I did not own the old German Shepherd next door. That did not stop me from loving him.
When I moved into the small bungalow on Elm Street in the autumn of my fortieth year, the property line was marked by a chain-link fence between my narrow back garden and the equally narrow back garden of the house next door. On the first afternoon, as I was unloading boxes, I heard a small deliberate sound from behind that fence. I turned. An old black-and-tan German Shepherd was sitting on the other side, watching me with the particular quiet attention that senior dogs develop after years of watching the people in their lives. His muzzle was entirely white. His eyes were cloudy. He sat very straight, the way old shepherds do, like a retired officer in a parade.
His name, as I would learn a few days later when his owner Frank came out to introduce himself, was Axel. He was fourteen. He had been Frank's dog since Axel was eight weeks old, which made him Frank's companion for essentially every day of Frank's adult life. Frank was seventy-two. He had lost his wife the year before Axel came into the household, and the timing had been, as Frank said the first time we talked about it, a sort of collaboration between circumstances. Axel had arrived to fill the quiet that had been opening up in Frank's house, and he had been filling it ever since.
The First Weeks
In the first month after I moved in, Axel and I developed a small routine. I would come out to my back garden with a cup of tea in the morning. Axel would already be at the fence, having heard my kettle, and he would stand up when I approached and accept a piece of dried sweet potato through the wire mesh. Frank had given me permission to treat him and had supplied the treats himself, in a Tupperware container with "FOR MY BOY" written on the lid. Axel would take the treat with the careful manners of a dog who has been formally trained since puppyhood, and he would sit back down on his side of the fence and watch me drink my tea.
It is difficult to overstate how much of my morning routine came to depend on this small encounter. A greeting from an old dog across a fence is a specific kind of benediction. It sets the tone of a day in a way that nothing else quite matches. I think Frank understood this, because he would sometimes bring his own coffee out and join us at the fence, and we would stand there, the two of us, while Axel watched the garden and made his small observations about the world.
The Winter Decline
By the second winter, Axel was fifteen. The decline was gradual but clear to anyone who had been paying attention. He could still come to the fence, but he had to be helped up from his mat on the back porch. His hips were stiffer. His hearing was mostly gone, though he still heard the kettle, which Frank attributed to the frequency being close to the frequency of his old working dog whistles.
Frank began a series of small modifications to the house and yard that I watched unfold through the fence over the course of several weeks. A ramp appeared where the two steps off the back porch had been. A heated bed appeared on the porch itself. The water bowl, which had always been at ground level, was replaced by a raised steel dish. A harness with a lifting handle appeared in the garage, and Frank used it to help Axel into the car for vet visits. Each of these was an ordinary piece of senior dog care, and together they represented the slow re-engineering of a household around the comfort of a fifteen-year-old shepherd. The principles are the same ones catalogued in our comfort care for aging dogs piece, but to see them rolled out in real time, through a chain-link fence, in the sequence of a winter, was a different kind of education.
Frank and I talked about the changes. He told me that Axel's veterinarian had started him on a daily NSAID for arthritis, on gabapentin for nerve pain, and on a joint supplement that Frank did not believe in but administered anyway because the vet had recommended it. "I don't know if any of it helps him," Frank said one morning. "But I know it doesn't hurt. And I know that doing the best we can do is what we're supposed to do."
The gabapentin in particular, Frank thought, was making a difference. Axel could walk the length of the garden again. He had started sitting in the sun in the afternoons, which was something he had stopped doing a month earlier. The medication was not miraculous. It was simply adequate, and adequacy at age fifteen is itself a kind of miracle.
The Day Frank Fell
In March of Axel's sixteenth year, Frank fell in his kitchen. He was not seriously hurt, but he was on the floor for about three hours before a neighbour noticed and came to help. I was at work that day and did not know any of this had happened until that evening. What I know, because Frank told me the next morning at the fence, is that Axel spent the three hours of Frank's fall lying next to him on the kitchen floor. The old shepherd, who struggled to stand on most days, had managed to get himself into the kitchen from the back porch and had stayed with Frank until help arrived. He did not bark. He did not leave. He simply laid down next to his person and kept the vigil that he had been keeping for sixteen years.
