His scent is still on my hands as I write this. Not ready to wash him off just yet. I have bits of his fur on my sleeves from the final hugs. We all crowded into the tiny exam room at the veterinary hospital. His parents, his step-parents, and his brother and sister. Six sad family members surrounding an aching elderly dog who certainly wondered what all the fuss was about. They put him on a blanket and gave him the injection. We said more goodbyes, held back tears, then let them flow. He was asleep and then he was gone. I cried with occasional bursts of loud, ugly, heaving sobs of gut-wrenching grief. I hugged my crying children, knowing I was helpless to ease their pain. I leaned hard against my husband’s shoulder, trying to quell my trembling. His father, usually so stoic, wiped tears from his flooded eyes. I hugged his stepmother (probably his favorite parent) and thanked her for taking such good care of him. She thanked me for sharing him with her.
(or How to Spend $600 After Almost Killing Your Dog)
First, a little bit of background. Our dog Buzz was a 50-pound Australian Shepherd mix. We think he was about our daughter’s age, so that would have made him seven or eight years old when I almost killed him. He was named after Buzz Lightyear, but we didn’t do that. He came with that name when we adopted him six years before from a local no-kill shelter. We decided to go for a mutt this time, seeing as how Buzz’s two predecessors (one disobedient inbred AKC-papered Lab after another) brought us nothing but grief.
Our first dog, Boo Radley, was a 100-plus pound black Labrador Retriever, who found it necessary to bust through our fence and get hit by a truck on the highway before he reached the age of two. His remains are supposedly resting comfortably in a pet cemetery in Lubbock, Texas.