Snail Spirals

Sometimes even the expected can be unexpected... heartwrenching... horrible. It's taken me more than a week to write this post. Our dog Cobalt went up to Friday Harbor with us last weekend, but she did not come home.


1994-2008

She'd been getting progressively impaired this summer, though she never had any acute attacks like she did a couple years ago. Just a general decline. Less stable on her feet, a little blind, a little deaf, but still her same sweet self.


July 1996

She was originally from Wilmington, North Carolina, born in 1994. Shaun got her from an animal shelter, in November of our first year together. She was about nine months old, our relationship was eleven months old. She was mostly past the puppy stage, incredibly sweet and cuddly. She wanted to be a lap dog, a 50 pound lap dog. She was picked up as a stray and we think she'd been abused, as she was always skittish around tall men with deep voices. We didn't even hear her bark for more than a year.


January 1996

She lived with me (illegally, in my no-pets apartment) for our last summer in Wilmington, while Shaun did research in Florida, then they moved to Pittsboro, North Carolina in the fall of 1995 when Shaun started in the PhD program at Chapel Hill. I finished up my Master's degree and joined them in December.


January 1996

She enjoyed the colder winters and occasional snows of the Piedmont, and deluded herself into thinking that she could catch the squirrels and deer in our yard.


July 1996

It was hilarious to watch her scratch her own back by wiggling with all four feet up in the air.


February 1999

She hated baths, loved to be brushed, and would flatten into a puddle of black fur when the temperature went above 80F.


July 1996

We moved to Friday Harbor in 2001, to the wonderful cool Pacific Northwest. Lots of beach walks and snuffling in the underbrush at Jakle's Lagoon. When Emma was born, Cobalt was interested and gentle and protective. She was very tolerant of the toddler-play.


February 2005

She traveled with us up and down the East Coast visiting and vacationing from Maine to Florida, and across the width of the US three times.


August 1996

She pretty much went where we went for 14 years. She was part of our family from the very beginning, from the very first inklings Shaun and I had that we would be a family.


January 1996

We knew she was old and gradually failing. She had a long life, and had cheated mortality several times - hit by a car, heartworms and the terrible treatment for them, cherry sized bladder stones and surgery to remove them, pancreatitis, and a stroke or possibe brain tumor - not to mention the less dangerous crises - bitten by a copperhead, stoned from licking a toad, a muzzle full of porcupine quills, lots of apparently benign but still sensitive large fatty tumors, and idiopathic vestibular disease.


October 2007

Despite all that, she kept going along. Even up to the end, she didn't seem to be in great distress, just a bit creaky. I was dreading having to make the decision to put her to sleep, but we didn't have to.


February 2005

Cobalt, Cueball, Cue-balty. You will be terribly missed. Rest in peace, sweetie.


September 1998