I talked about my second guide, Telus, here. Today, as it would have been his fourteenth birthday, I will tell you about my first guide dog.
My first guide dog’s name was Trep. He was born on May 7, 2004, and he passed away on September 22, 2017 at the age of thirteen.
He was a black lab/golden retriever cross. He had a stocky build; soft, floppy ears; and longer fur, especially on his tail. I received him on July 27, 2006; we graduated as a working team on August 18, 2006; and he worked until January 29, 2016.
He was the best thing that ever happened to me.
I don’t remember much of his information. I don’t remember his parents’ names, though they were told to me at one point. I know he had three other siblings, and at least one of them became a working guide dog. His puppy raiser was an older gentleman. I met him on a few occasions and he seemed very kind.
Trep walked across the stage with me at two separate school graduations. He slept under my desk for grades 9 through 12, and my first three years of university. We walked together down thousands of kilometres of sidewalk and hallways. He guided me around countless obstacles. He travelled with me all over Canada, to Disneyland, Seattle, and even Peru. He easily won the hearts of all who met him.
I miss him every day. My heart still hurts.
The first time I met Trep it was several months before I was to actually start class. I was thirteen and almost finished grade 8. The guide dog school from which I received Trep provides domicile training, so they brought out Trep and another dog (who was actually his sister) for me to walk. They knew at this point that they were going to give me Trep, but they let me try both to see how the dogs and I worked together.
Working Trep for the first time was a breeze. The trainers from the school had warned me that the dogs would probably walk slower and look back at the instructors while we were working for confirmation that they were doing the right thing. Trep didn’t do any of that. From the moment I picked up his harness handle and commanded, “forward,” he worked with me like we had been together for years. His sister, on the other hand, pretty much refused to work for me at all. It’s quite funny, I know the person who received Trep’s sister, and the dogs did this exact thing to her but reversed.
So, when the instructor asked me which dog I thought I would work best with (keeping in mind they already knew which dog I would be paired with, but I did not) I instantly replied, “Trep!” When they asked me why, I replied, “because he actually works for me.”
The day I received Trep was surreal. I was excited and nervous. My family had never had a dog, and though I had spent some time around dogs, I didn’t quite know what to do or expect.
The trainer brought Trep to the house with a large collection of supplies. There were bowls; food; beds; toys; a rain coat; leashes; a new collar, and most important of all, Trep’s stiff, new working harness. I didn’t realize dogs needed so many things. I remember when the trainer left that first day I felt this momentary jolt of panic. What was I supposed to do with a dog?
I remember Trep being confronted by our cats and cowering in the corner because he hadn’t been around cats before. Picture a large 80-pound dog cowering in the corner while two cats menace him with their fur all raised on their backs. Trep would continue to fear the cats for a few days until he witnessed them fighting, and he bravely stuck his head between the two combatants and barked his displeasure. From that day on Trep and the cats maintained a “live and let live” policy.
The first evening I had Trep I was alone in my room crying. I was upset about something someone had done. I was sitting on the floor and Trep was lying on his bed. As I continued to cry, Trep crept out of his bed and crawled into my lap. I knew at that moment that he had my heart forever. It was my first glimpse of his enormous, caring heart which would capture the hearts of all who met him.
Honestly, I can’t remember training in great detail. It was twelve years ago after all. I remember it being exhausting. I was the youngest person the particular guide dog school had ever given a guide dog too at the time, and I think they really wanted to be certain our partnership was firmly established and cemented. We worked extremely hard for the three weeks of training.
I remember once waking up abruptly in the middle of the night part of the way through training, sitting bolt-up right in bed, and commanding, “Trep, forward!” Trep was very confused.
Trep always appeared serious when he was working, so much so that people often commented that he looked sad. It’s not that he was unhappy, he just took his job very seriously. As soon as the harness came out, he knew he had an important job to do. He would walk with his tail raised but never wagging. He would refuse to give me kisses or do his tricks like shake a paw while he was working. However, when the harness came off and he was off duty he would run around the house and squeak his toys with abandon. His favourite toys were those that made noise, the louder and more ear-piercing the better.
He loved to play fetch. I remember endless afternoons standing in the backyard under the warm sun throwing a squeaky toy for Trep. He would always bring the slobbery toy back to my hands, so I could throw it again and again.
