It is 3am. Dark / cold outside. My wife is asleep – I should be as well. But my heart hurts, more than it has ever hurt before.
Today I am going to lose one of the best friends I have ever had.
9 weeks ago, our soon-to-be-eleven-year-old dog was diagnosed with osteosarcoma. It is basically bone cancer. And I can add that it is a complete, 100% bitch. The tumor is in the shoulder (at least the tumor we can now see), and has completely taken away the use of that limb.
Our kid dog (I’ll call him “T”), was only given 2-4 weeks to live when they first diagnosed him. I don’t think “distraught” is a strong enough word to describe the emotions that were swirling around us that week. We spent our days trying to do all the things T wanted to do, spent nights crying as we tried to imagine life without chewy bones smeared in peanut butter and dog hair on everything. Funny part is, T never cared what we did as long as all of us were together. And as far as he was concerned, it wasn’t living if it didn’t involve peanut butter.
I had friends tell me how lucky we were to have 9 weeks to “get ready” for today… That they had to make that emotional leap in 48 hours. To that I say bravo – you could have given me 9 more YEARS and I wouldn’t be ready to make that last drive to the vet. But I know that T gave us those 9 weeks as a blessing (hell the 11 years were a blessing) – he wanted to make sure we filled up our “love meters” as my wife likes to say…
For those of you that have a four-legged best friend, you should read this eulogy by Jameson Parker. Read it now before – like me – you find it as you are sitting at 3am searching Google trying to find the right words to express the emptiness in your heart. It can be summed up in one line:
If life is a system of balances, of yin and yang, birth and death, light and dark. then the proof of the great pleasures he gave me lies in the quantity of pain his passing has caused.
Goodbye T.
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