Michael Hillman

I’ve often found that writing about the loss of a pet helps settle my mind and come to terms with the loss, but I have to admit, I’ve been struggling with writing the story of Neilex, my Jack Russell, who succumbed to cancer last week after a two-year battle. He died peacefully in his bed. He simply went to sleep and never woke up. We should all be so lucky.

So where do I begin … I guess the beginning. Fifteen years ago…

I had lost PJ, my first Jack Russell, a few weeks earlier and really wasn’t in the mind to replace him just yet. I would replace him eventually, but not right away. I can still remember vividly seeing him for the first time. One of my students brought him into my kitchen. When she announced he was from a litter of her dog, who I was not a fan off, and her mother’s female, who I was even less fond of, I had pretty much made up my mind that I was going to have nothing to do with it. I was convinced nothing good could come from the pair.

Then she put him into my hands…

Try as I might, I quickly found myself smiling at him. When he reached up and licked my face, I knew I was in trouble.

My student was on her way to a horse show where she planned to sell him. Still not willing to commit, I told her that if she didn’t sell him at the show to bring him back and I would buy him.

"Seriously Mike," she said. "If I take him to the show he is going to get bought."

I thought about it for what, to me at least, seemed forever, and finally I said: "Leave him." And so began Neilex’s life with us.

Between the horses, cats and dogs, my wife and I had long ago come up with a naming convention for animals – Star Trek characters. I can’t recall why we chose Neilex, a character from Star Trek Voyager, but we did, and the name suited him.

That evening, we faced our first big dilemma with Neilex – where he would sleep. As we hadn’t planned on getting a puppy, we didn’t have a crate for him. My wife, who had less than a hospitable relationship with PJ, put a blanket on the ground next to my side of the bed and placed him squarely in the center. Neilex was not having anything to do with it.

Every time we turned the lights off, he would whimper. Not surprising, as he had spent his whole life – all eight weeks of it, in the championship of others. Being alone in the dark was scary.

It only took my wife about ten minutes to throw in the towel. "Just pick him up and put him between us," she said. I did, and Neilex promptly fell fast asleep… as he would every night for the rest of his life. I could swear he had a smile on his face. He knew what he wanted, and he was too cute to deny him.

That night as I stroked his head, I promised him that he would have a good life, and that he would be my retirement dog, and when that day came, we would have all the time in the world. I fully intended to keep those promises.

That night, I called him "Poop" for the first time, short for puppy. While Neilex was his official name, I always called him ‘Poop.’ To his last day, he was, and will always be, a puppy to me.

The next morning I was awoken with slobbering doggie kisses. It was way, way too early for me, but not for a Jack Russell puppy eager to get going in his new life.

Jack Russells have a horrible reputation of being neurotic, but as I learned with PJ, they are only neurotic if raised around other Jack Russells. In the morning, Neilex got his first real introduction to Kess, a shelter rescue and Kira, a laid back Lab-Rottweiler mix. Kess, a female, looked upon Neilex as her puppy. Kira however, was not impressed with Neilex. She had long ago forgotten what puppyhood was about and made it clear she had no intention of raising the little brat that was climbing all over her. But she got over it.

As the years progressed, Neilex and Kira became inseparable. Kess was happy being my wife’s dog. I often joked that while Neilex liked me, he loved Kira. They were the perfect Mutt and Jeff. Wherever one went, the other was sure to follow.

Neilex’s days were predictable, which made him a happy puppy. Once he learned the boundary of the farm’s Invisible Fence, he was let out with Kira every morning to do his ‘sniffs.’ Once he verified the property safe, he returned to a waiting breakfast, and then joined either my wife or I in the barn as we took care of stalls. Then came hours of riding, where he joined me in my ring. Then more barn work, then dinner, then sleep. For a Jack Russell, living with us was about as good it gets.

Good as it gets, that is, until one’s wife takes her eye off a curious puppy, and that puppy gets in the way of a 1,200-pound horse…

I still recall the call from my mortified wife. "Riker stepped on Neilex’s paw." She said. "He just squished it. Neilex was screaming, but Riker was oblivious and just stood there."