We would also play hide and seek with his toys. I would put him in a sit-stay and hide one of his toys somewhere in the house. Then I would tell him to go find it, and he would run around the house looking for it.
When things calmed down he would take one of his stuffed toys and lie wherever we were in the house and suck on it. His favourite was a penguin that he came with named Penguie. I’m not sure why he did this, but it is something that seemed to comfort him. We would often shop for his stuffed toys by whether they had a “suckable” head. All his stuffed animals had their heads sucked into a cone shape. One of the signs we noticed of his declining health in the last months of his life was that he no longer could suck on his favourite toys.
The teenage years are rough on everyone. One of the more liberating experiences I had with Trep was being able to leave the house and pound the pavement when I was upset. There were many sunset-lit walks around our neighbourhood where I poured my emotions into my feet and the sidewalk. We’d often walk to the little park near our house, and Trep would lie peacefully in the sand while I would swing on the squeaky, old swing set.
I know those days were fraught with emotion and angst, but to me now, they are beautiful, golden days with my boy by my side.
The thing about Trep was that he was my constant companion. He was always at my side, and he fit there. He was such a good boy, and he made our partnership so easy.
I rarely ever had to correct him. He had a sensitive personality and his whole desire in life was to please me. If I corrected him for a negative behavior once, he would probably never do that thing again.
He was so intelligent. If we walked a route once, he would remember it forever. The only problem with this came if I ever desired to change up a route. Trep would look at me, hesitate, and then try to go the normal way. With a lot of praise, we would end up going the way I wanted to go, but Trep would always look at me s if he were saying, “We always go this way, you silly human. Why do you want to change? I think we should go the regular way.”
The main lesson I had to learn with Trep in the early days was to trust him entirely. Don’t get me wrong, I always followed the harness, but sometimes I would doubt his sense of direction. I remember once taking the bus to work because it was cold. I normally walked, and so this was a new adventure for me. We had learned this particular route several years earlier, but never used it. When we got off the bus Trep tried to steer us to the left, but I was pretty sure we needed to turn right. It was minus thirty-five degrees Celsius, and there was absolutely no one around. We walked for a while and I increasingly began to realize that I was lost. I heard someone’s crunching footsteps in the snow up ahead and I called out asking for directions. Of course, Trep had totally been right and I was wrong. This was not the only time that Trep’s amazing sense of direction was bang on the nose and I doubted it. However, I quickly learned that ninety-nine percent of the time Trep knew what he was doing.
Trep was so unflappable. I remember walking once down a busy road and Trep being completely calm while a dog lunged and barked at him from the other side of a chain-link fence on one side, and a fire truck had its siren wailing on the other.
Because I was young when I received him, I did some silly things with him that he stoically took in stride. I tried roller blading with him. Somehow, he instinctively knew to slow down further back before the curb, so we could stop in time. I also made obstacle courses in the backyard out of lawn furniture and other odds and ends that he would run through. I even convinced him once to sit in my lap and go down the slide at the park (which he understandably did not appreciate). That poor dog put up with a lot.
I remember while in training, we were working through a busy mall. Trep guided me too close to a sign, and I bumped it with my shoulder. The sign fell to the floor with an enormous crash. For the rest of that day Trep was so concerned with making sure I didn’t bump into anything that he even guided me in a big arc around a candy that was on the floor, just in case that candy turned out to be a threat to my safety.
He was always protective of me. In fact, for the first couple of weeks I had him, he wouldn’t let my mom hug me. It was funny, though, because he ended up having a greater sense of devotion towards her over time. Don’t get me wrong, he always worked for me and loved me, but he adored my mom, and I can’t blame him. I adore her, too.
I’ve mentioned that Trep had a big heart. I know this is assigning human emotions to a dog, but I truly believe that Trep loved and cared for people. For instance, while my mom was going through chemo, Trep would lie beside her in bed with his paw resting on her. If she moved, he would wake up and check on her. Any other time, he would always just lie at the bottom of the bed.
When my mom’s boyfriend had to be rushed to the hospital by ambulance, Trep was so concerned that he lay awake all night in my doorway on guard.
When I had gallbladder surgery, Trep lay at my bedside for the entire time it took for me to get up and start going about life again.
