goodbye Lincoln

Life isn’t always full of puppy dogs and rainbows. But when it is… it’s amazing.

And when that puppy dog goes chasing after the end of the rainbow way too early in life… well… it’s really hard to accept.

At the end of January, our dearly loved 4 year-old Bernese Mountain Dog Lincoln seemed to catch a case of kennel cough after boarding over the holiday weekend. So he got some antibiotics.

Then he started throwing up, which we and the vet attributed to the icky antibiotics. So we gave him anti-nausea pills.

Then he stopped eating. And drinking. So we took him in again with everyone thinking he ate some silly toy while he was boarding and that was causing the problems.

But then… it wasn’t silly. It was cancer.

We were told he only had days left, but we asked what we could do. We got him all the chemo pills and would do anything if it would help. We even called UC Davis to try to get him into an experimental treatment program for new cancer drugs.

But he wouldn’t eat the pills. And he stopped drinking water. And then we just knew.

We hugged him and loved him and spent the days and nights sleeping next to him.

And then we said goodbye.

Everyone told us we wouldn’t want a giant dog. That we’d hate the drool. And the shedding. And we’d never be able to use our coffee table again.

But I’ll tell every dog person I know to welcome a GIANT dog into their life just for one go around. Because you’ve never felt love like that before.

It’s taken me a month to write this… because he left a giant hole in our hearts, our home and our life.

We loved that big silly puppy and we know he’s playing with Memphis over in dog heaven and maybe he’s finally going to win that epic tug of war battle!

Goodbye, Lincoln. We miss you so much buddy.