(Warning: the following material is not for the faint of heart.)

Once upon a time, several or more years ago, there lived a very old man whose name I never knew but privately I've always thought of him as Mr. Boudreaux. Considering that he lived in a parish where 50% of the population is named either Boudreaux or Thibodeaux, this seemed a relatively safe bet. So in the absence of evidence otherwise, we'll just go on calling him Mr. Boudreaux.

Through some fluke of either good fortune or bad, Mr. Boudreaux had managed to outlive his entire family, as well as all of his friends, acquaintances, and retirement savings. For sixteen years, Mr. Boudreaux's only companions had been an assortment of social workers from the state who came to his house once a month to check on him, and a small fluffy mixed-breed dog he called Nancy.

Nancy and Mr. Boudreaux were inseparable. He took her everywhere he went, and everyone in town knew Nancy. Since Mr. Boudreaux was too old to drive any more, they had to walk. They walked together to the grocery store when they needed food, to vet when it was time for Nancy's shots, to the groomer when Nancy needed her long fluffy fur clipped and cleaned.

As the years went by and they both grew older, the walking became more difficult for both of them. Sometimes the people in town would see them both sitting on a bench in the shade, resting so they could continue their arduous journey. Sometimes Mr.Boudreaux would carry Nancy part of the way, but this was a real challenge when he had a bag of groceries, because he also needed one hand free for his cane.
It's a good thing she only weighed eight pounds. But no matter how difficult it was, Mr. Boudreaux would never leave Nancy at home. Wherever he went, she went; slowly but surely, they went everywhere together.

The years continued to go by, the assorted social workers came and went, the trips to the store became more torturous and less frequent. One day the state hired a brand new idealistic young social worker, and when she paid her first routine visit to Mr.Boudreaux's house, she was appalled at what she found. The old man's old dog was sick and filthy and neglected: its eyes were opaque with cataracts, its nose and ears were oozing with pus, and its thick tangled fur was matted with feces. The dog was also starving because Mr. Boudreaux often had days when he didn't remember to feed it.

Ths social worker watched as Nancy lay weakly beside the old man on the couch, her chin resting on his knee while he talked, rambling nonsense which the little dog couldn't hear anyway through her massive ear infections. The young social worker quickly determined that the old man was no longer capable of caring for the dog. So she wrapped the ugly smelly thing in an old towel and dropped it off at the local animal shelter where it would be put out of its misery.

But when she returned to the house, she discovered that Mr. Boudreaux was distraught and utterly inconsolable, and was putting himself in danger. He had collapsed into a heap by the door, where he lay thrashing and wailing and sobbing and calling out for his dog. The young social worker tried, but she couldn't get him to pull himself together. So she phoned her supervisor and asked what she should do.

The supervisor sighed. "Give him back his dog," she said. "For now. But clearly it's time for us to...make arrangements. For both of them." So Nancy was returned to Mr. Boudreaux, and as the social worker left, she saw him clutching the dog to his chest, quietly weeping into her matted fur. Maybe he understood what was going to happen next, or maybe he was past the point of understanding much of anything.
We'll never know.

We do know that when they came back the next day to take Mr. Boudreaux away to the state-run facility where he would live out the rest of his sad lonely days, he struggled so fiercely to hold on to his little dog that he finally had to be sedated. And even under sedation, as he was carried off in one car and the dog in another, tears streamed down his face and he clawed desperately at the window repeating over and over the only name he still remembered: Nancy.

Nancy, meanwhile, had been tossed into a small concrete cell at the pound where she waited to be euthanized. She spent her first night alone without Mr. Boudreaux standing up, because her old bones couldn't take lying on the cold hard wet concrete. She was still standing there the next morning, shivering and covered with excrement, when a veteran dog-rescue volunteer named Rocky showed up.

Rocky muttered something unprintable, scooped up the little dog, and took her away. First they went to a nearby veterinarian, where Nancy's infections were treated, and then to a nearby groomer, where her matted coat was shaved off and she was cleaned up. As small town coincidence would have it, both the vet and the groomer recognized Nancy, and that's how Rocky was able to piece together her heartbreaking story.

