10.26.2014 - The Rainbow Bridge

Zoey has gone to meet her maker.                                                   (Euphemisms fascinate me.)

I just realized that this means I'll need to update the blog description, so I might as well write something about it, too.

We (our family of five) took Zoey in to the vet for euthanasia a few weeks ago. It was hard. She had fallen a few times - her legs just gave out under her while she was standing there - so I made a few calls and scheduled the appointment we had been dreading for years. The vet, Joe Liljenquist, is a friend of Brian's so we may have gotten extra special treatment, but I doubt it. All of the staff were great. They even sent us flowers!

All of us, except Charlie, shed tears by the time we'd left Zoey, still warm but unmoving, there in the vet's office. Charlie seemed to think it was no big deal: Zoey was going to be an angel dog and to live with Grandpa Dave in heaven. This seemed alright with him.

Having not owned a dog before, I didn't really know what to expect. In retrospect, I think I could've made an educated guess. When I was a kid, my mom made a difficult decision to remove a pet cat from our home. I loved that cat a lot. A LOT. I cried hard when I found out. I could've guessed that I would react similarly to Zoey being gone.

One of my cousins saw an online post of mine about losing Zoey and responded with the text of "The Rainbow Bridge," which I hadn't seen before. What a lovely thought, that Rainbow Bridge where our four-legged companions wait for us... I hope it's true!

When I read "The Diggingest Dog" to Charlie, he often requests that I change the story so the dog, Duke, is Zoey. Whenever Zoey is subbed in for Duke, Charlie asks that I also substitute Charlie in for Sammy Brown. This is how I know that Zoey still plays a part in Charlie's story. We have enough pictures that I think Charlie will always have "memories" of Zoey, but I don't know whether they'll come from him or the pictures.

Brian and I got Zoey for our one year anniversary. She enchanted us with her impossibly blue eyes and velvet coat. She destroyed lots and lots of things we were attached to. She taught us what it was like to leave a crying "baby" in a safe place to learn how to self-soothe.

Fifteen years leaves a lot of room for memories: I have so many of Zoey. There were so many things I got to experience because of her. I came to know new places, new people, and new things about myself. I wanted to put "the sweetest thing" under her name on the memorial plaque we ordered from the pet cremation place, but Brian won me over when he reasoned that we should leave it at her name.

I'm not what some people call "a bucket-list person," but if I were, if I had to do it over again, if I could somehow benefit from my own life experience and advice... I would put "own an awesome dog for 15 years" on that list. (That's a lot of ifs, I know.)