The Wanderer

There is nothing quite so poignant as when an elderly loved one begins wandering off,  putting themselves at risk of getting lost or seriously hurt  –  or worse.  Kathy and I are actually experiencing a trace of that ourselves …. with Ellie,  the older of our two golden retrievers.  Ellie is 13 years old,  which I believe translates in Dog Years to 91-years-old.  Given that sobering reality,  Ellie is surprisingly spry for her age and still seems to experience quite a lot of joy in her day to day life.   But she does not see as well or hear as well as she used to,  and it’s easy to see how much harder it is for her to get around.   I don’t think there’s anything quite as sad as when we take the dogs for a ride in the car and Ellie will gamely attempt to leap up into the car …. and not quite make it.   The spring in her step is just not what it once was,  and I now have to all but carry her up into the car and deposit her on to the car seat.  It is a dwindling of strength and dexterity that is pretty much inescapable- whether human being, dog, or monarch butterfly – but the fact that it is inescapable does not make it any less heartbreaking when it is happening to someone you really love.

And we really love Ellie.

What has begun happening as of late is that Ellie no longer seems aware of the boundary of our property that she vividly learned to respect with our Invisible Fence.   Neither dog has actually worn those special collars in years because they learned long ago what encroaching on the far edges of the yard would mean – a brief, gentle, yet effective little zap.  Actually, all it would take was the chirp of the warning beep to compel them to leap back.  We loved it because we could allow the dogs to run freely in the yard without leashes-  and once we were certain that they knew the permitted boundaries of the property and respected those boundaries,  we could let them run without wearing the zap collars.  It felt so good to that!  And that’s been the blissful state of affairs for quite a few years now ….

until one day about a month ago when Kathy let the dogs out into the yard – but when it came time for them to come back in the house,  Bobbi was there but Ellie was nowhere to be found.  Kathy walked all the way around our house – but there was no sign of Ellie anywhere.   Kathy was understandably terrified.  This had never happened before.  What to do next?  Where should she look?

I’m sure it felt like hours later-  but if was only a couple of minutes later – that Kathy spotted something strange in the overgrown ravine that borders our yard to the east. (It helped that Bobbi was perched towards the edge of the front yard,  looking back at Kathy as if to say “come here!  Something’s wrong!” That’s what really got Kathy looking towards our ravine.)  It turns out that Ellie had blundered into those woods – and gotten herself caught and unable to leave again.  As scared as Kathy was when she couldn’t find Ellie,  my wife could tell that Ellie seemed to be just as frightened.  Kathy was able to extricate her and ease her out of that tangle of thick brush and tree branches and back into the safety of our yard.  But it was a really disconcerting experience, to say the least.

And it turned out not to be a one-time, strange anomaly.  Several more times after that,  Ellie has gone wandering into the ravine in the same way.  As far as we can tell,  she is following the scent of something – a rabbit, perhaps? – and that scent overrides any sense she might have that she is straying into forbidden territory.  And because her sense of hearing is now so poor,   she does not seem to hear our frantic calls for her to come back.   For me, the most dramatic instance of this happened about a week ago when I put them both out in the backyard first thing in the morning to do their business.    I naively thought that Ellie might be inclined to want to come right back into the house in order to be fed,  but no-  she took off into the trees – and I followed after her, through the mud,  barefoot and in a bathrobe … the strangest looking Tarzan you’ve ever seen.  It was sort of funny –  but scary and sad as well.   And it was the moment when I finally realized (as Kathy already had)  that we simply cannot allow Ellie out in the backyard unless we are right there with her.

It’s yet another sobering reminder that Ellie is elderly- although there are so many other ways in which she seems like the same vibrant dog that she has always been.   And in some ways, even this wandering-into-the-woods thing would seem to indicate that there’s nothing wrong with Ellie’s energy- or her inquisitiveness.   I’ve also been thinking about the ways in which this wandering thing parallels what happens to some older adults whose mental faculties begin to dim.   You certainly hear about how this ends up causing what feels like a strange reversal of roles – with the child becoming the caretaker of their own parent as he or she reverts to a more childlike state.  That’s not true, of course, with our relationship to Ellie; there is no role reversal at all. She’s still the dog and we’re still the owners.   But in some ways Ellie might be swinging back towards her days as a puppy when she had to be watched with unfailing vigilance as she learned (sometimes the hard way) what was okay and what was not.  Ellie is now navigating the world with ample experience … but also with compromised eyesight and hearing that make it a potentially more perilous world than when she was a bright-eyed puppy.

So what can we do?  We will do what anyone else in our position would do.  We will do all we can to keep her safe and healthy and happy . . .  and will cherish every single day that we are blessed to enjoy with her from here on out ….

even the days that find us climbing through our muddy ravine in bare feet, wearing nothing but a bathrobe on, in order to gently usher Ellie – our prodigal daughter – back home.