...the life of a Navy dog

Fair winds and following seas to my dear deployment dog.   For fourteen years you have been by my side.  The never ending deployments, the deployment where we didn't know when it would end, the deployments that I didn't expect to be the way they were, the deployments that we didn't expect and then there was the shore duty that turned into "det" duty with a critically ill child.  Jax joined our family in Japan during Glenn's first sea tour.  Over the 38 months that we were there Glenn was gone 9 out of 12 months and we had two very small children.  Jax was always there.  Cleaning up dropped cheerios, little faces that needed wiping, gold fish, sushi, you name it.  He was there.  He always had an idea of who was okay and who was not...who should come near his puppies and who should not.

The first thing that he did was bring a smile to the face of my 15 month old who didn't understand why his father was gone...and we had no idea when he would be home.  Those many nights when I was up with sick children and my husband was deployed, he was there.  Regardless of how many times I got up in the middle of the night, he was there.  The time period of Rachel's critical illness and endless breathing treatments around the clock, he was there.  When I was trying to learn how to nurse a baby, exhausted in the middle of the night, he was there.  When I lost the baby weight and cast off postpartum depression, he was my constant running partner and was always there for a run.  Over the past few years he has slowed down a lot but he was always happy so we kept him going.  Of late, his spirit was still willing but his body had quit.  Now, he isn't here. 

Dogs, especially retrievers, embody everything that Christ tried to teach on how to treat others.  They achieve it with little to no effort because they are pure of ill intentions.  They just want to be with their person, to be there.  Good bye old friend, we gave you the best day your body could handle yesterday.  May you be pain free in a field with endless tennis balls to retrieve, squirrels to chase, a never ending sun patch for lounging and no kitties to boss you around.


His Japanese Kennel Certificate as a black lab and was originally named Beam of Shonan Kanezaki born 10/25/2002.  I always thought this was cool as it is mostly in Kanji and the names are a bit entertaining.