blues for you Yaya, cause you are gone to us, and you were incredible. And you are gone. I love you Yaya.