But Rocky already had 25 abandoned dogs living in her garage, waiting for her to find them new homes. She knew it wasn't possible to introduce a sick disabled elderly dog into that rowdy pack. She needed to find a quieter safer home for Nancy. But who in their right mind would want to adopt a scrawny sixteen-year-old dog, especially one that was blind, sick, incontinent and, let's face it, pretty damned unattractive? Rocky knew she would have to find a sanity-challenged soft-hearted idiot whose foolish lips were totally incapable of forming the word "N-O" to take this one. And that's how, later that very afternoon, Nancy came to live with me.

I wish I could tell you that the story had a nice, happy, heartwarming ending, that Nancy lived out the rest of her long happy life in peaceful comfort and dignity, and that it was all a very rich and rewarding if bittersweet experience for me. But that's not really how it went.

Nancy was, how shall we say? Extremely high maintenance. She was totally deaf, 95% blind, and she no longer had a sense of smell because of chronic nasal infections. In spite of this, it took her less than 48 hours to learn her way around my house and to figure out which room was the kitchen. She was a smart little dog, yet for the 14 months she lived with me, she never once showed any sign of affection or even recognition towards me. She was crotchety, ornery, and feisty, and she made hideous snorting noises in the back of her throat. It was like living with somebody else's horrid impossible-to-please old great aunt.

She didn't seem to be in pain, but she never seemed happy or content. She didn't like to be held or patted. She was always restless, and would spend hours trundling methodically from room to room, scowling with grim determination, as if she was searching for something. For Mr. Boudreaux maybe? For her old familiar bed, or a favorite toy she'd left behind? Or perhaps just for something, anything, that she could still see, or hear, or smell.

Like her beloved Mr. Boudreaux, Nancy was also starting to experience bouts of senile dementia, known in dogs as canine cognitive dysfunction, or CCD. She had her relatively good days, when she seemed happy enough to stand in the sun and didn't mind being brushed. But on her bad days she would appear agitated, disoriented, unable to eat or sleep. She would stand in a corner facing a wall and whimper all day, she would bark all night while spinning around in circles. The vet tried a number of medications and supplements, but nothing helped much.

It was brutal to watch, and not a day went by that I didn't wonder if I was really doing the right thing keeping her alive. And hardly a night went by, after she'd woken me up to be taken outside in the freezing cold rain for the sixth or seventh time, that I didn't promise myself that tomorrow I would take her in to be "put down," because I couldn't take it any more.

But the next morning she would be calm again, she would eat a little gumbo out of my hand and turn towards the sun, and I'd pick her up and we'd waltz around the kitchen to the Cajun radio station, and I would think maybe--just maybe--I saw the faintest hint of a glimmer of understanding, that somehow she knew that she was still loved. And I couldn't help believing that somehow, on some level, Mr. Boudreaux, wherever he was, knew as well. So I'd hold her close and whisper, "Come on old girl, let's try for just one more good day, shall we?"

They say you know when it's Time, and sometimes that's true. But sometimes it isn't. One day when Nancy was having her teeth cleaned, the vet discovered a rapidly growing malignant melanoma on the roof of her mouth. He told me she might have a couple of weeks left, or less, and he gently offered me the option of ending her life then, before the cancer became painful.

I couldn't do it.

Nancy lived for another three months. She never seemed to be in pain, but at the end she started having seizures, at first only occasionally but eventually several times a day. She lost all control of her bowels, and would have bouts of bloody diarrhea all over the house. She would sneeze so hard, over and over, I was afraid she'd break her neck, and blood would pour out of her nose.

But she continued to have a good appetite and relished her gumbo, she still seemed to like standing in the sun, and she still went on her relentless room-to-room marches, searching in vain for whatever. She was getting worse, but she didn't quite seem ready to die, and I didn't seem quite ready to let her go, and I had no idea how to tell if it was Time.

I finally decided to do it on a Friday afternoon. Her seizures had become so frequent and her bloody sneezes so violent, I was terrified she would end up suffering unbearably over the weekend and the vet wouldn't be available to end it. So I took her in. When I set her on the floor to fill out the last paper work, the old girl bolted away and went bravely trundling off down an unknown hallway, half crippled and blind as a bat, but still on her neverending quest. Somebody else had to go catch her because I was crying too hard.

Nancy's buried in my back yard now, along with several other old dogs and cats I'd taken in over the years. I was never able to find out what became of her Mr. Boudreaux, or even who he really was. He might have been a Nazi for all I know, or a child molester, or the grand wizard of the KKK. But somehow it doesn't matter. In the end he was just a very old man who had outlived everybody and forgotten everything but who still loved his dog. Which I guess makes him one of the lucky ones.