Beans

On the contours of loss and time, in memory of our beloved girl.

admiring the big tennis ball in the sky

The beginning 

I like to think I manifested Georgia. 

As most lost postgraduates are wont to do after leaving school, I wondered about the logistical limits of my freedom. I could do anything! Growing up in a household that always had three to four stray cats in rotation at any one time, the idea of getting a dog felt foreign and exciting.  

I had always liked German Shepherds, imagining us a funny pair; there was something about the idea of a dog that looked as though they belonged next to a TSA officer, not a 5-foot tall Real Housewives fan. As I was obsessed with the Vance Joy song “Georgia” at the time, the name Georgia seemed perfect. 

So when I ended up at the same gathering as my now-husband Thomas for the second time in fall 2017 and he told me he had just gotten a German Shepherd puppy named Georgia, I couldn’t believe it. I told him about my TSA dog fantasies and attachment to that name. He didn’t believe me. To this day, I still don’t think he does. 

In perhaps the most specific act of spontaneous generation I’ve ever unwittingly executed, a few months later I began dating him, and with that…Georgia.

The middle

It would be impossible to capture everything that happened in the following six years, but what feels important to include is that, in some ways, Georgia was my closest friend and companion. After we moved to Fort Collins, Thomas had to go to (another) nine weeks of officer training for the Air Force, and Georgia and I learned our new life side by side. It was Beans who I walked with, ate with, slept with; every day, ceaselessly.

and, okay, watched a lot of TV with

There are a few other things you should know about her, while we’re at it: 

She never learned to swim, but loved to splash in water where she could stand. One time, a drunk guy on LSD tried to break into our house, and she repeatedly flung her body at the door with such determination that I feared the glass was going to shatter. Her arch nemesis was the mailman, and she had to play fetch with two balls because she wouldn’t drop the one she was holding without an assurance you were about to throw another. I am convinced she understood English, but selectively chose when to listen, and seemed to stop hearing entirely anytime her head was near an open dirty dishwasher. She hated amorphous objects (plastic bags and lawn inflatables topping the list), the printer, hair dryers, beeps, and not being the center of attention. She had a bottomless reserve of energy.

We found out she was sick in October 2022. I was in New York for work, and Beans had been in and out of different vets’ offices for rapid weight loss and constant diarrhea (thus bequeathing us with an unfortunate tendency we called “the Poopnado,” which I won’t elaborate on in polite company). The doctors thought they had figured out what was going on—her pancreas wasn’t working properly, which could be fixed with a simple powder supplement, hooray—“But also,” my husband texted me, “They found a bump on her head?” We had no idea yet that eight weeks later, she would go in for major surgery to have a lacrosse ball-sized bone tumor removed from her skull, earning this sick haircut for herself and permanently higher blood pressure for us:

she looked like a soldier coming back from WWI

german shepherd life expectancy, I remember Googling on my flight back to Colorado that night. When the first result assured me seven to nine years was standard, I exhaled. She was only five. Still, my face felt hot—for the first time, I realized that someday, she would die. 

In some ways, the year and a half that followed feels like it dilated into an endless expanse. Sometimes I forget she ever didn’t have cancer. When I watch videos of her in early 2022 or before, I want to reach through the screen and grab myself by the neck: You don’t know how good you have it. Don’t take this for granted. Do whatever she wants, whenever she wants, and never be stupid enough to complain she needs too much exercise. The simple time before the medications, surgeries, and appointments with all of the different radiologists bearing all of the same bad news feels far longer than 18 months ago. 

In December, we removed it. 

In April, it was back.

By June, we were told she had six months. 

In November, we were down to two. They found spots of cancer in her lungs. We were told if the tumor didn’t burst through the skin, it would grow into her brain, and seizures would begin. 

But against all odds, December turned to January, and January to February, and in April, she hiked five miles like it was nothing. We marveled at the way she seemed to be cheating death, despite the mass, now the size of a softball, displacing her ear and tugging on the skin above her eye. 

after two hours of hiking, four months after she was supposedly toast. what, like it’s hard?

All of it lulled me into a false sense of having evaded the inevitable. When, by May, she still wanted to throw her ball in the backyard, I had almost successfully convinced myself the tumor prognoses were flukes. The waves of anticipatory grief that had routinely swept me out to sea after we found out about her lung metastasis went temporarily dormant. 

Dosing grief like bitter medicine for 18 months (“I’ve pre-grieved”), I deluded myself into thinking of the sorrow like a finite experience I could get a head start on; moving through it at will, little by little in manageable pieces, such that the death itself would feel acceptable.

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In her final days, we had a few false starts. One morning, about a week before the end, we woke up after a rough 18 hours and took her to the emergency room. 

As we were about to leave, I realized I was wearing all black. It felt like a bad omen. I considered changing, but that felt reverse-superstitious, so I didn’t. She was unusually calm, which made me more worried. Champagne Supernova played in the lobby. 

By the time we finally sat down in an exam room that was so flooded with light I had to squint (we were warned it’d be a three-hour wait, but evidently there was something about her condition that earned us the Disney FastPass to the front of the line), I noticed Thomas was still humming the Oasis song. 

