Background

  I was seven years old and my mom was standing in the front door with a chubby, wet nosed, ball of fur puppy. He was chocolate brown with a black nose and enormously floppy ears. I couldn't believe my eyes, this was my very first puppy. She gave me the normal mom speach,"Now you have to feed him and water him every day, if he needs to go out, it is your responsability. You will have to clean up his messes until he's trained and make sure that he's hooked to his house before you go to school."  Anyone who has ever had a pet at a young age has heard this speech before, I'm sure you all know what I'm talking about.  I never shrugged my responsibilities with "Grizz", that's what we named him, because he looked like a little bear with all that brown fur.
  Grizz grew over the next year and a half. He went from a small bundle of cuddly fur to an oversized clumsy doofus. He was still my dog though, he would come with me to feed the chickens, sitting patiently outside the pen until I was finished. I no longer had to clean any messes, he had outgrown that finally. In the mornings before school, I didn't have to drag him to his house, he would trot along beside me, sniffing at whatever smell at that moment caught his attention.  He was a normal, happy go lucky, goofy dog with his oversized tail, and a tongue that never stayed in his mouth very long. It usually hung out the right side with a snot like trail of drool dripping from it.
  One afternoon, as I was shutting the gate to the chicken coupe, I turned and Grizz was not sitting his normal spot. I did a quick scan of the backyard, thinking that something had caught his attention, which happened on occassion. I saw under the big pine tree, laying on his belly with his back legs stretched out to the maximum length and extremely stiff
. He had pulled his front legs up to a position where he was balancing on his elbows and his feet were pounding at the ground. He was looking straight at me. His eyes were glazed over, completely brown with no white around the iris.
  I walked toward him, calling his name softly. At first I thought he was scratching his belly, although I had never seen him do it quite like that before. As I got closer I could see that it wasn't the normal train of drool dripping from his tongue. It was a white frothy, almost bubbling drool, oozing out of the corner of his mouth.  His feet began pounding harder and his neck went into a stretched out state, that made his head weave from side to side, all the while still looking straight at me.
  I went barrelling to the house, screaming for my mother the entire way. She met me at the corner, checking for a sign of blood or other life threatening matter that could only make me scream in that fashion. I turned and pointed at Grizz. He had managed to turn his body enough so that he was still looking straight at me. My mom had never seen him, or any other dog act this way before. She told me to stand back as she crept closer to him calling his name, trying to comfort him. He focused on her from that point, watching and still pounding the ground with his front feet. I remember feeling relief that he wasn't starring at me any longer, trying to get me. Was he trying to get me, looking like a rabid dog, crazy eyed, frothing at the mouth. Or was he just trying to get to me?
  I never really had another dog of my own, until one day many years later.  My daughter. Devan, who was eight at the time, came home from a day out with my mother. She walked through the front door with tears streaming down her face. I knew there was something she was trying to tell us, but she couldn't quite get it out. Finally, she releases in one long sentence; "Weston has a puppy mom, it's a black lab and it's the only one left and it's there all by itself and he sold the rest of them for a lot of money but he said that we could have this one for free and if you let me get this dog I promise I will take care of it you won't have to do anything, it's free and we won't have to pay any money PLEASSSSEE!!!???" My husband and I both initially said "NO", with the explanation that she has her friends and she would lose interest. The tears continued even harder, which turned into an eight year old little girls version of a full blown fit.  My mother stood there shaking her head, explaining that she had tried to tell her.
  The next day, after discussions with my husband. ( I had changed my mind already, I just had to change his.) We sat Devan down at the kitchen table, remembering the Mom speach. I had decided that I was going to make her put this "Contract" in writing. She wrote a two page contract in her own words why she wanted this puppy and how she was going to care for her.  After she signed and dated the new document titled My Puppy, we got in the truck to go see if he still had this dog.  There she was, laying in the yard all by herself. She was about seven months old, a black lab, looked to be in perfect health. When she saw the truck pull in, she sat up, wagging her long sleek tail, just sitting there, smiling as if she knew what was about to happen.
  Devan picked her name, "Lilly".  She was her dog for the first few months. Me making sure that she had performed Lilly's daily needs. As time passed, I found that Lilly was spending more and more time with me, laying at my feet as we watched TV, looking to me when she needed to go outside. I didn't mind the attention, or the need to be needed. My daughter was getting older and not spending as much time at home, or needing me as much as she had in the past.
  Lilly grew to be a beautiful labrador over the next year and a half. She also grew to be my dog. She would come to bed with me at night, until my husband had finished watching his shows. He would yell her name and she would happily trot down the stairs, straight to her kennel, where she was content to spend the remainder of the evening.
  Life was spent in this happy little routine until Lilly reached the age of two. One evening Jason, my husband, yelled her name as usual. She jumped from the bed in her normal spring form action, and went down the stairs. Shortly after, I hear Jason, in a frantic voice, "Darcy somethings wrong with Lilly!"  I had just been sound asleep with Lilly, what could be wrong? When I reached the foot of the stairs, I see my dog, laying on her side. All four feet curled up under her belly, resembling an arthritic elderly in their late stages of life. Her tail tucked between her legs and her neck stretched out straight from her spine. All of her extremities were heaving in a pattern that I couldn't understand. Her eyes were glazed over, with no white showing, and staring straight at me. I had seen this look before, Grizz, was this the same problem?