“Little Dog, Oh My God!” was a song I made up and would sing to her:
She’s the little dog,
“Oh my god!”
She’s the little dog,
“Oh my god!”
“I don’t know what to do, so I think I’ll jump and dance!”
“Oh my god” was her signature expression, often expressed as the abbreviated OMG. Or OMFG… she had a bit of a potty-mouth. Mavis was somewhat nervous all her life, although that did mellow as she aged.
It’s a Tuesday night (28 Jan) as I start writing this. Finally got it wrapped on Thursday 6 Feb, as this has been difficult to plug through. I knew it was going to take some time to work through this post. Mavis passed away on a Saturday night (25 Jan) approaching two weeks ago. I’ve needed some time to process and recover before I could begin to write about her…
There’s a ton of Mavis content on her Instagram, by the way.
Her name
In the adoption process, she was identified as “Ruby” by the rescue. But we knew that wasn’t her name. We thought she needed an old-timey name since her values were traditional, and she held her values strongly and tended to be a bit judgy. It did not take us long to land on Mavis, via two primary inspirations:
- The B-52’s song “52 Girls” that mentions the name. (It also mentions “Janet” as a name, which led to the name of Mavis’s little sister, Janet Corndog.)
- Mavis Staples, an iconic soul singer and civil rights activist.
Mavis was mostly white with brown spots, and those spots were her pancakes, and defined her appearance. She had one on her forehead and several on her body. Although pancakes as a food are considered to be mostly effortless and easy, there was irony in that identification with Mavis. In her first days with us, touching a pancake was an easy way to “activate the dog,” but through that we came to realize the place of her pancakes in how she identified herself.
Cats will tell you their names, eventually, maybe… and sometimes you have to wait. Dogs are more, “Yeah, man, whatever, say it consistently and I’m good,” about their names, but if you are patient in naming dogs, and allow them a little input, their names capture their essences, as it did with Mavis Pancakes, and it does with her sister Janet Corndog.
And then Mavis’s middle name… Ana Ng. Go down the rabbit hole to understand it.
What happened…?
She was a young dog, not even 6 years old yet, and succumbed to liver failure that onset suddenly, and by the time we had a handle on the severity of the situation it was too late to save her. What was the root cause? We don’t know. Never will.
The vets initially suspected she had contracted leptospirosis, but that possible diagnosis did not pan out through multiple tests. Another possibility is some kind of environmental toxin such as mushrooms (very common in the local dog parks) or xylitol, for instance, though those do not really match with either her behavioral patterns (she was not a chewer or frequent snacker of things she found) nor the trajectory of her decline and deterioration over a few days, rather than more acutely as would happen with a serious poisoning.
Another possibility, and the one that makes the most sense to my wife and me, is that she had lived with compromised liver function for some time (perhaps all her life… her littermate was a young diabetic, and they had a rough start to life), and Mavis’s ebbs and flows appeared normal and minor, like her being finicky with food on occasion, or maybe a day here and there where she did not feel great, but she always rapidly bounced back from those things.
But then we think it’s possible one of those ebbs was more severe, and it led to other problems, and as can happen sickness sets in, a cascade begins. And that is indeed what it was like. Her deterioration accelerated, and would properly be represented a hockey stick graph. That makes it so hard to assess severity in those moments when you are observing rather than measuring, as is often the case in health matters that are silent or difficult to measure, whether in pets, or in human mental health.
I’m not going to give a full play-by-play here of the veterinary processes, other than to say that after a few days of her not feeling 100%, although not overly concerning (we all have ups and downs), in less than 24 hours we went from hopeful-for-bounce-back, then to worried, then to alarmed, and then in a few hours she was gone.
Remembering Mavis
But this post is about remembering her and celebrating her. So that is what we are going to do, with photos and then descriptions, and tell a few stories about her in it all.
Her life ended too soon.
By writing about it I am extending it, and preserving it.
Baby Mavis
Mavis was about a year old when we adopted her via the Hearts4Doxies rescue, but we did get baby puppy pictures of her. We don’t know all of the details of her life before us, except that there was some kind of a failed adoption in there, but that didn’t matter.
Her brown spots on white fur looked like pancakes, hence her name. Her signature forehead pancake is visible in her puppy photo, and in many that follow.
Adopting Mavis
The day we met Mavis and her foster family in August 2020 it was instantly obvious that she and my wife had found soulmates in each other. Mavis loved Kim and wanted to be her dog. The sentiment was reciprocal.
As much as I loved Mavis, and she loved me, the relationship she had with my wife was far greater. As such, I know my own struggle the past couple of weeks is a shadow of what my wife has been going through. We’re still wrecked and fragile.
Mavis as a sibling
Mavis got along great with her feline siblings, as seen here with Aloysius and Agador, although she complained about the cats a lot. I think it was just noise when she said, as she did frequently, “I hate those fuckin’ cats,” because really, her behavior with them showed that she loved them. I think it’s more that she resented that the attention they received was attention that she did not get.
Mavis and her clothes
In this photo, Mavis and I are in matching Dude sweaters that Kim made.
Mavis was a slender wiry dog, without much fur on her underside. Here in the Pacific Northwest, the winters are cool and damp and long, and it did not take much time for us to understand that Mavis needed to be clothed more often than not.
The summers here are amazing, but generally do not start until early July and last barely 3 months. Mavis could go naked those months, but the rest of the year, we kept her in fleeces and sweaters, and she was happy for that. Mavis was always agreeable about changing clothes, and I think she enjoyed the fashion.
