Keely Has Found Her Way
Keely-Boo York, 2008(?)-2025
On Friday afternoon, August 1st, 2025, I said good-bye to my precious Keely. There was no one reason why. It was simply a matter of age and mortality.
She was ready.
I never will be.
I hoped she would live to August 15th, an entirely selfish desire that one could easily assume, once you know the date, was based on wanting her to make it to my birthday. But no. Since my childhood, I have had little love lost for the date of my birth, which for me has been more of a blank mile-marker than a celebration.
The real reason I was reaching for that date is that August 15, 2016, was the day I emailed Tallahassee Big Dog Rescue immediately after seeing Keely’s photo on their website:
When I saw that pic, I was taken by the feeling that she was just waiting for me, after all this time. I did not look at any other listings, I did not go anywhere else. I opened their homepage, saw her photo, made my decision. All told, it took about 30 seconds!
For years, I had wanted a dog of my own, which sounds weird if you know that I was raised around dogs. My parents always had at least one in the house, but the thing is, they were never my dogs. They were family dogs who generally favored one adult over the other. I loved them, but they weren’t mine.
After my parents’ deaths, I had to put their dogs down due to their own failing health. I talk about this in my book Grieving Futures, and it still breaks my heart that I had to lose them so soon. Yet, their deaths felt like just another checkbox for tragedy in those days. I thought, naively, that in a couple of years I would be settled down with a house and a job, and I’d be able to get my own dog. Like a normal person!
(The gods laughed.)
There were a lot of reasons that did not happen, and year after year I assumed that “next year” the stars would align, and I’d get a dog. Someday!
In fact, back in 2001, I tried to adopt a dog. (The year alone should give you some foreshadowing.)
Curious George was a delightful one-year-old, forty-pound Lab/Doberman mix I found wandering the streets of downtown Orlando while driving home from work. The search for his owners was unsuccessful, and I had immediately fallen for his adorable, high-energy personality. Unfortunately, my husband, despite initially agreeing, did not want the responsibility of a dog (or, I realized far too late, a marriage), and he abstained from anything having to do with George’s care. I eventually realized I could not raise a rambunctious mostly-still-a-puppy alone while working full time, so we ended up giving him away. I hope Curious George went on to bigger yards and a better family.
I was devastated by the failure and simply refused to reconsider the idea of having another dog, even after our divorce in 2010.
By 2016, I had been in therapy for a couple of years and had a decent desk-jockey job at FSU, but I was still putting off the idea of owning a dog for a variety of reasons which, I think, mostly had to do with self-flagellation. (Guilt is a hell of a drug.)
As August 15th rolled around, I was feeling like change was in the air. Life wasn’t great and, as I said, I don’t put much stock into my birthday, good or bad. But I was turning forty-seven that year, and I felt like I was finally pulling myself together like a goddamn adult! I wasn’t sure what was on the horizon, but I just knew something grand was coming my way.
As I walked into my office that morning, I was struck by the thought, “Wait a damn second. I am an adult who has a job, a home, and no other obligations. I can totally own a dog if I want to!”
And I did want to.
Determined to make a massive life change with zero notice or preparation, I sat down and before I even opened my work email, I pulled up Big Dog Rescue’s website. There she was! Right there on the homepage!
I was unaware at the time, but the photo had gone up only that morning, and I was the third person who contacted them about her. The other two never inquired further, so I won the raffle by default! I still believe that luck was on my side that day. Best birthday ever!
I got to meet Keely a week later at the local PetSmart, where the organization was holding a meet-and-greet. As far as I was concerned, this was the start of a beautiful friendship. I walked her around the store and then sat on the ground with her for a while. She was easygoing and somewhat confused but entirely trusting. Admittedly, part of that was due to her not being a puppy. They told me she was ten years old (we’ll get back to that) so while I knew I would likely not have her for long, I was excited to be giving an older dog a chance at a happier life.
