If you’ve owned and loved more than one dog in your lifetime, those pups that have crossed the Rainbow Bridge always hold a special place in your heart. You may absolutely adore your current CBF (canine best friend), but you have so many fond memories of the ones that went before. (If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with–apologies to Stephen Stills). Your ‘lost loves’ may have been gone several years, but you still tell cute and funny stories about them (I know I do). Here are a couple of the dogs that you have read about in my column. One is a past love and the other one is a current love. I hope you enjoy these stories and perhaps are reminded of your own pets waiting for you with joyful anticipation on the Other Side.

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned our Golden Retriever/Collie mix, Buster, before in this column, but I owe a lot of my current canine knowledge to him. We adopted Buster on Cinco de Mayo (May 5th) of 2000. My husband and I had both grown up with dogs and truly missed having one around. We had my cat, Gwyn, who was cute in her own way, but we’re both dog people, so there was still something missing (sorry, cat people).

Since we were living in an apartment at the time, we had decided we were going to wait until we had a house before we got a dog…but then my husband came home from work one day and told me about a customer of theirs who lived on 10 acres with 5 dogs and 6 cats. He and his wife were moving to a much smaller property, so they needed to re-home some of their pets. So we talked about it and decided we wanted one of the customer’s dogs. We originally were going to get a West Highland White Terrier named Joey, but since my husband’s two sons were quite young at the time and spent weekends with us, a larger dog would be more suitable.

The following Friday afternoon, my husband came home from work with Buster in the back seat. He was a mess, to put it bluntly–unkempt, matted, filthy, stinky–but he had those Golden Retriever eyes that seemed to look into the very depths of your soul. I was hooked. (Fortunately, my sister-in-law is a groomer, and she had already offered a ‘freebie’ as a welcome gift.) We had already made some preparations in anticipation of our new pet, so we had dishes and food ready for Buster. After a long walk, he was ready to settle down for the night.

The following morning, I awoke to something nudging my elbow. I opened my eyes and was startled to see those golden eyes and a huge grin about 6 inches from my face. Buster was telling me he needed to go potty, so I got dressed and went to get his new leash and harness.(The collar he was wearing when he came home was filthy and too small to the point where it had started to embed into his skin. Since he wasn’t a puller or an escape artise, he never wore a collar again. He did, however, acquire a rather extensive wardrobe of bandannas.) On the floor just outside the kitchen, I spotted an empty sour-cream container. We’d had a Cinco de Mayo lunch at my workplace the day before, and my contribution was 7-layer dip–hence the sour-cream carton.

But Buster wasn’t a garbage-picker; in fact, he got into the garbage only 3 times in his life with us. The second time was after we’d had him for a couple of months. We’d had corn on the cob for dinner and apparently Buster liked corn, because when we were getting ready for bed and I went into the kitchen for a glass of water, I found Buster under the kitchen table gnawing on a corncob. I took it away from him and put it back in the garbage. A few minutes later, I needed something else from the kitchen, and there was the corncob again. I took it away from him once more, told him to stay out of the trash, and went to bed. Guess what I found on the living-room rug when I got up the next morning?

The only other time he went garbage-picking was when we were babysitting his ‘cousin’ Chassie, a Rottweiler-Beagle mix, who decided to tip over the garbage, make a selection, and then disappear when we walked in the door, so Buster was the one who was caught red-handed (red-pawed?). Buster had two other unusual characteristics when he came to live with us. The first was that he didn’t know how to play. We bought him several toys and he just nosed them a bit with a puzzled look on his face. So we worked with him and were able to bring out his playful side. But his favorite toys were actually meant for cats–those little bunny-fur balls. Buster would see one of those and become completely unglued. Our meek, mild-mannered pup would go from Dr. Jeckyll to Mr. Hyde in about 3 seconds if he saw one of those bunny-fur balls. He actually jumped over the couch one time to get to one.

The other unusual thing about Buster is that he rarely barked–in fact, we didn’t hear a peep out of him until we were watching a Fourth of July parade 2 months after he came to live with us. Buster was completely silent until he spotted a team of Clydesdale horses pulling a float. He stood up, quivering with excitement, and let out a single ‘Woof!’ as the team passed. We tried to get him to ‘say woof’ more often, but he had trouble getting his words out. Most of the time, his mouth would move, but the only sound that emitted was his teeth clacking together. We figured that he may have been punished for barking by a previous owner.

We actually were Buster’s third owners; his first owners physically abused him, and his second owner (who gave him to us) neglected him. As I said earlier, his coat was a mess when we adopted him, but he also had untreated allergies, horribly infected ears, scarred anal glands, and arthritis–all at age 2 1/2. We discovered that he was allergic to wheat, so we eliminated all grains from his diet, tried all kinds of natural remedies for his arthritis, and over the years, spent a fortune on him. He was well worth it. Buster was the best-behaved dog I have ever known and possessed a sweet, gentle, friendly nature despite the abuse and neglect he had suffered in his early life.

Unfortunately, also due to the early abuse and neglect, Buster’s aging process was greatly accelerated, and by the time he was about 9 years old, he seemed more like 15. Shortly before Halloween 2007, about a month before Buster turned 10, I took him in to see one of our vets. (We have two: a ‘regular’ vet who practices traditional Western medicine, and a vet who practices integrative medicine, which combines Western medicine with Ayurvedic, herbal, traditional Chinese, and homeopathic modalities.)

This time we visited our integrative-medicine vet. Buster wasn’t eating well and his energy levels seemed really low. The vet examined him and discovered that his lymph glands were really swollen, so she aspirated one of them and sent the sample to a lab. Before we left, she warned me that there was a strong possibility that Buster had lymphoma, a form of cancer. I left her office hoping it wasn’t true, but a couple of days later I received a phone call confirming my worst fears.

