““Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.” ”

— Marilyn Monroe. The other blonde bombshell.

The end of Summer came on Monday. It was November 11th. I felt the warmth slip away as I held her head in my lap, her body suddenly lighter as the sprit that powered this irresistible life force flowed out of our lives. She was ready to go. We encouraged her to go. And I am lost without her. My blonde bombshell.

I met Summer on the corner of Oak and Rush in the summer of 2007. I was volunteering at Paws Chicago’s Angels with Tails adoption event and was entrusted with finding this slightly manic but stunningly beautiful girl a home. A year before I had met Fred the same way, at almost exactly the same spot.

Summer exploded on the pack of four dogs and two humans that had found each other over the previous twelve years. Harry and Maya and Maude and Fred and Chris and Charles. We didn’t need a fifth. Weren’t looking for a fifth. Didn’t want a fifth.

Summer was two and a half years old, an opinionated adventurer with a troubled past, always eager to greet the next person and explore the next open door. She pulled me around Chicago’s Gold Coast for two hours before I finally won her attention by buying her a double hamburger at Johnny Rockets. For the next 12 years we shared a ride filled with mayhem, adventure and love. So much love.

It was four months before Summer became a permanent part of our family - a torturous process that first saw her adopted and then returned by a young couple entirely incapable of handling her lust for life or her separation anxiety.

I attended many adoption events with her, posted flyers advertising her, hired behaviorists and trainers for her, and reached out to everyone who might be interested in adding 50 pounds of unfiltered love to their lives. In the end, there was only one taker. Me.

It took some time to convince Chris this was a good idea. At one point before the adoption was final, she said it was her or Summer. I’m glad Chris decided to stay. She gave Summer so much love and care during her life, especially over the last few months as dementia and arthritis took their toll.

Summer was absorbed into the rest of the pack as though she was a founding member. She and Fred and Maude were inseparable, swimming for hours at dog beach or cavorting in the snow or lying wrapped around each other. Each of them entirely different. All of them completely connected. Diversity and inclusion.

But for all that was effortless, we quickly found out that Summer is a force of nature and for several months her arrival brought almost endless drama. One evening, when I was traveling, Chris was pulled from her dinner with a friend by a call from the alarm company. Racing home she was met by two Chicago police officers ready to take down the intruder. Instead they found Summer, rocking her crate so violently across the kitchen floor that she had set off the alarm. We later found out that the first family to adopt Summer had found her energy so overwhelming they had confined her to a crate for most of her first two years of life, her back molars nearly worn away by her attempts to chew through the metal bars. The police left and Summer never spent another minute in a crate.

Our move to Millbrook gave her room to roam and the safety of an environment that understood and protected her. Her energy filled every corner of the house and every blade of grass that surrounds it. Every time we came home, we would open the den door and stand back as Summer and Maude were catapulted past us, racing each other in a frenzied lap of the garage, nipping at each other’s heels before running back in the house to greet us, Summer’s tongue only the most visible expression of the grin that swallowed her face.

But it was the pack that brought lasting order to Summer’s chaos, Harry’s quiet but unmistakable authority and Maya’s unshakable calm the perfect framework for Summer’s leap first, ask questions later approach to life. Original thinkers need firm but benevolent order around them if they are to thrive and for Summer, her pack gave her precisely that.

She was the final element of a jigsaw puzzle of mismatched pieces that formed the most perfect whole. If you have read about Harry and Maya and Maude and Fred, you know that the arrival of each of them into our lives was driven by emotion, devoid of any kind of strategy. It should not have worked. But it did. Every day, in every moment, they fit together as though designed by a Swiss watch maker, the movement of each perfectly in sync with the others, even as their roles changed and evolved.

Summer loved every member of her pack unconditionally and unreservedly, but this was not true of every other dog she met. We never discovered what made her decide whether to love or loathe. But, as the years went by she changed, and from the anxious, opinionated dog that I met on Oak St, emerged a soul of pure, unfiltered kindness.

When people were around, Summer wanted to be close. Whether you were her friend or neighbor, a child or a parent, an animal communicator or her guardian, she trusted without hesitation. Nestled beside you, her naps were animated affairs filled with high energy chases. Awake, she embraced you with love that had no off button. There was no cautious assessment. She was all in, always.

Summer lived head first. She was an explorer of all things and places, a ball chaser of limitless passion and a swimmer who didn’t just enter a body of water, she invaded it.

Three months after we adopted her we lost her for 3 hours in the woods above the Potomac river, unprepared for her sudden dash for the deer that had appeared 100 yards away. We finally found her standing on a ridge, 30 feet above us, grinning and panting with exhaustion, oblivious to the fact that the bottom of her paw had been ripped open by a broken bottle. Her joy for life was infectious and when Summer was with you the world seemed more hopeful, her corner of it filled with curiosity and possibility.

This love of life never left her and even in her final weeks, when arthritis had left her back legs almost too frail to support her, you would still find her in the bottom field, checking for interlopers and exploring, unconcerned by any thought of whether she could make it back up the hill.

In her quiet moments, she redecorated the furniture to her liking and found imaginative spots in which to warm herself, her tail thumping with happiness when we found her. “There’s my beauty girl.” Over twelve years I must have said that phrase twelve thousand times. It was always true. Inside and out.