She took Neilex to the vet, who assured her that while his paw pads were in fact ‘squished,’ they would recover. And they did. But as bad as the situation was, there was a bright side – I got one of my most favorite photos of Neilex out of it.

The incident also sparked the beginning of my wife’s long and deep affection for Neilex. I’m not sure if it was because he was such a good patient for her as she changed his bandages every night, or just his laid back, happy go lucky nature, but he made it clear to her that he liked her, and she retuned the favor.

On occasion, way too many to count, my wife would sit with Neilex on her lap and they would sing – well she called it singing, I called it howling. It was their thing. I may throw the Frisbee, I may take him for rides, but singing was theirs.

It always started of slowly, but always built to a crescendo so loud that I often found myself leaving the room to give my hearing a rest. It always ended with my wife getting a thorough face licking from a very happy puppy.

It’s funny, once you lose a pet their idiosyncrasies tend to dominate your memory of them. The vision of my wife and Neilex sitting on the couch singing will be forever etched in my mind. So too will be Neilex’s shaking – a trait he inherited from his father. To those who did not know him, it looked like Neilex was either shivering from cold, or from fright, but as I explained countless times, he just shook.

Neilex also had an annoying habit of sitting out in a field and barking at nothing – a trait he inherited from his mother. I can’t even begin to enumerate the number of times I had to get off my horse and chase him back into the barn so I could continue my ride in peace.

Neilex however, did have his positive idiosyncrasies, like always waiting to lick my legs dry when I came out of the shower. I never did understand it – maybe it had something to do with protecting me, but God forbid if I didn’t give him the opportunity to do that job.

The shout of the word "Frisbee" was a sure fire way to bring Neilex out of wherever he had settled down. Unlike the other dogs however, Frisbee, for Neilex, involved only chasing the Frisbee, not returning it. I always tried to explain it to him that we could play longer if he returned the Frisbee, but the gears in his head just couldn’t seem to process the idea. Only once did he actually catch the Frisbee, the rest of the times he would wait for it to land, then pounce on it, only to run off with it when I tried to retrieve it for another throw.

At night Neilex would always go through what can be best described at a dance as he pawed his blanket into the perfect nest at the foot of our bed. At times, my wife and I would watch in awe at his antics he would go through to make the bed just right, and once he settled in, god help you if you happened to nudge him with your foot. Any disturbance was sure to be met with a growl. In the morning, when I was not home, Neilex was always ready and waiting for my early rising wife. However, when I was home, Neilex ignored my wife and always waited for me to rise. I miss him being the first thing I see in the morning.

Of course my greatest memory of him will be the sheer joy he would show whenever I would come home. He would squeal like a child opening Christmas presents. The squeal would only grow louder when I picked him up, which also allowed him to thoroughly clean my face with doggie kisses.

As I grow older, I’m increasingly aware that time is a precious commodity. The long hours of today will be but a distant memory in a flash of any eye. A little bouncing puppy will become a routine fixture before you know it, and in a blink of an eye, an old dog enjoying the last few years of his life.

Such was the case of Neilex.

His early life was marked by the thrill of joining me at my horseshows, where he got to run around courses and do what Jack Russell’s do best – be busy. When I quit competing, I turned my attention to rebuilding my house – the tearing down of walls, the comings and going of the workmen provided Neilex almost non-stop entertainment. Even when that ended, Neilex always had his trusty canine companions to turn too.

Kess, who had looked upon him as her puppy, eventually died. I’m not going to anthropomorphize and say Neilex felt her loss like we did, but I do recall he was quiet the night Kess died, and as we went to bed, he came up and gave me a gentle lick on my face and then settled in next to my chest, his head facing mine. He had a sad look in his eyes.

Those sad eyes would soon be replaced by joyous ones, when Troy joined our household and increased the canine complement back to three. As Kira by this time was growing old, a young puppy was exactly what Neilex needed, and soon, the two were inseparable.

