A Tribute to Valentine
Written March 23rd, 2026
It’s Delia again, here live from the Amtrak train, and yes, we are running late—again. This is the second Amtrak train I’ve been on in the past twenty-four hours, and this particular one is en route back to Princeton.
Yesterday afternoon, I got a call that I guess I was expecting to get at some point soon, but I wasn’t expecting it yesterday: Valentine, my Swiss Mountain Dog of nine years, had been having seizure after seizure and they couldn’t stop them, no matter the amount of medication they gave him. He had had a long battle with epilepsy starting the August before my junior year of high school (3.5 years ago). I remember his first seizure very vividly because it happened in the middle of the night; we had to drive him to the emergency vet where there wasn’t much they could do for us, except prescribe what would be the first of many drugs he had to take over the past 3.5 years.
At first, we thought maybe it was a “one and done” type of situation. Maybe he ate something bad or his flea collar was defective. We began the process of eliminating different human snacks from his diet, had him stay inside more in case there was some type of animal in his pen outside that perhaps had bitten him, and gave him medication. I don’t remember exactly how many months he went without a seizure, but it was a while. But then, they just started occurring closer and closer together. We tried more and more medications.
That lasted until July of this summer while I was in Spain, when he had his first big cluster seizure where they couldn’t get them to stop. The emergency vet told my parents that they could hold him for a few days, but it was unlikely to help and would cost thousands of dollars—and if he had another seizure in the night, he was likely to not make it. My parents decided to take him home and hope he would make it through the night. My parents and brother gathered blankets and slept in the living room all surrounding him, hoping that he would just make it through the night without a seizure.
Long story short, he made it through the night and went another eight months without seizures. Until Sunday afternoon, when he started having seizure after seizure and the medication didn’t do anything. Unlike in July, where he would have a seizure and “wake up” after as his normal self, he didn’t “wake up” this time. He was just in this sleepy state where he couldn’t walk or recognize anyone.
My parents called me and I made the five-hour trip to Connecticut, hoping he would still be there when I got home. He was, kind of. He was alive, but not really there. We put him on a piece of plywood and then on a dolly to roll him out to our car and drive him to the emergency vet to say goodbye at something like 1:00 in the morning today.
A little more than nine years ago, Valentine was born somewhere in Texas on the 17th of February. For the first few months of his life, he was known as the “blue puppy” because that’s how the breeder identified the dogs—by the color of their collars.
I was originally hoping to show Valentine in dog shows, so we were looking for a purebred, “high-quality” dog. I remember the breeder messaging my mom about which of the puppies we were interested in. We were between the green and the blue. I think I wanted the green one, but my mom convinced me the blue one was better.
Originally, the puppies were supposed to be born on February 15th, and sixth-grade me was hoping that they’d be born on Valentine’s Day—hence the name Valentine. I remember being so excited to receive the photos and videos of the puppies every week and going to Petco to pick out all of Valentine’s supplies.
A few weeks later, we piled into the Ford Edge to drive up to Boston to pick him up at the airport. He was the cutest thing ever and so small! I remember my mom telling me we had to walk him around the parking lot so he would go to the bathroom before making the two-hour drive back home. Despite the 15 minutes we walked him around, he decided he did not want to go to the bathroom. We started to head home, but it was dinner time, so we decided to stop at Panera. My mom, brother, and I headed inside to get the food while my dad stayed with Valentine. When we returned to the car, Valentine had decided to poop all over my dad and the car. It was quite a disaster.
As Valentine grew up, he didn’t give up his bad bathroom habits. He was very well-trained in that he knew he had to go to the bathroom outside, but when he got angry about something—usually us leaving him to go somewhere or leaving him in the kitchen—he would pee on the floor.
In addition to his bathroom habits, he also developed a habit of grabbing people’s clothes. He absolutely hated to be left alone or put outside in his pen and air-conditioned dog house during the day, so he would grab people’s clothes to prevent them from leaving. I think almost everyone in my family has holey clothes to confirm his bad puppy habits. He even ripped off my dad’s jeans one time. Like, fully pulled them off. Being a dog bred to pull carts, he was quite strong.
Anyway, Valentine’s puppy behavior made the breeder worried that he might bite someone’s clothes—or someone in general—if we showed him, so we decided to just make Valentine a pet. We brought him to Petco every week to teach him basic obedience (sitting, laying down, paw, walking, etc.), although he still loved to pull us around when we walked. We even had a trainer come to our house to teach us how to put him in his dog house without him ripping our clothes off. The secret? A bowl of cheese and hot dogs in his dog house to distract him while we ran out the gate.
