Saying Goodbye to Morgan

This is Andrew writing. Barbara has contributed the pile of pictures and I’m contributing the prose.

I think it was late 2013 when Barbara and I first started visiting Austin Pets Alive to see about adopting a dog. Despite our both wanting a dog and being in agreement on size and possible breeds, it quickly became a point of stress between us.

Barbara fell pretty hard for a dog named Boomer that lived at APA’s main location, but I just wasn’t connecting with him. It bummed her out, as you can imagine. I didn’t like bumming her out. It did not feel good that we weren’t on the same page.

Not long after, we saw Morgan’s listing on the APA website. She wasn’t at an APA facility; she was being fostered in someone’s home. (Later we found out why: she hadn’t been found in Austin, and the city-owned animal center that APA co-occupied couldn’t be used to house dogs that came from elsewhere.) She was listed as a “lab mix” and had gigantic ears.

We met with Morgan’s foster owners in a park near their house in central Austin. Barbara spotted her before I did: still at least 100 feet away, but trying to lunge in our direction, leash be damned. Once she was within striking distance, she pelted us both with kisses as we tried our best to pet a moving target. She flopped over and wanted belly rubs. We were total strangers and she acted like we were the only people in the world.

That was it. We both knew she was the one. I was instantly forgiven for not bonding with Boomer. For years to come, every once in a while Barbara would say to me: “Thank you so much for picking Morgan.” I think she gave me a bit too much of the credit, but I certainly always knew what she meant.

That was February of 2014. She was around 7 months old when we got her, and she was our co-pilot for the next 12½ years until we had to say goodbye to her on Thursday morning. Our dear friend Rachel, Morgan’s dog-sitter for these last six years, was there to help us shower her with love as she drifted away. Dogs age and their personalities change, but until the very end she kept that same disarming sweetness toward any and every human being she met.

We don’t know much about how she entered the world. We can only make educated guesses. She had a mark around her snout that implied someone had used a rubber band as a muzzle to quiet her down at an early age. I can tell you a story that feels true: we suspect she was bred to be aggressive and then abandoned when it became clear that there wasn’t a single misanthropic corner of her lovely soul.

We don’t know who found her on the streets of Waco, Texas, and brought her to a local vet. We have the notes from that checkup — estimated birth date, the earliest photos we have of her, and the vet’s notes: “No worms; very sweet.” We can guess with high confidence how she ended up in Austin: APA is the closest no-kill shelter to Waco by a great margin. Someone clearly couldn’t keep her, but couldn’t bear to hand her over to any organization who didn’t feel a moral obligation to give her a loving home. We don’t know who that person was, but I do wish we’d tried a bit harder to communicate just how grateful we were.

Dog-lovers were particularly vulnerable to her charms. At her vet in Austin I could tell that they’d made notes on her record about her adorable quirks; they’d check her in and then ask, “Morgan, can I see you SMILE?” She’d wag her tail, put her front paws on the counter, and show off her submissive smile.

Vet techs, being dog experts, knew that this was her way of communicating appeasement and showing excitement. An awkward, teeth-baring chomp that the average person would find off-putting actually meant something like “I think you’re awesome and would never hurt you in a thousand years.”

The flip side of having a dog that loves people so much is that, once you own her, she ends up being excited to see anyone but you. If you’ve visited our house in sandals or an open-toed shoe, you probably left with a saliva bath you didn’t ask for. Barbara’s likely told you the story of bringing a half-dozen of her professional friends (in Austin for a conference) to the house to meet Morgan… causing her to get so overwhelmed that she suddenly flopped over and peed onto the floor. (Ever been so excited to see a total stranger that you wet yourself? Neither have I.)

It’s been years since either Barbara or I have commuted to work, but the thing I miss the most about going to an office was being able to come home after eight hours away and have Morgan lose her mind with excitement for even just a few minutes, the way she did with visitors to the house. We’d often joke that she’d abandon us in a second for any other confident, friendly person who acted like her owner — though I’m glad we never found out exactly how accurate that joke was. But the ease with which she gave out love was too endearing to take offense at.

We mostly got the upsides of these neuroses rather than the downsides. Her APA listing said that she was just as eager to go on a run every day as she was to be a couch potato; I was skeptical, but this checked out. She treated every walk like an adventure. We never walked her quite as much as she deserved, but she was too polite to complain.

Her mast cell tumor first showed up in December of 2024. Upon confirming it was cancer, we stayed in Pasadena for Christmas, convinced she didn’t have long to live. The tumor’s location (near where her front leg met her torso) made it impossible to remove entirely, but surgery plus some early chemotherapy was somehow enough to keep it at bay for another year. This was a miracle. We have her surgeon and her veterinary oncologist to thank for giving us another healthy and happy year with our dog.

The tumor re-asserted itself last November. Everything since then has been a rollercoaster — jumping from treatment to treatment, winning some battles but never making much headway in the larger war. I could never read too deeply into her emotional state, but I suspect she’d been in a steady amount of discomfort for at least the last four months, and probably longer. Once again she was too polite to complain.

Here’s what I cannot prove, but will believe for the rest of my life: her baseline joie de vivre was buoyant enough to keep her afloat even through her pain. Last Friday, upon first meeting the hospice vet who would help end that pain, she wagged her tail harder than we’d seen it wag in weeks. The same vet showed up this morning and Morgan summoned all her strength and stood up without any help — something she hadn’t been able to do at all the previous day — and gave an encore tail-wag performance.

As you can imagine, we’re utterly heartbroken. It was the right time and we’ve known this was coming for almost two years, but you can only do so much grieving ahead of time. The moment of goodbye was always going to be devastating.

But the sadness will pass. It was all worth it. Her very existence was enough to deliver us from stress. The occasional tension and bickering — part of living in the same house with someone, even someone you love — could be defused in an instant by any of her inadvertent comedy routines. (Example: Morgan wanders into the room, looks at us earnestly, then looks at the back door, then us again. She repeats until one of us gets up to let her out.)

When you’re tired from work or weary about the state of the world, the fact that someone will follow you around from room to room just to be near you is exactly what you need. (You cat people out there can have your sophisticated and nuanced human/pet relationships; give me the unambiguous affection of a dog any day.) Barbara would’ve loved for her to be slightly more of a cuddler than she was, but this was the next best thing: I won’t put my head in your lap, but I am tethered to you nonetheless. You are the most interesting thing in this house.

I want her legacy to be more than those fond memories, though. Every time I think about Morgan for the rest of my life, I hope I feel the same gratitude that I saw in her eyes every morning. I hope I can take that best quality of hers and make it part of me — in everything, not just in nostalgic reflection. Everyone deserves to feel the warmth she gave out for free.

And whenever we can bear to adopt another dog, I hope that gratitude overwhelms whatever misguided impulse I have to judge that new dog against the standard that Morgan set.

I’ll step right on the cliché here: the gratitude was mutual. She acted like she was the luckiest dog on the planet, but I still can’t believe we managed to win her in this cosmic lottery. The most adoptable dog in dog history was just sitting there on our local rescue’s website. I am thankful for her and thankful for the series of events that placed her into our lives.