Kaylee, 2013-2025

Not long after we were married, Tara and I started talking about getting a dog.  She wanted a lab of some sort, and I wanted a German Shepherd.  So it seemed like divine confirmation when we were out grocery shopping and just so happened to see a sign on a car window saying, "Ask me about my black lab / German shepherd puppies!"  For that reason, we liked to tell people we got Kaylee from Aldi: we simply followed the sign inside, inquired of the cashier, and from there found ourselves in a private home a few days later, observing a litter of about 15 lab/shepherd puppies all in one massive, wrestling bundle on the kitchen floor...  All except for one sweet little girl off to the side who just sat there, looking up at us, quietly wagging her tiny tail, waiting with such expectancy for us to pick her up.  When I did, and she instantly snuggled into my neck, Tara and I both knew we'd found our girl.

"Lady," as she'd been named, came home with us the next week, when she was old enough to leave her mother.  Naturally, we wanted to give her a name we'd picked out, so we decided to call her "Kaylee."  For the Firefly fans out there, I always intended to find her a "Simon."  But Kaylee (who also went by "K-snaps," "Kayleebean," "Puppernickels," and a wide variety of other affectionate nicknames) was more than enough dog for us, all on her own.  As a matter of fact, she was the reason for both of our moves: when we disclosed her to the apartment management at Forest Creek, they told us we couldn't keep her, but by that point she'd already become part of our family.  The Woodstown bungalow we moved into was a perfect first home (bat infestation notwithstanding), but it only had a tiny little triangle of a yard out back, and Kaylee loved to run.  And so, three years later, we sold that property and moved to Swedesboro, back to the neighborhood in which Tara and I had both been born and raised, knowing we needed a bigger yard for our pup, in addition to a few extra bedrooms since Tara was two months pregnant with Zeke.

Kaylee loved our yard here in Swedesboro.  She was a black, furry missile, streaking from one end to the other, chasing out rabbit intruders and greeting passing neighborhood dogs.  In fact, before we finished fencing in the yard, she gave several passersby near heart attacks by racing up to them when we weren't paying attention.  I did not get off on the right foot with one neighbor for that very reason...  As much as she loved her outdoor spaces and our various chairs and couches, Kaylee also loved going just about anywhere with us.  Of course, her eagerness was always a bit of a trade-off with how nervous she would be en route.  The DNA evidence would be left all over the car seats, dashboard, and windows by the time we reached our destination.  Up until we started traveling with two or three car seats, she would tag along just about everywhere we went -- across town to visit either set of parents, to a local dog park, all the way down to Cape May on family vacations.

 

She had quite a few friends over the years: Apple, Tony, Gus, Rocky, Tinkerbell, Kilikina, Sushi, and Han & Leia to name just a few.  One morning when I was walking her around our Swedesboro neighborhood, a rottweiler leapt clear over his fence and came after us.  Not knowing what else to do, I yelled at him, "Stop!" and pulled Kaylee along (she was very eager to meet him).  Purely by God's grace, the dog halted in his tracks and didn't follow us across the street.  Another rottweiler we used to pass in Woodstown would spin in dizzying circles behind his fence every morning when we'd walk by.

Kaylee spent her very first night with us crying nonstop in our apartment kitchen.  Penning her up in there was part of our efforts to housebreak her.  While she didn't have any accidents, we also ended up with the soft top of our card table shredded (we didn't own a puppy gate), zero sleep, and tons of anxiety that our nextdoor and downstairs neighbors would complain about us to management.  Night number two, Kaylee slept in the bed with us.  In fact, she did so basically from then on, snuggled under my arm, right up until the time Tara was way too pregnant with Zeke for us all to fit comfortably in on a queen mattress during the summer months.  From there, a disgruntled Kaylee moved under the bed on Tara's side -- probably because I was the bad guy who kicked her out.  We used a wooden cradle from Tara's parents for each of our kids during their first few months ex-utero.  Zeke was a heavy sleeper from day one, but Nora was a restless fidgeter whose sudden, thrashing movements and gasps (all while still being fast asleep), rattled the old cradle and terrified Kaylee so that she became too nervous to sleep near her anymore.  She fled to the other side of the room, or out into the adjoining hallway (our playroom) until each baby finally moved upstairs and the cradle moved out.  Melody was a lot more like Zeke when she finally came onto the scene, but Kaylee was so traumatized by the Nora experience that she stayed away from the cradle preemptively.

In her early years, we oscillated between crating and leaving her to free-roam while we were out.  She never had many accidents, but she often got into things.  Stray hair clips and pens were the primary targets of her boredom.  As a puppy, she chewed through the patch cables on my guitar pedalboard once.  Another time, we came home to the entire (and I mean ENTIRE) apartment floor covered in a layer of plastic shopping bags.  I can only imagine her discovering the pile of them in the corner by the microwave and excitedly zipping back and forth and spreading them everywhere.  Thankfully, they were all intact -- if she ate any of them, we never saw evidence at the other end!

