Goodbye, Tassie Marie

Since I began blogging in early 2001, I’ve mentioned our family border collie in this space exactly … never. That shouldn’t be construed as a sign that Tassie hasn’t been an important part of our family; it’s just that I just never got bloggers who write about their cats or dogs every week.

And I’m not sure this is the right forum, so I’ll keep it brief.

When Mary and I returned home from our weeklong trip back East the other night, we were shocked to discover that Tassie, our wonderful border collie/Australian shepherd mix, was dead. She had died just a few hours before, and her fur was still warm. She had just turned 8 years old this past week, and we were planning on throwing her a little birthday celebration. We’re not exactly sure how it happened — possibly a heart attack. But that’s rather shocking: Tassie has never been sick and was (we thought) in very good health.

We got Tassie just a few weeks after Mary and I got married, and raised her since we got her as a puppy in Elk Grove, Calif. She was a tri, with the distinctive shepherd markings of three brown paws and one white paw. More importantly, she had a distinctive spirit and loving personality. She was a fiend for tennis balls, and we couldn’t take a dip in the outside spa without throwing her the ball a good 20 or 30 times. I still remember the night my sister, Kathy, baby-sat for Bobby and wound up throwing the ball for Tassie at least a hundred times (“she kept bringing it back!”). We named her Tassie as a Lassie-like tip of the hat to the Down Under Tasmanian devil, given the raptor-like teeth she liked to bare as a pup.

Mary and I both have had one dog when we were single (Scoop and Dali), but Tassie was part of our family. The realization hasn’t really hit Bobby yet; he only knows that she’s in doggie heaven. I’ll miss her licks in the morning, and playing Frisbee, and saving her scraps of chicken and pizza crusts, and her barking to Christmas tunes, and her sibling rivalry with Bobby.

We’re having her ashes buried in Napa Valley.

Tassie, we’ll miss you.

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.