You can tell a lot about people by the way they react when things don't go exactly as planned. A friend from work, Mary, and her husband, facing the Empty Nest syndrome, decided they wanted a couple of dogs for companionship, so they got a brother-sister pair of Shih Tzus, which they named Rudy and Gracie. Things began to wrong with Gracie almost immediately. After numerous trips to the vet, they learned that her kidneys never did develop properly. They spent months doing everything they could, but the battle was lost Wednesday. What was supposed to have been an easy way to liven up a household turned into a long nightmare with a sad ending. And through it all, my friend and her husband bore up and did whatever they needed to for that dog.
I know a lot of people who would have given up almost immediately. "Hey, this isn't the deal we bargained for, let's just get rid of the stupid dog and go back to normal." They wouldn't have spent thousands of dollars. They wouldn't have done everything the vet said -- all the shots and injections, the force-feeding. They wouldn't have given up all their spare time to try to make it work and stayed up nights when it didn't. They certainly wouldn't now be agonizing over what Rudy must be going through, trying to figure out what happened to Gracie.
All of us who have people like that in our lives should give thanks. Not just because they care more about a dog's well-being than some people do about their own children's, but because they stick with the course they set, even in the face of consequences they couldn't have foreseen and would not have chosen. Those are the kind of people who also know how to treat friends, too, accepting their faults as well as their virtues.
Mary said yesterday she was glad she still had Rudy. "If I didn't, I'd go out and get another dog immediately. I never realized how quickly I would get used to having them around." That she could feel that way after everything they've been through is the most remarkable thing of all.