Mavis and her graffiti
Mavis had a bit of an attitude, and a salty mouth, and those attributes were reflected in her graffiti, such as the “OMG, MAVIƧ, FUK U” in the preceding photo. When writing the S in her name it was always backwards, although she wrote all of her other S’s properly. And of course her graffiti was full of misspellings, because, come on, she was a dog, after all.
When I took her for walks, I’d try to remember to take a piece of chalk along in my pocket in case she asked me to scribble something for her. We still have her graffiti here at our house, with some on the back of the garage and some on a chalkboard in the basement, similarly salty, about how she claimed to despise her sister “JANIT”.
Mavis and her attitude
Another thing Mavis would do on walks was sing her own version of the Bee Gees song “Stayin’ Alive” while strutting down the sidewalk:
“Well, you can tell by the way I use my walk,
I’m a little dog, no time to talk…”
She had long legs from the miniature pinscher in her heritage, and walked with a bit of a goose-step. She was joyful and exuberant on walks, and nearly everyone who saw her got a laugh from just being near her.
Mavis had a clear sense of the way she thought the world should be. And if something did not fit, she declared it as “weër”, which was what it sounded like when she said “weird”.
Mavis was so self-affirmed that she probably never considered that the rest of the world might find a dog in a pink tutu to be “weër.”
Mavis loved beaches
Mavis was a total beach dog. She especially loved the beaches of northern California (plus the redwood forests), and we made several trips there with her. She loved to just get out there and run and run and run and fetch sticks and chase birds.
She was a great traveling dog. She enjoyed road trips and adventures, and I think she also enjoyed the ritual of riding in the car for a while and then emerging in a totally new place. And then also the end of the day and settling into a strange bed with her parents right there.
Mavis and Janet
This photo is from when I was looking at photos from a dog rescue and we asked Mavis if she might want to have a little sister, in late 2022. She was all “yeah I guess,” and we ended up adopting Janet Corndog. They had a complicated relationship. Mavis was mostly annoyed with Janet, but Janet adored Mavis.
Janet is now coming to terms with Mavis not being here, and really doing her best to be The Dog Of The House, kind of an odd position since at 9 pounds she’s smaller than 4 of our 5 cats. It’s clear that Janet misses Mavis, and that she has been sad.
I think Mavis loved Janet more than she would admit, but they bickered a lot, as siblings do. A game we called Wolfmouth was common, usually on the couch, where they would snarl and wrestle and snarl some more. But they also snuggled a lot and always rode in the same crate together in the car, and loved running together at beaches and dog parks, so yeah, there was love there, too.
Mavis hated being in water
Despite her love of beaches, Mavis did not enjoy being in water. This photo is from one of our California trips, specifically, in the Smith River in Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park. For this photo I carried her out while wading in the river and set her down. She did not budge and stood motionlessly with a sour expression for the photo op, all, “Can we get this shit over with?!?! OMG”
I then picked her up and carried her back to the river’s edge, and she looked up at me and said “Wat da fuk was dat, Diddy?!?! OMFG”
And of course, Mavis hated baths.
Mavis loved dog parks
We are fortunate to have a couple of nice wooded dog parks within 15 minutes of our house, and I would take the dogs there a few times a week. Mavis had a singular favorite activity at the dog park: scouting. We’d walk the trails, and Mavis would run far ahead to investigate what was before us, and run back to report. Sometimes she’d take a detour and somehow manage to come back to us from behind. The main loop at one of the parks is nearly a mile long, and with her scouting, I bet she’d run that distance 2x-3x on our visits.
Shadowbite
Mavis loved Halloween, because that was when she could don her vampire costume and assume her alter-ego, Shadowbite the Vampire Dog! Shadowbite’s favorite thing was to suck blood from eyes, and she loved to tell us how she’d just do that allll niiiiigghhhht.
Of course, I had to write a little song about her:
Her name is Shadowbite
She will bite you in the eye
She will suck your blood all night
That’s the way of Shadowbite
Headshot photo
I’ve used this as my main headshot photo for several years, whether in LinkedIn, Zoom, Google, Teams or whatever other sites/communications. The goal was a softer image, with the muted colors and the sepia tone, and an easy icebreaker for conversations and interviews.
I’m going to have to change it now, so that I’m not just “that guy who is sad about his dog.”
The last photos
Her appetite had seemed off for a few days, so on Thursday morning, only a couple of days before we lost her, we offered her a special breakfast of canned food to spur her interest. It worked… look at the eager face on Mavis as she stood to see what was in the bowl:
Later in the day she vomited it back up. Maybe it was richer than she was used to? At that point we decided that if she was not interested in breakfast the next morning, I’d take her to an urgent care vet on Friday morning. And that is what happened. She was clearly having liver issues, and was looking a little yellow. The vet ran blood panels and her liver function was off, but not alarming. When I picked her up at the end of the day on Friday, the plan was to get her on liver-support meds starting right away, then do an ultrasound on Monday to see what we were dealing with.
This was early Saturday afternoon, less than 10 hours before she was gone. She looked tired, and acted tired, but seemingly not critical. But, she declined so quickly over the next few hours, we went to the emergency vet around 8pm and she was gone before midnight.
Mavis Pancakes has left the building. And I still can’t believe it. I will miss her forever. OMG.
