I don't know quite how to write this one but I am going to give it a try anyway. Please believe me when I say that I am not trying to sound maudlin in the following little story.
You see that pretty little chinois urn in the picture? Harry is in there. We didn't pick his final resting place but we are pleased with the choice none the less. Another example of those impossibly elegant French. This sense of style even reaches the French Canine Cremation Services.
Two weeks ago our beloved Harry dog couldn't keep upright after we tried to set him on his feet, his legs would not hold him up and he couldn't keep anything down either, not even feeble laps of water. His time on this earth with us had hobbled to its end. The three of us here in Paris have been privileged to take care of this dog as he gently lived out his last years. Keeping a dog in Paris is not all romance. Of course the city is filled with stereotypical Fifi's in hand knitted sweaters sitting smugly alongside their owners in posh cafe's. But our Harry was too big and too old to ever really get the hang of cafe society. For every sidewalk complement he received from an admiring passerby (and the occasional inappropriate "pass"- see my earlier post on this subject), he was also faced almost daily with our angry gardienne, yelling "NO pee-pee, no pee-pee!!!" as the poor dog tried to hold his bladder until we could carry him to the street. You would think that there would be more tolerance to a dog's "call from nature" in a city famous for its doggie landmine litter, but such is not always the case.
Still Harry's always mild mannered self took this and pretty much everything thrown at him in stride. He was as dependent as a child on the 3 of us. We took turns picking him up to take him to his food bowl, to take him out for his bathroom breaks, to pick up him up when his senility rendered him "lost in the corner" and unable to back out.
Again I have to say, do not let anyone tell you that the French are all arrogant creeps. As I pushed open the door to the Veterinary clinic with him in my arms two weeks ago, a rush of sympathetic care surrounded us. These people didn't know us from Adam but they couldn't have been more gentle and compassionate with both him and me. When I returned with the daughters later that evening to say our final goodbyes and bury our faces in his fur for the last time, the young French vet on night duty earnestly explained all his actions in quaint broken English as he helped Harry go to sleep.
When we decided to move to Paris two years ago, daughter #2 observed that Harry would appropriately spend his last days in Gay Paris, the very land of puffy poodles. Well he did. Just like so much else in life, from where one stands at any one place, it is impossible to see ahead to how things will be. He didn't do as much prancing "sur les rues" as he and we would have hoped, the aftermath of his ultimately crippling "marathon training days" running around Lake Miramar in San Diego. But he still could draw his share of admirers. Even the vet observed that he was "un chien magnifique". He really was a magnificent dog.
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