““Live the life you’ve dreamed.””

— Henry David Thoreau

Ally’s life should have ended on Labor Day, 2013.

By all reasonable measurements she was dead already, a bag of bones and infected skin that had been found lying and dying a few hours earlier in a supermarket parking lot in Yonkers, New York.

But fate or luck or whatever energy force you personally believe in stepped forward and she was picked up by a passing truck driver who took her to a shelter who got her to a rescue group who raced her to an emergency vet.

His diagnosis was simple. “This is going be a long road. We should put her to sleep.”

In 2013, more than 1.5 million animals were euthanized in the United States. One more would not have been even a rounding error on a rounding error. But on that warm late summer afternoon, Jackie O’Sullivan of Rescue Dogs Rock NY wanted to try to save this one.

And the world was changed for us. Forever.

I ‘met’ Ally later that Labor Day evening. Scrolling absently through Facebook, I came across a post titled, “Ally’s Struggle for Survival.” The pictures were horrific. The medical needs immense. I donated immediately, my heart captured by a face devoid of hope.

The next four weeks were roller coasters. I checked Facebook constantly, scrolling with fear that the next post would announce her death.

They ran every test imaginable, gave her cupboards full of medications and added endless supplements to her food with little sign that anything was working. She would barely eat and wouldn’t drink, her skin was exploding with infection and her paws were so swollen and raw they were almost unrecognizable.

We donated more money and began corresponding with the rescue group. Her Facebook page grew to 11,000 followers, and every update generated hundreds of comments, all of them willing her to live.

She made it to a foster home for two days before being rushed back to the vet for three more. Every step forward was met with a step or sometimes two back. We started to despair.

Then one morning, on a train ride into the city, a video suddenly appeared that made me sit forward in my seat. It was six seconds. Six seconds of Ally trotting down a hallway to fetch a tennis ball.

The next day brought a video of Ally barking to urge a vet tech to hurry up while he made her breakfast.

A corner had been turned.

Two weeks later we went to Brooklyn to meet Ally in person. She smelled terrible, her skin was still a mosaic of infection and her paws looked swollen and painful. But she had a personality and some energy and was fascinated by two rescue puppies that Jackie had brought in to meet her.

We also met her foster mother, the extraordinary Joyce Savino. There are angels on this planet and Joyce is one of them. In the seven years since we met, Joyce has fostered many, many dogs, giving them a foundation on which to build their lives. Ally was her first medical foster. “She is the reason I keep doing what I do,” Joyce told me last Saturday afternoon.

Nine days after that meeting in Brooklyn, Joyce and her family drove Ally up to Millbrook.

The date was November 9th.

She never left us again.

Until last Saturday.

The two thousand, five hundred and seventy six days in between began as we had hoped they might.

For a dog that had been close to death two months earlier, she quickly showed signs of improvement. She started to fill out, losing the three-sizes-too-small-for-her-skin look that she arrived with and her paws slowly responding to laser treatments, sprays and baths.

She slept for America, filling the air with her gentle snoring and our peripheral vision with her high energy dreams.

Day by day, she started to engage with our pack. Ally was our sixth dog, the previous five forming a unit that was even greater than the sum of some extraordinary parts. Harry and Maya had already left us, but Maude, Fred and Summer treated her with the openness and acceptance that had eased each of their arrivals.

Our hope, our dream, was that the rhythm of playful peace and contentment would continue, with Ally adding her own unique signature.

It’s funny how life works out.

“Live the life you’ve dreamed.”

Ally held my heart the instant I saw her. She never let it go. She has it now though we are separated, temporarily, by whatever happens next. Ally already knows the answer to that. I have to wait a while.

In those first days of our relationship - when I knew of her but she did not know me - she lived a nightmare of hopelessness. Back then, her life’s dream was to survive one more day. By the end, as disease overtook her, I came to accept that her dream was to leave.

In between, her dream was to eat, sleep and be loved. And in return she was willing to love.

With one obvious exception. Summer.

Ally hated hot weather. Anything above 78 made her uncomfortable. She hated rain and cold and wind and snow too.

We decided early on there was about a 20 degree spectrum in which she’d be happy to go outside. Anything else was a negotiation.

But she really hated Summer.

For those of you that have read the stories of our other dogs, Summer was our fifth. She died a year ago after fifteen years of living life out loud.

For the six months following Ally’s arrival, Summer mothered her. And for a while, as Ally recovered, we had a unified pack.

Ally, who had never learned the social niceties of dog language during her awful first year and a half of life, wanted to be part of the pack and tried to play. Summer gently rebuked her excesses with maternal nudges and corrections. And we watched, as proud parents, as our family took on new shape.

What we failed to spot, as Ally’s strength returned and her confidence grew, was that she was not observing the boundaries that Summer was setting. And when, on one fateful morning, Ally decided to finish Summer’s breakfast while Summer was still eating it, the ensuing fight, and the three others that quickly followed - each worse than its predecessor - changed all of our lives.