When, eight months after we arrived in Millbrook, Harry died, Summer instinctively took over the role of guardian, watching out for all of us for the next decade.

She did this without ego, happy to let Maya lead the pack in her own quiet way, but conscious always of her responsibility to keep us safe, her barks filling the air at the arrival of any visitor or the sighting of activity on the horizon. At night, she slept on a dog bed beside me, her presence powerful and reassuring. More than once, she followed me downstairs to explore some 4am sound, her confidence filling the gaps in mine.

As Maya began to suffer the effects of aging and dementia took hold, Summer quietly began to mother her.

Fred was the healer in the family, his care for all of us obvious and ever-present. But Summer’s soft and gentle concern for Maya was everywhere, her willingness to lie quietly beside and with her older sister given freely and without limits.

When Maya died a year later, the three remaining pack members became an even tighter unit. Roughly the same age, they flowed together with ease, playing, exploring and sleeping in complete harmony, Summer’s confidence anchoring Maude and her companionship empowering Fred.

It was a period of calm and contentment. It was not to last.

We are all on our own journey, interwoven and influenced by others to be sure, but ultimately we are all responsible for the decisions we make. I have lived with this one.

On Labor Day 2013 I saw a story of a dog on Facebook titled “Ally's Struggle for Survival.” A dog had been found on the streets of Yonkers, New York, all but dead.

She ended up with a rescue organization that funded her care through social media donations. Three months at the emergency vet later and Ally came to live with us.

For six months, Summer mothered her in every way imaginable, trying to teach her the rules, comforting her during her recovery and tolerating her lack of social sensitivity.

We were oblivious to some of the signs that Ally wasn’t getting it, and we did little to help Summer teach Ally where the boundaries of pack hierarchy lay. A group’s culture is a sensitive organism, a life force in its own right. Looking back, I would have paid more attention to this one and made sure Ally played by its rules. We have all paid a price for that lack of leadership on my part.

One day, fully recovered and gaining in strength, confidence and entitlement, Ally decided that she would help Summer finish her dinner. This was the final straw for Summer, and a dog fight ensued. Followed the next day by another, and a week later by another, each worse than the last. Finally we accepted the inevitable. They could never be in the same space again.

For the next six years, we lived in a house in which one door was always closed, our texts to each other navigating the movements of dogs through the house and outside. Most people would not have done it. If you’ve read this far, you understand why we did.

A year after Ally’s arrival, Maude died, traumatically and suddenly, and the pack dynamic changed again. Summer became Fred’s constant companion, the two of them inseparable and devoted.

Looking back, it’s also now clear to me that Summer made another choice. By all rights the house and its humans were hers. She could easily - very easily - have made it impossible for us to provide an environment in which Ally could also live safely and happily. But instead, she focused on Fred and on the two of us and allowed the interloper on the other side of the door to find a home with us too. It is easy in life to wish to be kind. It is another thing entirely to make the sacrifices that kindness sometimes requires.

For the next four years, Summer and Fred were never apart except when, in what turned out to be Fred’s final few weeks, he was gone for the day having cataract surgery or when he was hospitalized with pneumonia. On each occasion, Summer sat by the door waiting for his return.

When Fred died, suddenly and unexpectedly early one July morning, we were certain that Summer’s own death would be days or weeks away, her heart broken, her separation anxiety from her early days with us, re-inflamed.

Instead, she was re-born, a blonde phoenix who rose from the ashes of the loss of Fred to finally, live life on her own terms.

She wandered the property with abandon, one day appearing on the distant horizon, oblivious to our calls until I walked out to explain that she was too old for such forays. She looked at me curiously as if to say, ‘after all these years, you still don’t know me?’

In the last few weeks she aged rapidly and last Wednesday, when I was in London, she stopped eating entirely. I got home on Sunday night and on Monday we asked Karen Miura, the animal communicator we have learned to trust, to confirm what I already knew. Summer was waiting to go.

The intensity of that hour with Karen is hard to describe and will be impossible for some to believe. As Summer rested her head on my lap, Karen pointed to where the spirits of Fred and Maude were sitting in the room. At the open door, the spirit of a larger dog that none of us recognized, sat guard. Summer’s final evolution and the reunion of the pack had begun.

That evening, our vet Jerry Scheck made his third visit to our house in the last eleven years and a few minutes later Summer left us, lying on my lap on the same couch in the same corner of the same room where Harry and Maya had taken their last breath.

I was conscious of her suddenly becoming lighter on my lap, but that was the only physical evidence that anything had changed until I laid her head gently on the blanket and saw only the lifeless shell Summer had left behind, its job done, her work here complete.

Life with Summer was not a straight line and she did not aways make it easy. But she lived and loved and laughed like no other spirit I have ever met and I am grateful beyond expression to have found her and that she chose me to love. There is no greater gift.

As I write this she is back with her pack and they are rolling in the grass and running through the surf and curled up next to each other on the couch.

I don’t know what happens next. None of us do. But I hope with all of my broken heart that they will again need someone to throw the ball and the frisbee, that they will again need a lap on which to lay their heads. And I pray, yes, pray, that someone is me.

Thank you, my blonde bombshell. Thank you, my beauty girl. For everything.