Trep absolutely loved swimming and water. The first time we visited the ocean he guided me straight into the water. We were heading for the water to check it out (it was my first time at the ocean), but he just kept going joyfully into the waves. Whenever we were near a body of water larger than a puddle, Trep desired to swim in it, and he would whine pitifully if I didn’t let him.
Despite his love of water, he hated puddles. He would manage to walk around puddles in such a way that his paws would stay dry while I would get soaked.
He also loved the snow. He would prance around in it, and when he was running around the backyard he would shove his face into the snow drifts to smell the snow. He’d end up with a snow-covered face and a wildly-wagging tail.
Trep had a full life. Not only did he navigate me through the crowded hallways of three separate schools, but he also traveled with me to many different locales. He rode on boats, trains, buses, golf carts, and planes. He climbed mountains, swam in the ocean, and went camping. He attended sporting events, visited the top of the CN Tower and the Seattle Space Needle, and rode some of the rides at Disneyland. He traveled to two other countries and always guided and behaved with aplomb. Even in Peru, where there were wild street dogs, markets full of new smells (including plucked chickens out on display), and erratic drivers, Trep was calm and collected.
He loved to fly. All we had to say was, “Trep, we’re going to the airport!” and he would jump up and start wagging his tail. I can’t even begin to calculate how many flights he took with me, but it was definitely over fifty.
It feels like I’ve said a lot, and yet nothing at all. I struggle to encapsulate what Trep meant to me and the depth of our relationship. When I was writing Trep’s eulogy I started out by attempting to put our bond into words. I couldn’t do it.
I think our bond was something that had to be witnessed, because it can’t be described. It was present in our seamless movements when we were working together. It was visible in the way Trep appeared to read my mind. It was felt in the way Trep absolutely trusted me and I trusted him in return. I could feel it in the perfect level of pull he had in his harness. People tend to say that my guide dog must be my best friend. Trep wasn’t my best friend. My best friend is human. However, our relationship was deeper than friendship. He was a part of me. He was my eyes, my confidence, my grace, my independence, my joy, my life. These words are so pitiful and don’t even begin to articulate what he meant to me.
I knew when it was time to retire Trep. He started slowing down dramatically in harness. He would always let me put his harness on him, but when we’d leave the house, he would keep trying to turn around to go home. He would be happy to go for a walk on leash, but if he had to work, he was reluctant. He worked until he was eleven, when I received <a href=https://insightfromtheshadows.wordpress.com/2018/04/22/my-guide-dog-journey-guide-dog-number-two-telus/<my second guide, Telus. By the end, I was mostly guiding Trep.
The night before I graduated with Telus, the instructor came to collect Trep’s harness. It was such a sad moment for me. I wasn’t handing Trep over, but I felt like I was losing something important with the loss of Trep’s harness. I cried. It was the end of an era. I knew Trep had to retire, and I was looking forward to working with Telus, but I knew Telus wasn’t a Trep. We are told not to compare our new guide to our old one because they are separate beings with individual personalities, but you can’t help it, and I was already having some niggling doubts about Telus because of what I would later discover were the seeds of the anxiety issues that would lead to his early retirement. However, I pushed these doubts to the back of my mind and tried to soldier on with my new guide.
I’m not sure when Trep became ill, he always had a sensitive stomach and would vomit if I didn’t feed him exactly on schedule, but we knew it was bad shortly after we moved in 2016 and he wouldn’t eat and would throw up anything he drank. We took him to the vet and they did a blood test. His white blood cell count was elevated and so they believed he had an infection. He was given antibiotics and some medication to settle his stomach. This settled his stomach down for a while, but not for long. When we took him back they ran more tests and performed some X-rays. We were giving the gutting news that Trep had cancer in July 2016. He had tumours in his lungs, stomach, and chest. There was nothing they could do, and we didn’t want to put him through any procedures. The vet informed us that Trep probably only had a few months to live. We took him home and made him as comfortable as possible.
Trep ended up living for fourteen more months after his diagnosis, and he probably would have hung on longer if we hadn’t made the decision to put him to sleep. We watched as he slowly lost interest in the things he used to enjoy. Our walks became slower and shorter. He stopped sucking on his favourite toys. He would get hot easily and pant. He couldn’t climb the stairs after a while, so I slept on the couch in the living room on the main floor. He would go for weeks eating just fine, and then he would stop eating for a day or two. We eventually were feeding him chicken, vegetables, and rice noodles instead of his kibble, but then he would stop eating that and would switch back to kibble for a while. Near the end he was mainly eating cottage cheese. It was a sometimes-daily struggle to find what kind of food he would eat. He was so skinny, and his fur was falling out in clumps. I was scared that I would wake up one morning to find that he had passed away in the night.