The vet wanted to get him treated right away, so she referred us to a veterinary oncologist who was also practiced integrative medicine. During our first appointment, Buster started a 20-week protocol of chemotherapy, along with natural treatments to support his system. I rearranged my work schedule to accommodate his weekly vet visits, and we began treatment. It was definitely rough at first, but then he began to respond favorably to his treatments, which gave us hope that we wouldn’t lose him anytime soon.

On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving 2007, we went for our appointment and received wonderful news: the lymphoma was in remission. We were elated. But on Thanksgiving Day, Buster took a turn for the worse. He was vomiting and had no energy. We figured that it was just a delayed reaction to the treatments, since he was in remission, so we left him resting at home and left to have dinner with my in-laws. We got home a few hours later and found diarrhea and vomit all over the kitchen floor and Buster in his bed. I began cleaning up the mess while my husband woke Buster up to take him outside. He collapsed on our front lawn and I called his oncologist.

We were told to bring him in immediately, so we raced to the vet (25 miles away), my husband driving and me in the back with Buster on my lap, begging him to please hang on. We got to the vet’s and found out that he was in shock, so we had to leave him there overnight while the staff tried to get him stabilized. I called hourly for updates, but there was no change. The next day, I went to work with an extremely heavy heart. About the middle of the day, I received the phone call that I hoped never to hear…the lymphoma was still in remission, but Buster also had developed adrenal cancer, which is extremely aggressive and totally non-treatable. I called my husband, and together we made the heartbreaking decision to let our darling boy go. So we both left work and drove to the vet’s, where we were given a room to say good-bye in private. He died in our arms.

After we got over the initial shock of losing Buster, we realized that there was a huge hole in our lives. Even though a dog doesn’t take up much space in your home (unless you have a Great Dane or an Irish Wolfhound), they are an enormous part of your life and add so much to it. So we started looking on Petfinder just to see what dogs were available. Since Buster had been a mixed-breed but definitely favored his Golden Retriever side, we thought that we might like a Golden for our next dog. My husband thought that maybe it was too soon to think about getting another dog, that it would be insulting to Buster’s memory. On the other hand, I felt that another dog would honor Buster because we loved him so much that we needed another dog to try to fill the void.

We found Cosmo, our current Golden Retriever, on Petfinder about 1 1/2 months after Buster died. He was listed through Golden Retriever Rescue of Michigan (GRRoM), and was a younger dog, age 2 1/2 (ironically the same age as Buster was when we adopted him) and that we could download GRRoM’s adoption info and forms, complete them, and submit for approval.

GRRoM is VERY thorough–they want to take every precaution so that their dogs don’t need to be re-homed again. The application form is several pages long and asks about every question possible having anything to do with dogs. Then your co-ordinator performs a phone interview, consults with your vet, consults with references, performs a home visit…it’s like adopting a child. When we were finally approved to start meeting their dogs, we made an appointment with Cosmo’s foster family in Mount Pleasant for a meet-and-greet. This went really well, and I think that Cosmo chose me for his forever mom when he got in my lap with a toy. I was completely won over.

A few days later, we received the call that we’d been approved to adopt Cosmo. He has been with us for over 7 years now and will be 10 years old in June, wich scares me since that’s the age Buster was when he died–but Cosmo is a totally different dog. Because we learned so much about optimum care and nutrition from our time with Buster, we were able to apply these principles immediately to Cosmo (plus, he didn’t suffer the abuse and neglect that Buster did in his early life).

So how did Cosmo, a purebred, AKC-registered, champion-bloodlined ‘bench’ Golden Retriever end up in a rescue group? The kennel that Cosmo came from, Kay-Lynn Kennels in Mount Pleasant (Cosmo’s AKC name is Kay-Lynn’s Cosmic Inspiration) was a small-scale operation that only had one female at the time Cosmo was conceived. While he and his siblings were in utero, his mother drank contaminated well water and contracted a nasty bacterial infection which turned her uterus septic and affected the developing pups.

When the puppies were born–4 girls and 2 boys–the other male in the litter died, and Cosmo was born with a weak bladder sphincter muscle, so he was ‘leaky’ and the breeder was going to have him destroyed since he couldn’t be shown, sold, or bred. Her vet, who ended up as Cosmo’s foster mother, convinced the breeder not to do this and took him in herself. He lived at the clinic where the vet practiced, where she performed exhaustive research and tried several techniques to strengthen his sphincter, even taking him to Michigan State, where she was told that the only operation available was still in experimental stages and would not permanently fix the problem. The vet had just gotten married, had a full-time practice, lived in a small house with her husband, 2 Labrador Retrievers, and 2 cats, and they were trying to start a family–too much on her plate and too little space to add a third large dog into the mix.

But she was determined to find Cosmo the best living situation possible, so she registered him with GRRoM and was going to keep him herself until just the right family showed up. When we first met Cosmo, he was wearing a doggie diaper and was taking 1 1/4 tablets of a medicine called Proin (phenylpropanolamine) 3 times a day for his problem. After we adopted him, we switched him to the semi-homemade, semi-raw diet that we still feed him, and in doing so, we were able to cut back the Proin to twice a day and eliminate the diaper. (Now that he’s getting older, the diaper may make a return appearance at some point.) Cosmo is a happy-go-lucky, sweet, outgoing, friendly boy, and we love him with all our hearts. We hope to be able to enjoy several more years with him.

Although it’s so painful to lose them, dogs bring so much into our lives that the pain is worth it. Besides, to quote the words of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ’tis better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all’. Dogs make us whole.