The Lobo Moment

My wife’s second and probably most beloved dog, a German Shepherd-Collie mix, was called Lobo. When we took him off to have him put down (at fifteen years old (!), his back legs were no longer working, due to tumors on the spine), two guys from the Animal Hospital took him gently out of the back of the car, placed him on a rolling trolley and wheeled him across the parking lot and inside. Normally, being half shepherd, Lobo would have torn to shreds, or at least threatened severely, any stranger who had reached into his car. But it was a quiet and peaceful dog that allowed himself to be lifted from the car and placed on the trolley. As he was being wheeled off, he threw his head back and looked back at us – especially at “Mommy,” my mother-in-law. I asked my wife what she thought he was saying. She says, “It wasn’t exactly concern, but he knew he was going to something serious, and he wanted to connect.”

She referenced this “Lobo Moment,” after she came out of surgery. As she had been wheeled off from the room, and I was told to go the other way down the hallway, she had looked back from her gurney and said, “I love you.” “That was my Lobo moment,” she said. She meant that that had been her moment to connect one last time before we were temporarily separated, not that she was being wheeled off to be euthanized, but I reacted as if stricken – after all, death was the fear, death was the unspoken reason for that connection. God thankfully forbade that anything like that would happen to her, but I had been so afraid that I would lose her that even after the surgery I just couldn’t think of that as her “Lobo Moment.”