Beli & Me. A best seller in my books.
First of all, let me apologize for a serious lacking in the cracking effort on my blog as of late. It’s been over a month since my last post and apart from running around like a chicken with my head cut off, out of town guests, the holiday season and a myriad of other responsibilities and fires to put out, I really have no excuse for being so lame …
Truth be told around the same time as my last blog post, we got the word that our dear dog Beli had not in fact torn his ACL as we had previously been told, rather he had bone cancer and only a few months to live. Talk about having the wind taken out of our sails. We went in to the vet to get Beli repaired and we came out with the news that what he had couldn’t be fixed.
Turns out a few months was optimistic and just 10 days shy of his 8th birthday, on January 22nd, 2010, we laid our beautiful furry friend to rest. Cue the tears.
Before I go any further, I really should warn you that this is going to be a long post. Marley & Me was 289 pages long so I will try to keep this shorter than that but I cannot make any promises.
Being a lab lover my entire life, there was no doubt what my first dog would be and even though Beli thought his name might have been “No, no bad dog” most of the time, he was named after a beach in Portugal where Jeff and I got engaged called Beliche Beach.
After growing up and hounding my parents for as long as I can remember “Please, please can I get a dog?”, I was always devastated that the answer was no. So when I moved in with my now husband, I started to work on him “Please, please Jeff, can I get a dog?” and shortly after we got married and bought our house, he conceded and we went puppy shopping! We settled on a breeder in Abbotsford and a little dog we nicknamed Whitey as he was the lightest color of the bunch. He also seemed to stay on his own and Jeff thought he might be a bit boring. For those of you that had the pleasure of meeting Beli, boring is not an adjective that would be used in the same sentence as Beli.
On my 30th birthday and a few days before we were scheduled to pick up Beli from the breeder, Jeff surprised me by bringing our 8 week old labrador retriever home and from that point on, our lives changed forever.
At first I was worried because after wanting a pet my entire life, I thought, maybe now that I had one, it wouldn’t live up to my expectations. Time would tell.
Beli, or “the beast” as some of us affectionately referred to him from time-to-time, was an amazing dog. We kept telling people he was gifted but his antics and failure to pass his obedience training didn’t convince everyone.
We had heard labs would eat anything and over the years we lost countless loaves of bread, tomatoes, chillies, beer caps, cob of corn and god knows what else. Perhaps the most memorable article Beli ingested was a fisherman’s glove that he found while beach combing near Porteau Cove. We had no idea until he threw it up one afternoon, all except one finger from the glove. That surfaced the next day. EWWWWW!
Unbeknownst to us, when he was a pup he also got his paws on a pound of butter. I couldn’t figure out where the butter had gone that I had left to soften on the counter but figured Jeff must have put it back in the fridge. A few days after the butter had gone “missing” we were en route to our friends place to make some salsa and stopped in at Safeway to pick up a few ingredients. Since Bel’s was a pup at the time, I was a bit worried about leaving him in the car but when we got back to our Honda Civic, he was sitting in the back seat looking so beautiful and well behaved. If it weren’t for the vomit all over the front passenger seat, we would have still thought he was well behaved. An entire pound of butter, foil and all came back to haunt him and haunt us for years to come. We tried everything to get the smell out of our car. Years later, we had it detailed just before we sold it so hopefully the dude that bought it doesn’t read this blog post and calls to try to get his money back.
In the past month, Beli had some good days but particularly in the last few days before he passed, his condition had deteriorated to the point where he had very little quality of life and by quality of life, we mean having the ability to sniff neighborhood scents & other dogs bums, pee like a girl (he never mastered the leg lift), hump randomly and to generally enjoy life as he used to know it.
When Marley and Me came out, Jeff bought the book for my birthday and I couldn’t put the book down. The parallels to our life were uncanny, although John & Jenny had 3 kids and we only have 2 (Hmm … think that is where the parallels end). Then when the movie came out on Christmas day in 2008 I wanted to go but held off until our 7th anniversary dinner a couple of weeks later. In the theatre, I started off laughing so hard I snorted and when the movie ended I was weeping.
I thought that Beli would be around the same age as Marley when he passed (and our kids would be around the same age as John’s kids) but regrettably, we lost our pal earlier than that.
As you can see, I had no need to worry that my expectations would not be met, they were far exceeded. Beli, you were one of the greatest loves of my life and while this may not be a NY Times Best Seller or a movie featuring A List Actors, it is my tribute to you. I honor you, cherish you, love you and miss you.
Sue
Beli’s Mom & Chief Executive Mom at Raspberry Kids
On the Web: http://www.raspberrykids.com
Tweet with Us: http://www.twitter.com/raspberrykids
Become a fan: http://www.facebook.com/RaspberryKids
More details: http://www.raspberrykids.tel
Our latest newsletter: http://www.raspberrykids.com/newsletter-jan11-2010
© 2011 Raspberry Kids. All rights Reserved.