I wasn't supposed to get Otis; I was supposed to get Chula, an old, arthritic, overweight female beagle (and there was a slight six-hour diversion in that whole weekend where I almost ended up with Sully, a gangly yellow lab), but halfway through walking around that Antelope Road park outside of Sacramento on the first Sunday in May, sweet Suzy stopped, switched leashes with me, and handed me the bounding, 12-year-old beagle boy she'd also brought along:
"You should take him. He needs someone young and active. He needs you, and you need him."
And then I found myself driving back down 80 with this panting, very beagle-y beagle in my front seat, and he looked at me, and I said "your name is Otis", and he stepped on the console and gave me the first of approximately 1 million slobbery licks across my face... and that was it.
Suzy was right: he needed me, and I needed him. Sometimes, with rescues, you get the story, and sometimes it's sad and pitiful, and sometimes it's fine and driven by unavoidable life circumstances, and sometimes you just don't have any clue. All they knew with Otis was that his previous owner had died, and the family didn't want him.
It was slightly heartbreaking, but over the next few weeks, it became very clear that he was indeed a house-beagle who was privy to the good things in life like sleeping on couches and burrowing under the covers in bed and snuggling on laps, and he knew very well how to give and receive love. He tried me, in a way that was almost toddler-boy-esque, where he'd get this devilish look in his deep, brown, mascara-ed eyes, wreak some havoc, and then crawl back into some nook created by my body to be that living stuffed animal constantly by my side. I let my coworker watch him once over a weekend, and he'd told me that no one had ever looked at him with that total love look that Otis gave - and it's true. That dog gave the most extreme look of heart-melting "you are my human, and I will forever protect you" and made it his duty to never stray from my side from the second he became mine.
I needed him for purpose, to have a reason to get myself out of bed in the morning when my room and world was suffocating me, to drag me out at night into the fresh air. I needed him to love and care for, when everything else I had ever loved and cared for was out of reach and not there. I needed him to curl up quietly next to me while I sobbed uncontrollably and to remind myself that there was something in my life, and that I wasn't as horrible of a person as I was being made to believe.
And as my life shifted, and we squashed ourselves into my packed car and ascended into life in the mountains, I needed him to keep my company through navigating a new place and as my office companion to keep my company (and remind me at 2:52pm every day that is was most certainly food and walk time) during the long, isolating days of working from home. He gave me stability, and routine, and a constant, while everything changed, and joy (so much joy) and comfort on days that were good and bad.
The beagle-shaped hole in my heart and life is huge - I feel like I lost a limb (literally - Otis was rarely more than three feet from my side). The blankets on the couch and the bed are missing their permanent beagle lump, I can eat my food at a reasonable pace without a nose and begging puppy eyes six inches away, and the mornings are eerily quiet without his snoring or whines to get me up.
We crammed a lot into almost three years, and while I knew this day would come, and he is now pain-free and (I'm choosing to believe) hanging out at the prime of his health, romping around a field and sniffing his little heart out with Monty and Lola and Auri and Smedley (and someday Effie), I'll be feeling the loss for years to come.