My poor Blue continues to age in a very confused style. Yet one that is more than faintly familiar to me as I follow her on the path into senility.
I make her get up every night between 10:30 and 11 PM to go out for one last pee. She reluctantly rises from her bed in my bedroom and walks gingerly and stiff legged to the top of the stairs. Then she peers down through her cataract riddled eyes to see if there is any chance I’m going to not make her walk down the stairs and go out just after she’d gotten so comfortable. But no, I insist.
So she very carefully comes down the carpeted stairs. About once a week or so she misses a step and slides on her belly to the bottom, where she immediately picks herself and her dignity up and pretends it was what she’d planned all along.
She then slowly makes her way to the back door and goes out. She stops on the little stoop and lifts her nose to ascertain whether there are any enemies she needs to be careful about in the area. Either that or she’s trying to figure out if something died in her yard since the last nap that she needs to go eat. Then she slowly, ever so slowly, moves off the stoop and pees into the first patch of dirt she hits. She then returns to the stoop. She stands on the stoop for a moment in deep thought. She looks at the door. She looks at the yard. She thinks again for a few minutes. She is debating whether or not it’s worth going back to bed while still half asleep or waking up enough to go poop so she’ll be comfortable through the night. Then she slowly reverses course and goes back into the yard to poop. She’s apparently decided that since I made her get up anyway, she might was well conduct all her business and then sleep through the night.
And as I laugh at her and her decision making moments, I wonder how different they are from when I wake up in the middle of the night and lie there so warm and cozy wondering if it’s worth the effort to get up and pee or will I be able to make it through to the morning without that extra trip. Like Blue, I almost always comes down on the side of getting up since I’m awake anyway.
Old age holds many such moments where you find that you and your dog have so much more in common than you ever imagined in youth.