Frank said, at the fence, with his coffee cup trembling slightly, that he had known from that morning that Axel's remaining time was going to end in a decision that he, Frank, was going to have to make. He was going to have to decide when to let his dog go, because Axel was not going to decide for himself. Axel would keep coming. Axel would keep watching. Axel would lie on the kitchen floor for three hours to keep Frank company. The capacity of a German Shepherd for that kind of loyalty is, Frank said, simultaneously the best and the worst thing about the breed.
Our piece on the last good day addresses this exact problem - the problem of an owner deciding when a dog who will not stop on her own should be allowed to rest.
Axel's Last Summer
Axel made it through that spring. He made it through most of the summer. By August of his sixteenth year, he was sleeping almost entirely, rising only to eat a small meal, to do his business in the yard, and to come to the fence once a day for a piece of sweet potato. He would sometimes forget where he was for a minute or two, and Frank would sit with him and wait while the confusion passed. The cognitive decline was part of the picture now. Canine cognitive dysfunction, a condition described in detail by the American Animal Hospital Association guidelines, was catching up with the physical decline, and it was clear to everyone that Axel was in his final chapter.
On a morning in late August, I came out to the garden with my tea and Axel was not at the fence. This had happened before on cooler mornings, and I thought nothing of it. But Frank was at the fence. He had not been at the fence for months. He was in his slippers and his old cardigan, and he said, simply: "It's today, Pat. I'm going to make the call at eight."
I asked if I could be there. Frank said yes. I went over. Axel was on his mat on the back porch. He looked up when I came through the gate and he lifted his white muzzle toward me. I sat down on the floor next to him and put my hand on his chest. Frank sat on his other side. Between us, the old shepherd breathed slowly and watched our faces.
The vet arrived at nine. She had treated Axel for most of his life. She was kind and unhurried. She explained what was about to happen, and she listened to Frank talk for fifteen minutes about all the things Axel had been - a puppy who knocked over the Christmas tree in 2008, a young dog who kept a toddler out of the street in 2011, a middle-aged dog who rode shotgun on the drive to Frank's wife's chemotherapy appointments, an old dog who lay on a kitchen floor for three hours when his person needed him. The vet listened to all of it. Then she administered the medication. Axel relaxed into Frank's hands, and then he was gone.
What the Fence Taught Me
I did not own Axel. I do not know how to describe, exactly, what he was to me. The most honest word is neighbour. He was the neighbour who was always there, across the fence, for three years. He was the neighbour who taught me how an old shepherd ages with dignity. He was the neighbour whose routines I learned to respect without ever being part of his household.
When Frank and I talked on the day after Axel's passing, Frank said something that has stayed with me. He said: "The hardest thing about a dog's life being shorter than ours is that we end up loving them inside the shape of a decade, and then we have to figure out how to live in a shape without them." He was seventy-five that week. He did not pretend that there would be another dog after Axel. He had decided, he said, that Axel had been the right dog for that stage of his life, and that whatever came next would not necessarily involve a dog. "Some chapters you don't write twice," he said. Our piece on preparing your heart speaks to this same place.
I moved away from the bungalow on Elm Street a year later, for a job in another state. Before I left, I went over to Frank's house and sat with him on his back porch. The porch had been adapted for Axel, and the ramp and the heated bed were still there. Frank said he had not had the heart to remove them. He said he liked knowing that the adaptations were there, waiting, in case whatever came next in his life was indeed another senior dog. He had not committed to another. But he had not closed the door.
I think about Axel often. I think about him more than I think about any dog I have ever owned myself, which is a strange thing to admit. The old German Shepherd next door was not my dog. He simply sat at the fence, most mornings, for three years, and he taught me everything I needed to know about how to be a good neighbour to a senior dog, and through that, how to be a good neighbour in a wider sense. Love does not require ownership. Sometimes the most instructive dogs of our lives are the ones who live next door.