Eventually, he grew out of all these bad habits. He still liked to bark at everything, but that was better than ripping off clothes—although both my grandma and Babci (who didn’t like the barking) probably would beg to differ. We decided to stop crate training him and installed gates in our kitchen to keep him out of the living and dining rooms (so he wouldn’t pee on things). After a few months, he learned how to jump over the gates, as well as bite them so much that there was a hole, or ram them until he got through. Instead of just taking down the gates, my dad made it his life mission to buy “better” gates. We went from wood to plastic and eventually to metal. Every time, Valentine would find a way through, and sometimes even a way for our smaller and much calmer dog, King, to get through. All of this makes sense considering that when Valentine was a small puppy, we used to put him in little plastic pens and he literally learned how to climb up and out of them—and taught King as well.
All through middle school, the gates stayed up; they had to get higher and higher to prevent jumping and were bungee-tied shut because he figured out how to open the door. I basically needed a stepstool every time I wanted to go into the kitchen because the gate was so tall to walk over.
At some point during COVID, we got rid of the gates. COVID was such a nice time to hang out with the dogs. Every day, we would take them on long walks down a dirt road near our house. We would play ball (Valentine’s favorite activity) outside every day. On the weekends, we would drive to local parks on the rail trail to walk for hours on end. Sometimes Valentine would get tired and just decide he wanted to lie in the middle of the road or trail and would not get up. We would have to bribe him with treats and have King run around to get him going again.
As I started to allude, Valentine’s favorite activity was playing ball. Not in the sense that you would throw a ball and he would go and get it; no, it had to be a very specific ball from Petco that was a gel-like, spiky ball with air in the middle. I frequently liked to try balancing on the ball, which resulted in the first two popping. Trying to replace Valentine’s ball was a task because sometimes he didn’t like the replacements. By the third ball, we learned our lesson and got a ball that was the same material but couldn’t pop. This one, however, did squeak VERY loudly. Valentine would bring this ball everywhere and bark at it twenty-four-seven. For the last few years of his life, the ball was no longer a ball because, one time after it got dirty, my dad thought it would be a good idea to put it in the dishwasher. It melted into a weird cylinder shape. We tried replacing it, but that was HIS ball. Hence, we have many random balls in our backyard that just didn’t make the cut.
In his last year of life, I would put him to bed every night, which involved taking off his harness (which we needed to help lift him because the seizures made it so he couldn’t walk well) and singing to him in Spanish so he could be bilingual. These were never actual songs that existed, but more of me coming up with random things in Spanish and trying to give them a rhythm. I did, however, learn one real Spanish lullaby the last time I went home for spring break, so he did get to enjoy one “real” song.
When Valentine graduated from his big crate in the kitchen, he always slept in my parents’ room. I, of course, wanted him to sleep on my bed, but during his “bad puppy” phase, he would jump off the bed and eat my dressers, claw at the door, and bark. He liked my parents’ room because they had a couch he could sleep on and our other dog often slept in there. He would, however, always wake up at 5:00 AM, walk out of my parents’ room, and use his nose to push open my door (which has a handle that doesn’t work) just to sniff my face and leave.
When we had visitors, Valentine would always bark very loudly at them and didn’t like to be touched. He loved to bother my Babci, who hates dogs; he would always go over to her and follow her around with her cane while barking. He also enjoyed going to the nursing home to see my Pépé.
Valentine went on a lot of trips in his old age, since he couldn’t be left alone due to his medications and the effort required to carry him around. He went on some college tours with my brother (or at least stayed in the car for the ride), stayed in cabins, visited me at Princeton and stayed in hotels, and went to New Hampshire with us. He even went to work every day with my dad, where he would bark constantly. He would eventually fall asleep in the hall, and a colleague of my dad’s would always wake him up to pet him, which—of course—caused him to bark even more. He loved going into the shop to sleep on the cold floor and following my dad into the bathroom.
While in the last year of Valentine’s life he couldn’t walk well—meaning the mile-long walks had to get shorter and shorter and ball playing was limited to him walking slowly and sometimes falling—he was gifted eight more months with us. We got to spend time together, take him all over, give him lots of treats, and take lots of pictures. And while he is gone, I’m glad it happened while I was there and not while I was in Spain.
Valentine was truly there for so many parts of my life. From my awkward days at Griswold Middle School and the isolation of COVID to my Pomfret School days and now my life at Princeton. He saw me grow from a little kid into a young adult, and I’m glad he got to live such a full, long life.
Valentine, I hope you’re finally walking and playing ball again. Until we meet again.