Because of how well she had been doing until recently, we were in denial. Maybe she has an unrelated infection? We asked the vet, who, I could tell, didn’t have the heart to tell us we were out of our minds. They did X-rays. The spot in her lungs had become a blossoming constellation, tethered to a tumor the size of her heart at the front of her chest. 

“Just spoil her,” he instructed, as if this were a departure from her regular life. 

What followed over the next week was a microcosm of the last 18 months: spurts of grief, silently wondering which of our daily routines and outings were “lasts,” and staring at her sleeping, rattling off a mental list of material comforts I would give up, crimes I would commit, and bones I would subject to breaking (definitely an ulna or radius, jury’s out on tibia) if it meant she could stay. 

At night, the sound of her labored breathing from the foot of the bed made my chest hurt. I wanted to crawl beside her, then inside of her, to hold her and breathe on her behalf.

For a year, I dreaded making the phone call. I tried to mentally rehearse how I’d listen to each slow ring and then say the terrible words aloud, but I’d wince and admonish the vision before I ever got to the part where I spoke. (This might be why I had to call on three separate days, stalling with new questions each time.) Mostly, I dreaded the idea of going to bed for the last time together. I knew I couldn’t schedule it in advance—I needed to preserve my own plausible deniability that maybe, actually, this wasn’t the last time I’d fall asleep knowing she was at the foot of the bed, keeping watch for intruders on LSD, even if she was contorted into some ridiculous position not befitting of a guard dog, like this one: 

any time she’d jam herself in a weird spot or do something out of the ordinary, we called it a “rarebean.”

Nobody talks about how gut wrenching—how impossible—it is to circle a date on the calendar, with all of its heartbreaking implications, and how embarrassingly specific they become. This is the last time she’ll eat cottage cheese. The last time she’ll lie down in the closet while you get dressed. Last hike, last time in the car, last time going on a walk around the block. I’m grateful I didn’t know in the moment when we were on our last stroll. I don’t think I would’ve come home. 

The end

Equally disorienting are the firsts. The first night you go to sleep without her in the bed, the first morning you wake up to a silent house. Somehow, I think the firsts are worse. At least all the lasts had Beans. 

On her last day, we took her for a drive around the neighborhood. She had shown little interest in doing just about anything for a few days, but when I was gathering her things by the front door, she got up from the spot on the kitchen floor where she had been sleeping and seemed alert; interested in getting out. Seizing on this moment of engagement, we lifted her into the backseat. For a moment, everything felt blessedly normal. Like we didn’t have an appointment in three hours. 

For as quickly as her life seemed to pass, those final three hours stretched on for days. Each minute bearing the punishing reminder. The last. The last. The last. 

She didn’t bark at the doctor, which was a shock (see also: mailman nemesis). She just walked outside and laid down at her feet, like she was ready. She chewed on a piece of beef jerky while the sedative kicked in, and we were warned it could take up to 10 minutes. Within 60 seconds, she laid her head down and drifted off, so close to the edge that all it took was a small nudge. The sky was vast, blue, limitless. All I wanted was to stay there under it with her forever. 

I felt terrified of this moment—and these first days without her—for nearly two years, the tumors in her body like a clock ticking down, threatening to explode and change everything. Now that I am in them, as miserable and unpredictable as they are, I’m afraid to leave them. The hollow emptiness in my chest connects me to her, as though staying with it will keep her here. We may have said goodbye to her in the backyard, feeling foolish and strong, but I didn’t realize I’d say goodbye to her again every time I pass a fur tumbleweed on the ground or step over her empty bed. 

We agreed in the hours that followed that being without her feels like missing a limb. No matter how medically right her absence is, it only feels wrong. 

The forever

There was a privately owned plot of land in Fort Collins with laissez-faire mountain town owners that a neighbor named Katie with a dog named Montana told me about on a walk toward the end of our time in Colorado. “All the dogs there are off leash,” she said, nodding to Georgia tugging at the fullest extent of her retractable length of nylon. It was nearby, and we started going all the time. 

There were three separate lakes on the vast property, each larger and more secluded than the last. The land felt like a mirage, undeveloped as far as the eye could see. We called it Doggy Freetown Christiania, for the town in Copenhagen with no laws. 

sizing up some bikers in the distance at Christiania

unbelievably good knee-length splashing to be had

It was there that we spent most of our hours outdoors in our final months in Colorado, each time discovering some new path or feature, regretting only that we had found it so late in our tenure there.

In the grand scheme of our life together, Christiania represented a relative blip—and yet it’s there I find my mind wandering to the most. 

Scenes play unprompted, like a dream, of her sprinting back and forth at the perimeter of the lakes, bounding down dirt trails, and vibrating impatiently in wild ecstasy for the unbearably long 15 seconds it took to park and get out of the car. I felt I could keep her happy and safe there forever—where we could walk in the shadows of the mountains, and no cancer diagnosis could track her down. 

I can’t help but wonder if that’s where my mind keeps wandering because that’s where she is now, her spirit unleashed and soul unweighed by a body that couldn’t contain it anymore, free. 

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Georgia “Beans” Tassin | September 26, 2017–June 19, 2024

9 bean scenes from her last 2 years on earth: a rarebean; rhony bean; lapdog bean; whipped-cream-on-my-last-day bean; redwoods bean; saying-goodbye-to-my-mom bean; waterfall bean; lazybean; snowbean