This is the toughest blog I’ve ever written. Millie the wonder dog, my 13 year old Brittany Spaniel, died last evening, July 10 2009 at home in Okemos Michigan. This is her “obituary.”

Millie Ruth Harris, a pure bred Brittany Spaniel, was born on April 24 1996 in Wichita Kansas. She was to be my son Eric’s hunting dog. Eric and my wife Ruth picked out Millie because she was “so cute and lively and kept running away from the other puppies of the litter!” How appropriate would those words turn out to be.

Millie soon left Kansas, where the bird hunting was plentiful, when we moved to Michigan in March 1997. She was there to keep my wife company while I was working and before we had made any real friends. It was while walking Millie that Ruth met one of her fast friends. In reality, though, you didn’t walk Millie–she walked you! She was so strong and so headstrong that she literally pulled on the leash all the way, glancing back with a look that said, “get the lead out–c’mon!”

That’s how the running thing got started. When I became interested in getting fit and needed to run as part of my regular cardio, no one wanted to run with me–except Millie! She was always ready, and she would literally drag me the entire two miles. Every day we would be out there, rain or shine, summer or winter.  Running with her in winter was perilous. More than once she pulled me right through a stop sign on icy streets with cars coming at us! Her winter specialty, though, was to run down by the river, run off the roadway and dive into a bunch of raspberry bushes that usually held rabbits and thorns of course. She would get hopelessly tangled up in the leash and the bushes and I’d have to go extract her!

Her other regular specialty was running away. She had a way of winning your confidence and lulling you into the notion that she’d stay in the yard while you were gardening or lying in the sun. And somehow in a moment she would be gone! We live in a village, but our home is right on the edge of a large wooded area with the river, so  when she took off, you had almost no idea how to find her again. She never came back home either! But, she would always eventually show up at the home of Ruth’s friend, the one she met while walking Millie.

In the last year Millie developed arthritis and was unable to run anymore. She took it much better than I did. I really missed her out there. Within the last few months she began to decline noticably and quickly. The vet tried what he could but said in a vettish way that she was just old and we should feed her well and keep her comfortable.

Though she was agitated and breathing heavily before she died naturally, she did not seem to suffer any pain or even any real  stress until just a couple of hours before she left us. She died right where she spent her spare time, sleeping on her side on her favorite pillow on our deck.

I’ve never been attached to an animal like Millie.  I miss her much already. I buried her this morning in the back yard area she loved.  This is hard!