When Kira died, Neilex again mourned. He had grown up with her. Kira had been his companion at horse shows, countless car rides, and the rebuilding of the house. As with Kess, Neilex was quiet the night she died. Again, he slept next to my face, as opposed to my feet as we slept. I recognized the look in his eyes. He missed her.

But Neilex had Troy, and life went on.

I fully expected Neilex to live out his natural life with us, which for a Jack Russell not stupid enough to kill itself, should have been 16, but at 12 we noticed a marked drop in his outward appearance, and sprit, enough of a change to bring it up to our vet, Gary Kubala, to look at. The evening of his examination, Gary dropped by to tell us the bad news, Neilex had a tumor in his intestines, and it was cancerous. The cancer was an aggressive one Gary told us, and the outcome was poor at best.

From the get go, there was no doubt in either my or my wife’s mind that we would pull out all the stops for Neilex, the first of which was to do surgery to determine how extensive the cancer had spread.

The results of the surgery were better then we hoped. The cancer, much to the pleasant surprise of the oncologist who worked with us, was localized to a small section of his intestine, something she said never happens. The involved section of the intestine was removed and the intestine resected. Neilex returned home that evening to recover under the watchful eye of my veterinary nurse wife. Within days, he began to put on weight, and within weeks, he was again running around in the field with Troy.

We held our breath when he returned for his first check up with the animal oncologist. The news was better then we had dared to hope. There was no sign of cancer. After a few months, his monthly checkups were stretched to quarterly, all with the same results. Neilex was cancer free.

That all changed this past March.

March was supposed to be his last and final checkup. If he was still cancer free, then Neilex was officially in remission. But his luck finally ran out. I still vividly remember the call from my wife. I was expecting word of remission, but instead, I got the opposite. And unlike the first round, the cancer had already spread throughout his body.

In this case surgery was not an option, so we opted to do chemotherapy. Yes, it was expensive, but there was always a chance it would work, and no matter what, we didn’t want to find ourselves questioning if we had done all we could for him – we wanted to make sure when he died that we would have no regrets.

Unlike the first bout of cancer, Neilex entered the second bout in relatively good health, so he handled the chemotherapy relatively well. Of course he did have to take daily medicine, to counteract the effects on his stomach, which at times stretched my wife’s patience, but we dealt with it, as did he, albeit begrudgingly on his part.

Unfortunately, the first round of chemotherapy was ineffective, so Neilex was switched to another drug that required weekly infusions. As the veterinary oncologist office was in West Chester, Pennsylvania, requiring my wife to dedicate a day every week for his treatments. The time was well spent on both parts. Neilex would fall asleep on the bench he and my wife sat on while getting his infusions, and while he slept, my wife got to build new memories.

Unfortunately, while the second drug did manage to arrest the progression on the cancer, it was too little and too late. The end came quick.

Two weeks before he died my wife told me I should try to spend as much time as I could with him, while I could. I’m glad she did.

At first Neilex was able to follow me out into the field, a field he used to run around in as a happy-go-lucky puppy. But within days, I found that while he could follow me out, he could not make it back, so I had to carry him.

Neilex’s once veracious appetite evaporated – whereas one night he would gobble down chicken, the next night he couldn’t. When he turned away from cat food, something he was always trying to sneak a bite of, we knew his time was up.

My last night with him was spent sitting out in the field with him curled in my lap. He barely had the energy to hold his head up. I sat with him for over an hour, stroking his frail body, reminiscing our life together.

That evening, as we lay in bed, my wife and I made the decision that it was time to help him along and arrangements were made for Gary to come over and put Neilex asleep in his own house, on his own bed. We had no regrets. We had done all we could. There was nothing more to do.

The next morning, Neilex seemed to rally – greeting my wife when she arose. A last glimmer of hope. As she headed out to do some chores, she put Neilex onto his heated dog bed, wrapped his blanket around him, and headed out.

Neilex went to sleep. He never woke up.

I like to think he was greeted in heaven by all the dogs and cats that have found refuge and love in our home, and that he is running around in fields of grass with them, awaiting for the time we will be reunited with him.

It will happen in a blink of an eye.

But until then, I will miss him, as I miss all the four footed souls that have shared their lives with us.