Within weeks we had divided our house in order to keep Summer and Ally apart. With the exception of three occasions over the following six years when we made a mistake about keeping a specific door closed, Ally and Summer never again shared the same room. It was a stressful situation, but one that we felt responsible for creating and felt responsible for managing. Even with the restriction, we felt we could offer them both loving homes. As we look back over each of their lives, I’m certain that we did.

I’m also certain that given the choice of living in a split house with Ally or an open house without her, we would choose a life that included Ally every time. A lot of people thought we were insane, but Summer and Ally were part of us and we were part of them and we did what was needed to make it work.

Part of what made it work was the fact that I was traveling in to the city for 2-3 days each week. By the end of our first year together, Ally was joining me regularly at our apartment in Manhattan.

She took to city life like the proverbial duck to water. The noises rolled off her back, the traffic left her unimpressed and the smells of the sidewalk attracted her with the magnetic connection of a bloodhound on the trail of foie gras.

She stopped only for one thing. The attention of passers-by. Which meant we stopped a lot.

I have never been with anyone - human or canine - that attracted as much attention as Ally. Wherever we went, people wanted to meet her. Other owners would walk by, looking at us forlornly as if to say, ‘what’s wrong with my dog?’ But regardless of their dog’s breed or beauty, they were always an afterthought. Ally emitted people pheromones like no other.

Maybe it was the way she walked, a happy, purposeful trot that always seemed to say, “I’ve got somewhere to be and I can’t wait to get there.”

Maybe it was the way she looked at you, always giving her audience her full attention.

Maybe it was her ears, the subtlest changes broadcasting the breadth and depth of her feelings - from happy to hopeful to resigned acceptance.

Or maybe it was the patience and understanding she showed for everyone who wanted some of her time and attention. Like the little girl in Nantucket, one warm August morning, who was terrified of Pit Bulls but who got down on the ground to stroke Ally at eye level and then wrapped her arms around her as we left.

Whatever it was, Ally was magnetic. And that soon became a cornerstone of our life.

Except for her relationship with Summer, Ally was the most phlegmatic dog I’ve ever met and leaving her alone for 3-4 hours at a time was the most natural thing in the world. Often, I’d come back from my meetings to find her curled up in exactly the same spot I’d left her.

Indeed, sleeping was a big part of Ally’s dream life. We always suspected that the physical trauma of her early years had left a permanent mark on her energy levels and she was never happier than when she was curled up somewhere warm. I have dozens if not hundreds of pictures of her sleeping. Angelic is an over-used word. It also happens to fit.

At the end of 2015, we came back into the city after a trip to Chicago and found a lawsuit taped to the door of our apartment. It was from the landlords who were suing us for bringing an ‘aggressive animal’ into the building. Clearly, they had never met Ally and for a day or two we thought about fighting it. But the more we thought about it, the more we relished the idea of being freed of the responsibility of maintaining an apartment. We quickly ended the lease and decided to solve our New York accommodation needs another way.

Within weeks, Ally and I had become regular guests of The Edition Hotel at Madison Square Park. In the movie of Ally’s life, her days and nights at The Edition would be the happy ending, fade-to-black moment.

The Edition welcomed her like royalty. Within weeks, they had put her ‘on staff’, awarding her her own employee identity card.

Special treats were held for her behind reception, and at the end of every walk Ally would insist that we visit the wonderful people who manned the desk. Each of them had their own routine with her, and with each she played her part perfectly.

The housekeeping and guest services staff all came to know her too and whether patiently waiting for an elevator or while the turn down service was performed, Ally was the center of their attention.

One night, about a year after our arrival, there was a knock at our door. I opened it to find two of the housekeeping staff, wearing party hats and holding balloons and a dog-friendly cup cake. “You told us that May the 1st is her birthday!” they exclaimed. I might have technically been the customer, but there was no question she was the guest.

Ally came to see the Edition as her primary home, greeting our return each week by leaping onto the bed and wriggling blissfully on the fake fur throw that is one of the hotel’s trademarks.

At night, I would wrap her in one of the hotel’s fluffy robes and she would wait for me to climb in so she could lean against me and begin the night-long battle for dominance of the bed. Many mornings I woke to discover that I had been successfully pushed to the very edge of the mattress. At home, Chris and I began to call nighttime Ally, ‘lumpy’ such was her skill at making herself a suddenly immovable object when it came to bed ownership.

Her bed gymnastics were, in many ways, the height of her athletic ambition. In our early days, tug was her game of choice, never happier than when I would spin her around as she gripped a rope toy in her teeth. But, even in her prime, 15 minutes of play would be more than enough for her and as she grew older she would be satisfied with a trot around the porch and a 1 minute game of tug. Before Ally arrived I had never parented a pit-bull. But through her I learned that everything they say about them being ‘nanny dogs’ is true. Even in her most excited moments, she willingly gave up any toy or stop any playing the instant I asked her to. I would have trusted her with anyone of any age at any time.