The Woodstown season was a sweet one for us, being a young couple with a furry plus one.  While we lived there, Kaylee would play hide and seek with Tara when we'd both come home at the end of the day.  Tara would hide in a closet while I'd let Kaylee out to use the yard.  Once back inside, she'd tear around the whole house sniffing and wagging until she found whichever closet "Mommy" was hiding in.  A retaining wall ran behind that house at a diagonal, creating our triangle property, and Kaylee would often hop up onto the wall and sit there, haunches deep in ivy, daring the landscape workers who parked their trucks in the gravel lot behind us to come closer.  Sometimes she'd jump down and bark her head off at them, running back and forth as far as her lead would allow.  She also got to ride in the back of a pickup truck in the Woodstown 4th of July parade one year, when Tara worked for a local CPA who featured his business in the event.  One of our bedsheets still has stains on it from the time she put her paw in wet tar while we were walking around the block near where the township was resealing the streets.

How Kaylee adjusted over time to the kids was a special thing to watch.  Before we had any children, she was always nervous around any of the small humans our friends had the audacity to bring into her realm.  It was partly in her Shepherd nature to be hyper alert and quick to defend, so anything loud and unpredictable that violated the quiet sanctity of our home was a potential danger.  Over time, however, she warmed up to Zeke taking the bones she was chewing on right out of her mouth and Nora trying to climb on her (sort of).  By the time Melody came along, she'd mellowed into a mostly unflappable old age and had to be coerced to get up and move, even when a child was trying to step over her.  As soon as Mel would be in the high chair though, Kaylee was up in the blink of an eye, eager to clean up after her.

Kaylee was a kisser.  We had a ton of incentive early on to train her not to nip, since she had those razor sharp puppy teeth that made tug of war, wrestling, and fetch serious dangers to the digits. So kissing was our replacement mechanism.  "No bite!  Give kisses!"  Instead of nipping, she would lick unabashedly, jumping up to get your face if she could, and would coat your hands, arms, and legs with affection if you allowed her.  On the day we had to say goodby to her, it had been a while since she'd given any of us kisses, probably in part because she'd become so stationary and the five of us weren't practicing much stillness with her.  But when the time came, she had one final kiss in store for Tara, some precious licks that reminded us of better days.

I feel so grateful that Kaylee was a such a healthy dog throughout her years with us.  Aside from visits to pet clinics for rabies boosters and Frontline treatments, she really only made four visits to the vet for health-related issues.  One trip came when she managed to pull out a few stitches following her spay.  Another time she had to be sedated, following some kind of panic attack in her crate where she managed to break a few of the metal bars and also bite through her upper lip, getting the tooth stuck in the inside of her mouth, and we couldn't help her get it out ourselves.  Legend has it she had to be given enough sedative to calm a Great Dane before the vet could perform the five-minute operation.  In the spring of this year, she had to see the vet for pneumonia.  At the time, I thought she had something stuck in her throat, but X-rays revealed pneumonia in her lungs, and also an enlarged liver that probably was a sign of something cancerous.  Although the medication cleared up her breathing, she never fully recovered from the illness, and her appetite dwindled away to nothing.  Her last visit to St. Francis was on Monday, September 22nd, 2025, the day we knew her quality of life had deteriorated, both because whatever was going on in her belly had caused her to rapidly lose weight and stop eating, and the hip dysplasia was making it impossible for her to go up and down our steps or even to stand up by herself on the hardwood floors of our home.

It's so hard to let an animal go.  Growing up, I remember being sad about family pets passing, but I didn't quite experience those losses the same way.  For Tara and me, Kaylee has been a part of our family almost from the very beginning.  It's weird to go around corners and not trip over her, to feel crumbs on the floor under my bare feet while walking through the kitchen or dining room, to come in the door and not be greeted by a wagging tail, to not get down on the floor next to her and give her belly pats.

In many ways, our still-young family has experienced a charmed life to this point.  By God's providence, loss and grief have as yet been removed from us.  Kaylee's passing is a bit of a practice in sad affairs with our kids, who prior to this had only ever lost a hermit crab before (and even he lived way past his life expectancy).  It gave us a window to carry something together, to rehearse good memories, and to be reminded that life this side of heaven is precious and very, very temporary.  But also that death is not the end.

We buried Kaylee behind the house, no more than 15 feet removed from where she used to sleep under Tara's side of the bed.  As we laid her to rest, I was thankful to read the words from Every Moment Holy Vol II, "Loss of a Living Thing."  I'll close this already-way-too-long eulogy with an excerpt.

Here was your good creature,
and here were the spaces and the days we
shared, enjoying the glad company
and cheerful fellowship of a fellow creature.

We made room in our lives,
room in our home, room in our hearts,
to welcome your unique creation.
And we gave your good creature the name
Kaylee.

We were filled with a right and fond affection
for another living thing your hands had made,
delighting daily in its presence.

Now this season of our shared lives
is ended by death.
Our hearts are unprepared for such loss,
and we are deeply grieved.

We are thankful for the many blessings
of knowing this creature,
and for the lingering imprint
of such a cherished presence in our lives.
We are grateful for these good memories of sweeter times... 

We know that the final working of your redemption
will be far-reaching,
encompassing all things in heaven and on earth,
so that no good thing will be lost forever,
so that even our sorrow at the loss
of this beloved creature will somehow,
someday, be met and filled,
and, in joy, made forever complete.

Comfort us in this meantime, O Lord,
for the ache of these days is real.

Amen.