I’m working on a poem about our beloved Oliver right now but
first wanted to tell this little story. It is about how Quinn and Oliver helped
to bring two families together. It is a story about how we had to lose all of
our old dogs at the same time and then bring in these new ones as an extension
of our newly formed family. It is about my father, and his love of Oliver.
Big dogs steal a big part of your heart. Yesterday our
beloved Bernese mountain dog, Oliver, was put to sleep. He would have turned 8
at the end of this month.
Having a blended family is rough, even though we fortunately
do not have any divorces or crazy custody battles attached to our family. My
father was a widower and he married a widow. Suddenly our family turned into the
Brady Bunch and then some! We had 7
kids, 3 big dogs, and 3 young cats. It was completely insane but pretty fun
despite the chaos!
The dogs were all old and a year after the marriage our
yellow lab, Abbi, died. It was heart breaking, she had been my mother’s dog and
like any milestone it was a feeling of losing another small part of my once vibrant
mother. This dog had stared out our glass front door the first week after my
mom had died. She protected my mom and our then black lab puppy, Maggi, from a
crazed German Shepard. She survived because of emergency surgery in the dark no
less, the next day I remember staring out the bus window to the street covered
in her blood and fur She had been diagnosed with “over bonding” with our family
and struggled with the new members of our family. She was smart, strong, and
sweet but resisted being part of a blended family until the end...
After Abbi was gone, I came home from studying in Guatemala
and that same day our other 2 dogs died. The Golden Retriever died exactly on
her 14th birthday and the black lab from a broken heart. I was at a
BB King concert with my father that night and I was weeping. People joked that we
had 2 dogs die in the same day, but it was the furthest thing from a joke… it
was us moving to a new level of being a family. We had lost members of our
individual families and we were starting to jell as a unit- the Hinkle-
Wisniewski family.
So, we did not make it very long without a dog. A month
later my dad and step mom brought home their baby… a Golden Retriever puppy
named Quinn. Quinn was perfect. He never needed a leash, he came right back to
you when called, and required the least amount of training my father has ever
put into a dog. He knows worthless, yet entertaining tricks like “talk to the hand”
where he will bark when you say it and how to chase his tail on command. He is
sweet, loyal, and will always play fetch. Quinn gets upset when we swim without
him at the cottage or if my father drives the boat past the island more than
once, he cries. He will swim and be the “monkey in the middle” during g a game
of Frisbee until he is completely worn out. Once he even rescued our elderly
cottage neighbor when she fell and broke her hip in the woods. Nobody saw her
but Quinn, he got my dad’s attention. Quinn is truly the “all American” dog!
Two years later started the Berner era. After a trip to
Spain Cecily came back with more pictures of a friends Bernese Mountain Dog
than the country. She was obsessed with
this tricolored beast of a dog. IT took little convincing of my father and
within two weeks he made a long journey to Ohio to pick up burner puppy,
Oliver.
Immediately Oliver stole my father’s heart like no other dog
our family has ever had. He was stubborn, always ran and sat on the highest
point he could find in true Swiss Alps fashion, was afraid of the water unlike
any dog we have ever owned, had serious kankles and tree trunks for legs, a
barrel chest, a white paint brush tip of his tail, and would growl on command
when you called him “big boy”.
Oliver could leap great heights from a standing position,
but would always get up for me when I walked down the hall somehow knowing I could
not see him. He would bound through snow banks with this past winter being his
favorite of all time. He had all the best Berner qualities: herd you by nudging
you with his big nose in the thigh,
give gentle long hugs, and lean into you so hard sometimes to the point of
knowing you over. As Quinn always looks at the person he is sitting next to,
Oliver sat with his back to you protecting his block.
Yesterday, my parents had to put him tosleeep. He had a
heart tumor only discovered two days before. It had been growing for four
months but the symptoms came on suddenly and quickly. The tumor was so big that
this week he had stopped eating and was really only sleeping. My dad is his
great wisdom wanted him to have dignity and the best quality of life. They
stayed with him as my father’s high school buddy, our trusted “Dr. Bob the best
vet ever and a Berner owner himself, put Ollie to sleep.
The big house is much quieter now and Quinn is following my
step mom around everywhere. I can feel in my own heart space, from across the
country, my father’s grief in losing his greatest dog companion. ]
At the end of the day the black floor on the white carpet,
scratches in eh walnut floors, and smudge marks on the windows mean nothing
compared to the love of a Berner. They are gentle, kind, loyal, gives the best
hugs.
The Hinkle- Wisniewski family will move forward, growing
with more grandchildren and probably another Berner in the future. There will never be another Ollie Doodle but
his memory, and fur in the corners of the house, will live on forever.
I love and miss you Oliver.
Here is more information about the greatest dog breed:
Bernese mountain dog - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernese_Mountain_Dog
