By Jeff Moss
DetroitSportsRag@GMail.com
July 18, 2015

On the morning of December 9, 2001 I made a decision that would forever change my life. It was a Sunday and in a few hours the Lions would be playing the Buccaneers in Tampa.

Now, I hadn’t missed a Lions game in decades (hell, I watched the stupid DRAFT during my sister’s wedding for Trout’s sake) so purposely avoiding this matchup was basically unprecedented.

It was the inaugural season of the Matt Millen reign of terror. The Lions were sitting at 0-11, and I decided that instead of watching another monstrosity on TV at 1pm, I was going to adopt a beagle.

So, I perused the Joint Operating Agreement classifieds and found a farm in Lapeer that had a bunch of beagle puppies. I told my thrilled girlfriend at the time (she’s now my wife, Melissa) that we were going to get a dog.

It had been a few years since my last beagle, Axel, passed away suddenly from congenital heart failure and I was ready to become a pet owner again.

(Chili on the left, Axel on the right)

Melissa likes to rub it in to me that she picked out Chili (named after Chili Palmer from the film adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s “Get Shorty” and most definitely NOT Chili Palmer from the film adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s “Be Cool”) from his eight or nine brothers and sisters, but in actuality Chill Chill picked us.

While his siblings acted like a bunch of vilda chayas (that’s Italian, you can look it up) in their pen, Chill Dog walked right up to where we were kneeling and began nuzzling and licking us.

He has been my shadow ever since.

Well, until yesterday when. after battling cancer for 19 months, we finally had to make the decision we had been dreading since January of 2014 when we first learned of his diagnosis. We had to euthanize him.

When the doctors at OVRS in Bloomfield Hills first told us that Wind Chill Factor had a bladder tumor, they informed us that he probably had three months to live if we did nothing and probably a year if we started chemotherapy.

Even though Melissa and I were on the verge of starting extremely expensive in vitro fertilization procedures in an attempt to have a child at the time we learned of Chili’s illness, neither of us hesitated in spending that money on Chili’s treatment instead.

It was a much bigger sacrifice for Melissa than it was for me, obviously. Due to Chili’s personality and his love for her, she went from refusing to get in the car to drive to Lapeer that fateful Sunday morning to postponing a potential pregnancy to extend Chill’s life as long as we could.

Truth be told, if it weren’t for Chili Bean, we probably never would have gotten married in the first place. When Chili was about three years old, Melissa and I broke up and she moved back to Florida.

We hadn’t spoken for about two years when the first of Chili’s illnesses was discovered. One day I came home from work and noticed that Chill’s pure white chest had turned purple and he wouldn’t eat his dinner. And if you know anything about beagles you know they don’t lose their appetite for ANYTHING.

(Just imagine sticking a Dairy Queen Cookie Dough and Butterfinger blizzard pie in front of 97.1 talker Scott Anderson’s grill and him refusing. You’d probably think something was wrong, right? Well, that’s the equivalent of a beagle turning down any type of food whatsoever.)

Anyway, after a battery of tests the veterinarian told me Chill had the liver of an 85-year-old lifelong alcoholic and he was given approximately three years to live if he took medications and changed his diet.

It was the first time Chili defied his life expectancy but not the last.

So, out of the blue, I emailed Melissa and told her about Chili’s health issues. We started talking again and eventually decided to get back together. When Melissa returned to Michigan for the first time it had been 26 months since Chili had last seen her. I figured there was zero chance he would remember who she was, but when she walked in the door he went nuts and started crying.

It was a reaction that I had not seen from him previously and it was sort of like those YouTube videos of pets seeing their owners for the first time after returning home from Afghanistan or Iraq.

Everyone always associated Chili as mine but he was just as much Melissa’s dog. Over the last 19 months, we have put our lives on hold to take care of him while he went through his treatments — including taking vacations apart so one of us could stay home with Mr. C.

I will never forget the sacrifices Melissa Myst made.

Eventually his cancer spread from his bladder to his chest to his thyroid and it became apparent on Thursday that it wasn’t fair to put him through this any longer.

At the end he had two bolt-like tumors on his neck that felt like Frankenstein’s which impaired his breathing to the point he sounded like a cross between Darth Vader and Scott “The Engineer” Salem when he breathed.

Not that you would have thought he was ready to go even at that point. After we made the appointment to put him to sleep, he bounced back and ate an entire Sposita’s filet mignon on Thursday night and went on four walks over the last 24 hours of his life.

But we knew he was masking his pain for us and we couldn’t watch him suffer.

I would like to thank everyone at OVRS for taking care of Chili over the last 19 months — especially his oncology veterinarian, Dr. Michele Sauerbrey and his two nurses, Kelly and Jessica. We were hoping to get another year from Chill Dog and we got that plus another seven months and for that we will be forever grateful.

I also want to thank Dr. Sauerbrey for telling us it was time because we could have never made that decision without her.

As you can imagine, we are a mess right now (especially Melissa, who sat shiva for seven days when McDREAMY died after ignorantly searching for his cell phone between his seat and console) but this article has been cathartic for me whether you cared to make it this far or not.

And the Lions? They lost that afternoon in Tampa to go 0-12 on the year. They won the following week against the Vikings to avoid becoming the first team to go 0-16 in a season.

They waited until Chili was seven years old to accomplish that ignominious feat. And, like many Metro Detroiters, Chili Eibar Moss lived and died without witnessing the franchise win a playoff game, let alone get to the Super Bowl.

Goodbye, Chill.