By Amy Joles (Contact / Staff Bio)
October 14, 2009 - 10:06 a.m. EST

On my computer at work, I have loads of sticky notes pasted along the bottom. Along with the do-not-forget notes, I have a picture of my husband and daughter and one of my dog, Rookie.

My “Rookie Cookie.”

She was a puppy when the picture was taken. She has an inquisitive look on her face, head tilted to one side.

If you know me, you know I love dogs. And although Rookie had some strikes against her from the very beginning, she became my very first dog - just mine, nobody else’s, and I loved that crazy little mutt.

I’ve wrote a column or two about her - even asked for advice on how to break her from wetting her bed at night, which later turned out to be far more than a discipline problem. It was actually a health problem.

At one point, I loaded her up and took her to a veterinary facility in Oakland County. There, she was diagnosed with early stage renal failure. They told me that she would live to about age 5.

She proved them wrong and lived two and a half years longer than their estimation.

Naively, I had hoped she would fall asleep someday and simply not wake up. Kidney failure isn’t that kind, though.

She quit eating and stopped drinking. The pounds began to fall and then the tail stopped wagging as much.

Her tattered football rested in the same spot for days, a week and then two. Sleep consumed most of her time.

As I drove her to the vet last Saturday morning, she looked up at me with the biggest, saddest brown eyes that I have ever seen. I cried and told her that this was the hardest thing I have ever had to do - cried and told her how sorry I was and what a good dog she was, the best dog.

In reality, she was just a little mixed breed, a spaniel of some sort that I adopted in front of Wal-Mart one day from a little girl in the back of a pick-up truck. I had just graduated from college and wanted a dog so badly. She was free, cute and needed me as much as I needed her.

I named her Rookie because I was a rookie at my job and it seemed to suit her.

She was often mistaken for a Cocker Spaniel, but she was a little taller.

Ironically, when we pulled into the vet’s office last Saturday, a man walked out with a little black Cocker Spaniel on a bright red leash. I watched as the dog happily jumped up on him and wriggled around his legs, eager to go somewhere, anywhere but the vet’s office.

Rookie laid still in the passenger seat.

“It’s been a long time since she was that happy,” I thought to myself.

I stayed with her that day until she took her last breath at the vet’s office.

And then I cried.

I realize that Rookie was just a dog. She was unruly, killed birds, moles, snakes, squirrels and rabbits and had terrible breath, but I loved that silly black ball of fur. She was my dog, just mine.

Her picture still stares up at me on my monitor at work. Those are the happy eyes that I will remember the most.