This was also the start of my attempts to get around her dislike of being photographed. 😂
Obviously, a dog does not understand what a photograph is, so I’ve always wondered what was going through her mind when she avoided being in the frame. Eventually, she grew more accustomed to it, but never comfortable. Catching a photo of her looking at the lens became quite a game for me!
Sadly, I could not leave PetSmart with her that day. She was suffering from a life-threatening case of heartworms, and they feared the treatment regimen would be too much for her heart. I knew in my heart that she would pull through. She was MY DOG. She was a survivor, and she was meant to be with me!
I threw down my money and we waited.
I wasn’t wrong about her being a survivor. She had been picked up wandering the streets “down south” (Brevard County, iirc) and had been in a kill shelter. Her fear response at the time was so severe that she was never put up for adoption, so they were counting down her days when—for some reason I’ll never know—a rescue group yoinked her out and put her in a foster home. Her Great Migration to North Florida had begun!
After our initial meet-and-greet, treatment continued for over a month. She reacted well to it, as expected (at least by me). I pestered the fosters with emails about her and counted down the days. The wait had a side benefit in allowing me time to prepare to bring her into the house.
By that point, my memories of being a dog owner were dim, and honestly, my parents had not been great dog owners. They loved their dogs and treated them well, but they never invested time or money in training them and did only the bare minimum for their health. I wanted to do better than that. But I had no idea what I was doing.
With the power of google, though, I knew all things were possible!
First, I installed a fence across the entrance to the kitchen to serve as a “cage” because I did not know if she was housebroken or how she would deal with being left alone all day while I was at work. I wanted an older dog just for that reason, knowing it would be cruel to crate a young, high-energy dog for 10 to 12 hours a day five days a week. (I worked a regular schedule, but commuting ate up the rest.) Curious George had taught me that much, at least.
Even faced with Keely’s apparently laid-back demeanor, horror stories I had read online of dogs with severe separation anxiety haunted me.
I also bought a harness because I did not know what I would be dealing with when walking her around the neighborhood. Was she a “tugger”? How would she behave around dogs we saw on our walks? Would she chase ducks and cats and children?
The answer was no, but I was prepared.
Finally, on September 23rd, 2016, my dear friend Martha drove me out to the boondocks to pick up my soul dog. I am still annoyed that I only had a very cheap, shitty phone camera at the time, as most of the photos I took were blurry. This is the best of the bunch:
While I had been told she was ten years old, her new vet said she was likely around eight years old instead. Either way, I thought I would only have her for maybe three to four years. She was an older dog with a hard past, after all.
That was nine years ago.
When I say I was lucky to get her, I don’t just mean the timing of it all. The other part is that, honestly, I had no business adopting a dog as big as she was (thirty-five pounds!) without a yard for her to roam in. My townhome is spacious (at least for the neighborhood) but I do not have a yard at all, much less an enclosed one. Since I swore I would walk her often, they let me take her home anyway.
Which means that, short of hurricanes and other bad weather, I have walked her twice, sometimes three times a day since September 2016. That is about 3,200 days in a row. I never missed a day except when I was out of town or sick in bed (even then, sometimes, if no one I trusted was available to stop by and walk her—thank you, Kim and Paul and Ann).
This year, I even got to walk her in the snow!!!!
Having Keely in my life has been a lesson in patience and personal growth, because she arrived extremely, if quietly, traumatized. When I got her, she was unsure of everything, rather timid, and always on high alert. She did not even start barking at anyone or anything until a couple of years ago, and even then, I had to constantly let her know it was okay. Surprisingly, thunderstorms did not bother her in the least, but this is the look I got from her for the first two years every time I touched her without warning:
For a long time, I could not touch her tail at all. To this day, several BB pellets are embedded under her skin in various places; not worth the trauma of removing them, the vet decided. Her teeth were worn down in ways that suggested she had spent a lot of time gnawing at cage wire. She had no idea what to do with chew toys, so I had to teach her how to play.
She was super wary of being on the bed, with or without me in it. I felt triumphant if I could coax her up (usually with treats) and get her to stay there for more than ten minutes. It took years before she was willing to hop up on the bed of her own accord and join me for a nap.
