Yesterday at about 3:45pm, my baby/little brother/best friend, Leo, died of a ruptured tumor near his heart.
We had no idea that he even had a tumor, and he was completely fine yesterday morning when I took him and his brother, Jersey, for a walk. It wasn't until about 2:00pm that he started showing symptoms (throwing up and lying unresponsive out on the back lawn), and within the next two hours he was gone.
It's too fresh on my mind for me to want to get into the details of the event, but I was at work when it happened. I got constant texts from my sister letting me know what was happening, and then I got the phone call I wasn't prepared for. My coworker took over the reception desk and let me go home early because I was such a wreck.
I'm just glad that I took the time to take him for a walk yesterday morning. Sometimes I put it off until evening or just skip a walk day. This morning I took him on a long loop down a street we don't usually go down. He barked at a few dogs and children on bicycles as he loved to do, and then when we got back I gave him a thorough brushing (another thing I sometimes skip). I gave him and Jersey a treat for being so patiently brushed, and Leo actually caught the treat for once. He was never a good catch.
One way I cope with losing someone is to try to write down the things I loved about them. So that's what I'm going to do here.
Unlike his brother, Jersey, Leo could roll over. Every time I got a treat and led him over to an open area of carpet, he would flop over immediately. Sometimes he would stop on his back, hoping to just get a belly rub
and a treat, but he was pretty good about rolling all the way over.
He never liked to fetch. He's the only golden retriever I've ever met who didn't actually retrieve. Instead we would throw the ball for Jersey, and Leo would chase after Jersey, tugging on his ears or trying to steal the ball out of his mouth. Or he would just sit at our feet and have us scratch his ears while we waited for Jersey to come back.
Cuddling was his best skill. From the day we brought him home he would push Jersey out of our laps and curl up with us. He had this perfect way of flopping right up against your leg and putting his head in your lap. Doing floor exercises was next to impossible because he always took it as an invitation to cuddle. And if you were sitting on the couch, he would come put his head between your knees and look at the floor so you could scratch his neck, as if he were on a massage table. He had these thick folds of skin around his face that made him extra soft and squishy. He was like perfectly adapted to getting petted, and he hated it when we rejected his advances. He was kind of a cuddle junkie. If you stopped petting him, he would shove his nose under your hand to force you to continue. Sometimes, if you were sitting at the dinner table or reading a book or something, you would find a cold, wet dog nose poking up under your elbow, trying to pull your arm over to him.
He wasn't a fan of the back stairs. For some reason, going up and down the longer staircases in the house was no obstacle, but he would take those three back stairs as carefully as if they were coated with glass. He also never picked up on the "ring the bells to tell us you need to go outside" concept. Jersey got it in like two days, but Leo always just did this half-hearted little
whoof and whine to make us come to the door. I tried to get him to ring the bells before I let him out, but he'd just crane his neck, lift his paw, and kind of scratch at the air a few inches away from the bells. Little stinker.
Even when he was the one to ask me to open the door, he would concede and let Jersey go out first if he wanted to--Leo could be halfway out the dog door, and Jersey would try to push past him, preventing either of them from getting out. Leo would just back out and let Jersey go ahead. He could be very non-confrontational with Jersey sometimes.
Dead birds were like heroin to him. He would find them all the time when we went hiking, and because he
knew he wasn't supposed to eat them, he would proceed to munch on them as fast as he could. I will not miss having to wrestle dead, half-eaten birds out of his mouth.
Another thing he loved to chew on was paper towels and toilet paper. We would catch him getting into the bathroom trash
all the time. But it was so funny the way he would hold his find up in the air and prance around with it that sometimes we would give him a paper towel just to watch him. It was like a party trick whenever we had guests over.
He also loved ice cubes. Jersey does too. I have no idea why. Sometimes we would just give them ice cubes instead of actual dog treats so they wouldn't get fat.
When we went on walks, Leo was the pack leader. He peed on everything and led the charge whenever we passed other dogs or people on bikes. He was an absolute terror off-leash. Never came back when we called. For years he would pull on the leash, too, but we eventually got him out of that habit. Still, he would do this little growl-and-bounce routine whenever he
wanted to tug on the leash and chase something. He got his hackles up easily, but never hurt anything. He was all bark and no bite.
Because he knew I tended to make false starts to walks (get their leashes
then put on my shoes
then grab my coat
then go outside), he would pretend like he wasn't interested in going. Jersey would follow me around with unmasked interest, but Leo would lie down a few feet away and pretend to be chill. But his eyes always followed me, and as soon as I gave
any sign that it was time to go, he would flip out and leap to his feet.
