Little Miss Fanny has been gone for two weeks now. We are readjusting to life without her. She was the third and last Irish Water Spaniel we got from Nancy Wiley and the last to travel to us by airplane. We picked her up at Delta Dash and she was so little that she fit in between our car seats on the gear shift.
Fritz was six and welcomed her. She was named after Guido’s maternal grandmother. She loved eating cicadas and never got sick from them. Like all our previous IWS she was very sensitive and very smart. She had a funny smirk. Early on I called her Fancy, Funny, Funny Girl.
She was definitely a girl. She had a rat tail like all other IWS but hers had a light colored ‘flag’ on it. A pretty tail. She was a little smaller than most IWS. She was a great jumper. Dilly arrived when she was 6 and she welcomed him immediately despite or maybe because of his quirks and they became a team (the brown team). She taught him everything she knew. She used to sleep between Guido and me and often would rest with her head on my leg. We dreamed together. She was concerned whenever I coughed/ran out of the room when we sneezed. When she was 9 or 10 she was diagnosed with a mast cell tumor on one of her toes. She did chemo twice with no visible side effects and beat the cancer.. She was a trooper. When she and Dilly returned from Country Lane when we traveled, she usually insisted on something extra on her food: it started with chicken broth or yoghurt and over the years advanced to smoked salmon. I finally outsmarted her with sardine oil. I brushed her teeth almost every night as she grew older and not strong enough to be anesthetized. She had been cancer free for several years but the last time she went for her onco check up her spleen was extremely enlarged and had to be removed. She survived the surgery and was frisky but the first chemo session was too much for her and she decided to move on to the next world. She was almost 13. She was the only dog of ours that died at home. Quietly, next to me while I did yoga. I wasn’t sure she was dying but I whispered a Buddhist mantra to her, ‘may all sentient beings be healthy and happy and free of suffering and the causes of suffering.’ Especially Fanny.