He just kept hanging on, and we weren’t ready to say goodbye. However, we realized that we couldn’t be selfish. Though Trep didn’t demonstrate at all that he was in pain, that didn’t mean that he wasn’t. He didn’t have the same life that he had previously. He stopped coming to the door to greet us when we came home. He was fading, but he hung on to life with his quiet stubborn streak. I believe that if we hadn’t made the decision to put him to sleep, he would have clung to life with every last ounce of strength in his body. He knew we needed him.
The last week of his life we pampered Trep. I invited our friends and family to come to the house to say goodbye. Because he touched so many people’s lives, and meant so much to them too, many people showed up at the door to spend time with him.
We fed him all his favourite foods. My cousin even brought him a McDonalds hamburger which Trep gobbled up in two bites.
The night before we took him to the vet I slept on the floor with him and we cuddled in the darkness. I attempted to let Trep know just how much I loved him through my soft words and gentle pets. I wept, and just as on the first day I received him, he comforted me with his solid, warm presence.
On the way to the vet we stopped to pick up Dairy Queen ice cream for Trep. He had always loved ice cream as an occasional treat. Because I am not fond of the cone part, I would give it to him. However, that day he got an entire cone to himself. He had it gone in two bites.
Saying goodbye to Trep was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. I had requested that we put him to sleep outside in the open air. It was a chilly day in September, and the grass was wet, but we were provided with a warm blanket to sit on with Trep. Our vet’s office is out in the country, so it was very peaceful.
I lay beside him through the whole process, feeling the cold moisture from the ground creeping through the blanket underneath me, and Trep’s solid warmth beside me. I just kept telling him that I love him so much and kissing his head. I had family there with me including Telus. I was so touched and grateful for all of those who loved Trep and came to say their final goodbyes with me.
Leaving his body behind, looking so small and sad, was hard on me. We wrapped the blanket around him and slowly made our way home. I knew that the vet staff were collecting his body, but I kept thinking of him left there on the ground, cold and alone. I am crying as I write this. Even though I have his ashes safe and warm at home, I can still see him huddled there on the ground as I left him behind.
There is so much I haven’t written in this post. I could go on and on forever about Trep. He was such a good boy.
He loved Christmas, and he would gleefully unwrap his presents (and sometimes presents that weren’t his).
He knew how to bow on command. This came in handy at graduation time.
He always had to be touching me when he was lying down in harness. AT school he would always have a paw or his head resting on my feet under my desk.
He helped pick out my cat, Aerin. I brought him with me to pick out a kitten, and she was the only one that wasn’t afraid of him. She jumped onto his head and rode around on his back. In fact, when she was a baby she believed he was her mother and would follow him everywhere and sleep in his bed with him. She watched him play fetch, and so she learned to play too. She watched him chew on a bone, so she tried it out as well.
He learned his commands in French. I decided to teach them to him on a whim, and he picked them up nearly instantly.
He had perfect comic timing. When I returned from Peru, my mom’s boyfriend asked Trep whether he had learned to bark in Spanish, and Trep, who normally never barked, let out a loud woof.
He rarely ever barked, but he would grumble at times, especially when he was hungry. My mom would tell him to tell me to “feed me mom,” and he would come to me and grumble, “rah-rah-raaaah!”
I could just go on and on forever…
Today Trep would have turned fourteen. There is not a day that passes where I don’t remember and miss him. I wear a pawprint pendant around my neck to keep his memory close to my heart.
I wish he could be here to meet my new dog. I wish he could be here, so I could give him one more pat and one more hug. I wish he could be here, so I could tell him one more time that I love him and always will…
Happy birthday, Treppy Bear! You were just the best dog.
“When you miss a thing it leaves a hole that only the thing you miss can fill.”
–Richard Wagamese
Insight from the Shadows 
Found your blog through a recommendation by a mutual friend. I absolutely loved reading this love letter to Trep. It’s sweet and funny and transcendent, and made me cry buckets at the end.
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