Interestingly, she refused to stay overnight—once the light was turned off, she jumped off the bed and hustled into the living room. I suspect a former owner somewhere along the line taught her that she was not allowed in the bedroom at night, and that stuck for whatever reason. It wasn’t until the pandemic lockdown era that she started sneaking back into the bedroom early in the morning to cuddle up with me while we slept. By that point, we had been together for over three years.
I did not want a dog that barked a lot, but that’s a natural behavior in dogs that was unnaturally absent in Keely until just a couple of years ago. The first time she barked at the postal carrier, I stood there in shock and then (perhaps unwisely) rewarded her. Whenever anyone or anything got her started, given her hyper-alertness, I had to constantly assure her everything was okay.
She eventually allowed me to brush her tail, but again, it took years of slowly convincing her that I could be trusted with such a vulnerability.
Between all these milestones were long stretches of no change in her behavior. I never set out with a goal to “help her recover” from one issue or another, I just tried my damnedest to make her feel safe, protected, and loved.
The incontinence crept up on us slowly. She had issues with it during the Great Crisis of 2019, when her immune system collapsed and she nearly died. The vet believed it was due to a tick bite, but we’ll never know for sure. She spent five days in “doggy ICU” and was put on a number of incredibly potent medicines to save her life. They worked, but the price was her bladder control. Off and on since then, she had recurring bladder infections and a slowly progressing problem with incontinence.
In May 2024, I went on a five-day work-related trip to Sarasota and left her in the care of a neighbor. When I got home, she was literally on death’s door with what I assume was a severe bladder infection. I honestly thought she would not make it, and at the time, I was so broke I was afraid I was going to be homeless by July. I had no money to take her to the vet and decided that if it was her time to go, then I would let her go.
But she stayed, by dint of pure dogged stubbornness. She recovered like a storybook character after a very rough, long dark night of the soul where I spent sitting on the floor by her dog bed until dawn. Soon I had my precious boo-bear back!
The incontinence was there to stay, though, and I’ve since figured out that it was a sign of the end times. While her overall health wasn’t terrible, she was getting too old to keep on keeping on.
Like most pet owners, I waffled about “when is the right time to make the call?” She was still eating and drinking, she was still begging for treats, she was still rolling over into Dead Bug Pose for belly rubs:
But over the past two months, the downward-dog slide became pronounced. The various meds did nothing to touch the arthritis or the incontinence. The distance she was able to walk without slowing down to a crawl got shorter and shorter. She started bumping into things around the house because she could not see them, and I had to hand-feed her treats because she could not sniff them out if I put them on the floor. She was getting bladder infection after bladder infection, requiring stronger and stronger antibiotics.
Not for nothing, Keely hated being incontinent. She disliked being covered in pee and she also hated baths (not a water dog!!!!). So every day was a race for me to keep ahead of diaper leaks and diaper rash. It got to the point where I had to change her out every three hours or so. I was getting up every night at 2:00 am to change her because if I didn’t, I’d wake up to a pee-soaked dog and a mound of sopping-wet, dirty bedding to clean.
We were both miserable, to different degrees, and I knew it was time.
I did not want to let her go, but the price of being a pet owner is doing what is best for them, not what you wish were true. The brief tail-wags and cuddles were not enough to excuse her being in constant pain and unhappy and uncomfortable.
I’ll leave you to decide whether she’s in a better place now. I know I’m not; there can be no “better place” without her.
Thanks for having been a reader of Keely’s Way!
If you would like to give a bit of something in memory of the goodest of girls, please allow me to suggest making a donation to Big Dog Rescue, who made it all possible!
Find KimBoo: Notes • Bluesky • Tumblr • Facebook • House of York
I'm so sorry to hear about Keely, KimBoo! I always felt like she was a part of our SDRC/OAS family! Sending you lots of love and care right now.
Oh I am so sorry. You are the best dog mom and she’ll always be with you.