CJW: As promised, here we are, coming to you live from Buttondown HQ.

This mail *might* end up going out to the full list because Buttondown allowed me to give new subscribers a 14-day preview of our bonus posts, but I can't remember if I hit that button before or after importing everybody.

Anyway, first a little housekeeping for our current paid subscribers - the Buttondown import carried over your Premium status, but I'm still trying to work out whether or not Buttondown knows when your subscriptions are due to expire, or if I will have to manually sort that out when the time comes. Justin at Buttondown has been a great help so far, so I've got no doubt he'll help me figure this out shortly. Worst case scenario, I've got subscription end dates saved from a Substack export, so no one will be cut off prematurely! In the meantime, I think everything is working well...

Buttondown also uses Stripe to process payments, but you will still need to re-up through Stripe when the time comes, because I can't simply transfer those payment details over for obvious security reasons. You should get notification emails from Buttondown with the correct subscription link, but I'll also be keeping an eye on things. If anything goes wrong, or you've got any questions, you can always hit me up at nothing [@] coreyjwhite.com.

On to the bonus post...

My cat has lymphoma, and as such I've been thinking about pet mortality a lot lately. I decided to write the below about my first dog, Maddy, short for Madeline.

Maddy

One thing that struck me in the past few years is the emergence and prevalence of the term “rescue dog”. I found it strange because my entire life, the pound is simply where one went when you were looking to add a new canine member of the family.

I can still remember going to the pound to get our first dog, Maddy (actually the family’s second dog, but the first one ran away or died before I was old enough to be cognisant of things). I remember the pale, dry dirt underfoot, I remember the metal cages that towered over me. I have only the vaguest memory of meeting Maddy, but I remember knowing that she was our dog right away, even if the adoption wouldn’t be official until my parents went back at a later date to pick her up. (I think the meeting I can remember was my parents checking to see if she was going to be safe for their kids, particularly me as I was the youngest at about five or six years old.)

She was a German Shepard, about one year old when we got her. The best we could guess across her life is that in the first year of her life she had been trained to be a security dog (she was already house broken, knew how to sit, lay down, shake, and other basics), and that the man who owned and trained her beat her with a rolled-up newspaper. We learned this maybe ten years later, when she reacted aggressively to a family friend that was staying with us when he was carrying around a rolled-up newspaper and wearing a baseball cap. Her reaction was immediate and visceral.

She would have been wasted as a guard dog. Not because she couldn’t have done it, but because I like to think she found a lot more fulfilment being part of our family. She still got to use her scant training and deep instincts to protect us, but she did it out of love.

(It also wasn’t just our immediate family who loved Maddy to pieces. When my grandparents came to visit, my grandpa used to love taking her for a walk, especially taking her down to the shops because of the way people would move aside at her approach, including those scary-looking teenage dirtbags.)

[A boy and his dog.]

I remember playing with her in the yard of the house we lived in for a few years – a house owned by the church and rented to us for little money (or perhaps nothing, I’ve never asked) because my parents had lost everything. It was in a bad part of town, and they had hoped her presence would stop burglaries, but the burglars instead climbed along the top of the fence and down into the house through the ceiling. I’m just glad they never hurt her. We replaced the stereo and whatever else they stolen on the three separate occasions when our house was broken into, but Maddy was irreplaceable. (I literally remember nothing of that house’s interior – all I remember is the yard, and Maddy.)

I remember driving my matchbox cars over her side as she laid down. She didn’t mind at all, I honestly think she just loved spending time with us and had infinite patience for the littlest member of the family. I remember playing with her in the back yard of the first house my parents were able to buy (read: mortgage, of course) since the “recession we had to have”, trying my best to keep up with her as she ran chasing after her huge rubber ball, but being left in the dust every time. I remember her running into the glass sliding door when it had recently been cleaned and how much we fussed after her (she was fine). I remember having to hold her on the leash when dad and I went walking and came across a red-belly black snake with its head stuck in a Diet Coke can, and struggling to contain her, but knowing that with a word she would always heel or sit because she was always so well trained. (Our house was close to a stretch of bushland, that’s likely been developed since. I would say that we lived “in Sydney”, but we were far enough out of the city that it was the volunteer bush fire brigade who came to our house in the middle of the night with sirens going, to respond to a call from a jilted ex-boyfriend of my eldest sister. He’d called in to say out shed was on fire. I slept through the whole thing, but learned all about it at breakfast the next morning.)

I remember being home sick from school – the fact that it was memorable makes me think it was likely a proper days-long flu – and the way Maddy laid down beside the couch where I dozed, keeping an eye on me and staying close enough that I could reach out and pat her. (This was at a different house, in a different state. This was the house where she died.)

I can remember another occasion, nine or ten years later, when some annoying young children of some family friends were crawling under the dining room table to try and pat our other dog who was extremely shy and hiding under the table precisely because she thought she was safe there from the children. Maddy grabbed one of the kids by the waistband of their pants and dragged them out – the parents were horrified at this, not realising or caring that she’d saved the kid from something much worse at the hands (well, teeth) of our little, frightened cattle dog cross.

I graduated from high school in 2000. In Australia, particularly on the Gold Coast where I lived at the time, the post-high school tradition is known as Schoolies Week, where just-graduated high school students would flock to Surfers Paradise for illegal drinking (the vast majority were only 17, and the legal drinking age is 18), pointless violence, and casual sex. I can’t remember much of the week, but I’m certain mine involved only the first...

Maddy was about thirteen years old at this point, which is old for just about any large breed of dog. I remember coming home from Schoolies and Maddy meeting me at the door. My mum was home, but she was the only one. She told me she didn’t think Maddy had long left, that she’d been holding out, waiting for me to come home. I got down on the floor and I patted her and I whispered to her that it was alright, that she was allowed to let go now. I was home, I was safe. She’d done her job, she’d done it all those years, and we couldn’t have wished for a better dog than her. And then I went and had a nap, to try and sleep off my hangover.

I can’t remember if I woke up because I heard my mum crying, but I remember being on the floor in my parents’ room, both me and mum sitting over Maddy’s body, in her favourite spot between the bed and the window, where she could stand guard, watching the street and keeping us safe. I remember holding my hand to Maddy’s nose and feeling a breath and thinking for a moment that mum was wrong, that Maddy was alive, but no. Mum was crying so hard it was her breath I felt, coming out long and ragged.

Twenty years later I still tear up thinking about it. Thinking about how much she loved us all, about how much she loved me, how she held on those extra days because she needed to see me before she went. We don’t deserve dogs. She gave us her entire life – my entire childhood, all my years of schooling – and we gave her all the love we were able, and still I don’t know it was enough. We used a choke chain for her leash because she was a big strong dog and that’s what people did at the time. We hit her to try and make her stop barking, because that’s what people did at the time. And still I look back and know she deserved better than that. That we should have known better, done better. But we loved her, truly, as much as she loved us. My mum still has her leather collar. Every now and then she’d get it out for our cattle dog cross to sniff. Sasha missed her too, even when she had another big dog sister to play with. But that’s another story for another day. Mum has Sasha’s ashes, Koko’s too, but not Maddy’s. Back then, she didn’t know it was a thing people did – none of us knew. But we carry her around in our photo albums, and in our hearts.