Then after walks, he would always sit right when we got in the door so that you could take his collar off more easily. Jersey has still not mastered this.
He once jumped out of a moving truck, taking Jersey with him and making it so that we had to take Jersey in to the vet to get stitches on the joint of his back leg. This was on my birthday. I was not happy with him.
He could destroy a squeaky toy in five minutes flat. Jersey tended to be more restrained with his toys (because he actually liked to
play with them), but once Leo got them he would just tear out the stitches, then the stuffing, then eat the squeaker. He destroyed Jersey's tennis balls, too. He never liked fetching them, but I guess he saw how much Jersey loved them and decided to ruin Jersey's fun out of jealousy.
He liked chewing bones, but only after Jersey softened them up for him. His teeth got really brown and gross if Jersey ate the bone in one sitting and didn't give Leo a turn.
Tug-of-war was his favorite pastime with Jersey, and they'd also wrestle. Jersey liked to roll on his back and kick at the air, and Leo would copy him, usually flopping on
top of Jersey. Leo was almost always the instigator of their play fights. All he had to do was walk slowly up to Jersey, posturing and avoiding eye contact, and Jersey would take the bait. Sometimes they'd get so heated that they would turn into
real fights. These always ended with a bout of sneezing.
He loved water. When we had a pool in Arizona, he would sometimes just go down on the steps and soak for a bit. He only ever actually
swam when one of us was waiting in the middle of the pool. Then he'd swim over and have us hold him. He also swam after ducks out on lakes. Usually they were too far out for him to be interested in chasing, but this one time there were baby ducks close to shore. Leo wasn't really going to go after them, but the mama duck freaked out and did the "fake broken wing" trick and splashed and quacked so much that Leo couldn't resist. Jersey followed, of course. It took us a long time to get them back to shore and leashed.
Leo may have loved water but he hated baths. He also hated getting his nails clipped, or having any medicine applied to his ears or fur. He was always so sweet about it, though, crawling up to you on his belly and rolling submissively onto his back to suffer whatever treatment you had to give him. The only problem with this was that he'd do this when you needed to hose him down or put flea medicine on his back.
I think he liked being brushed, because whenever I brushed Jersey first, Leo would come up meekly and try to put his head under the brush. I guess it was similar to being petted. He got all sad when I told him to wait his turn.
He didn't shed as much as Jersey. His fur was thinner and I could brush his whole coat without ever having to clean the brush out. His fur was darker than Jersey's too.
Sometimes he laid on the floor and then used his huge dog bed as a pillow.
He randomly chewed this one spot on his left wrist, leaving a little dime-sized sore. We never learned why he did that.
As he got older, his nose turned brown (instead of black), and got little black spots all over it. He also went grey around the eyes and nose, and had a little tiny grey tip to his tail. And he farted and snored a lot these last few months of his life.
The cat didn't get along with him as well as she gets along with Jersey. I never once saw her try to rub up against Leo the way she does with Jersey.
I don't know if he was jealous of the cat or just didn't really know his own name very well (which was very possible, since we tended to just say "Leo! Jersey!" and have them both come at once), but he would always come when I called to the cat. It was probably just the baby voice that he associated with cuddling.
I called him "Bug" sometimes. No idea when or why that started. I also sometimes called him "Leopolio."
Our time together was wonderful. We got him when I was a junior in high school, and so much has happened since then. I was at college and on a mission for a lot of it, but he and Jersey were always so happy to see me when I came home. I'm so glad that I've been living at home these last three months, so that I could see my little Bug every day before he died. And he got to see snow. I'm glad he finally got to see snow.
We're going to miss him so much this summer. We had big dreams to take him to the ranch and to the cabin and to Lake Powell and to all our favorite Utah haunts. It won't be the same with just Jersey. I'll no longer be "that girl who's always walking the two identical, beautiful retrievers." I'll just be a girl with a dog, like everyone else in Daybreak.
But Leo had a good life. I don't regret a single moment of it, and I'll treasure his memory forever.
Rest in peace, Leopold "Leo" "Bug" "Leopolio" Treasure Springer. We loved you so much and we miss you already. We hope God gives you lots of paper towels to play with.
UPDATE: My sister Sarah wrote her own blog post (read it here), and she has many more photos than I posted. They're adorable! Please go check them out.