And that trust allowed us to travel with her as often as we wanted. Wherever we all went, whether to the Edition or on vacation, she was the easiest traveler we’ve ever known. Nine hour drives with one five minute break were effortless for her and she met the ‘ferry, trains and automobiles’ version of what became an annual trip to Nantucket with absolute equanimity.

In the end, she just wanted to be with us. And we wanted to be with her. And that simple reality allowed us to make all our dreams come true.

The one thing we couldn’t give her was a long and healthy life. Eighteen months ago, she started to develop significant digestive issues and after a number of tests and procedures, we finally sought the help of a specialist.

Ally introduced us to angels.

Ally’s foster mother Joyce is one. Another is Dr. John Broussard. To simply call him a vet is to fail entirely to capture the spirit of a man that we came to know much too well. For almost a year, his expertise, his compassion and his determination guided us to a regimen that gave her some degree of stability. And when Summer died and then Covid hit, and she had our full time attention, Ally was as happy as I’ve ever known her.

Having a pack - Harry, Maya, Maude, Fred, Summer - had always been a big part of our lives and we knew that at some point we would build the pack again. As we looked back at videos of the first months after Ally’s arrival, we were surprised to see how much time she and Maude had spent playing in the year before Maude’s tragic death to cancer. When we thought about how Ally interacted with dogs in the park in the city, we started to realize that Ally wanted to be connected to a pack in a way that had never happened when she came to us before the Ally-Summer feud ended that version of our life.

We were convinced that Ally, with John Broussard’s help, would get back to a predictably healthy life and in the middle of this summer we decided we were open to the possibility of a new addition.

One evening, this face appeared on Instagram.

Two weeks later - and a quick text exchange with the extraordinary animal communicator Karen Miura, whose understanding of energy we can sense but not see we have come to value enormously - Sam joined us as the seventh member of the pack.

Ally was surprised for a few days but slowly and then increasingly quickly, the part of Ally that had always wanted to connect with other dogs, started to emerge. For a few blissful weeks in the mid and late summer, Sam started to teach Ally how to play. For the first time in her life, Ally was completely connected to a pack.

Medical science has made remarkable progress in the last few years. Sometimes it can respond to prayers. Sometimes it can’t.

In early April, Ally experienced a seizure. In May she started to limp. By the end of June, we had exhausted all the obvious diagnoses and treatment plans and in July, Ally went through a comprehensive MRI. It showed nothing. The neurologist who conducted the exam has a strong reputation but it quickly became obvious he was trying to fit us and Ally into a bucket.

The following four months were a roller coaster of declining highs and increasingly lower lows. A follow up visit to the neurologist invoked no greater curiosity on his part and an increasingly dismissive attitude. Five days later, a second seizure and an emergency visit to the same animal facility produced a conversation with a second neurologist who was, if it is possible, even less interested than the first.

Ally’s symptoms were varied and worsening. We got her home and then a day later took her to John Broussard. He is neither an emergency vet nor a neurologist, but the care that he and the staff at Hudson Highlands gave her will live with me until the end of my days. One of the vet techs told us that a whole team of people were caring for her. They had named themselves, “Team Ally.” Even in her sickest days, her magnetic appeal was not diminished.

A day later, we got a call from John Broussard with two pieces of new information. Ally had suffered another seizure. And he thought he had figured out what might be causing her increasingly complex and confounding symptoms. John had spent several hours looking up research into any kind of study that might explain Ally’s condition. He sent us a link to what he had found.

“Cerebellar Cortical Degeneration in Adult American Staffordshire Terriers.”

Every symptom matched Ally’s. The description also matched what Karen Miura had told us she was feeling about the cause of Ally’s illness.

It is easy to see what you want to see and ignore evidence that is right in front of you. We knew Ally was very ill. But looking at her through the lens of a degenerative neurological condition made everything fall into place.

Including our acceptance of what needed to happen next.

We coordinated a plan to bring Ally’s body to the University of Connecticut for a full autopsy so that others might learn from the 18 month journey that Ally had taken with us, John Broussard, Karen Miura and with Ally’s regular vet, Jerry Scheck of Hopewell Animal Hospital.

The day after Thanksgiving, we brought Ally home for the last time, reasonably confident that she could survive for 12-18 hours without medical intervention.

Ally and I slept on the couch in the den and Chris and Sam slept beside her on the floor. Just after 8am, Jerry arrived. As he pulled up outside, Ally lifted her head and barked. It was the last sound she made.

At 8:28am, lying where Harry and Maya and Summer had all taken their last breath, Ally quietly left us. Through our sobbing we stroked her head and told her how much we loved her and thanked her for everything she had given us.

For being the dog that was loved by so many people.

For being the dog who left behind so much more than she ever asked for.

For being the dog who should have died seven years earlier but who got to live her dream.

We love you Al-Pal with all of our hearts. And we know, we know, that under the watchful gaze of Harry and Maya, you are playing now as you never have before.

With joy. With freedom.

With Maude and with Fred.