Aug. 17: I don’t feel this way very often, but I must say that for the most part, today pretty much sucked. A major exception was waking up and having Andrew tell me, “I missed you last night, Mommy. I really missed you.”
Maretta came over early this morning to tell me that when Mom met with her doctor yesterday, he gave her a referral to hospice. This wasn’t totally shocking to me, but it was certainly hard news to swallow. She also told me that Duncan, the family dog, was in a lot of pain and had yipped through the night and probably needed to be put down this morning. So we cried together for a while.
Andrew saw the tears on my cheeks and said, “Mommy is sad.” Then he tried to wipe them away. What a wonderful boy.
So I took Andrew to Karen’s for the day (I’m normally at home with him on Fridays). I made an appointment with the vet to have him put to sleep, and I headed over to Mom and Dad’s house.
After spending a little while up in Mom’s room, I came back downstairs to find that Duncan had died on his own, at the foot of the stairs, in the home he loves. Duncan was Joe and Mom’s dog, and poor Joe…this is really too much for a person to have to deal with. We all cried over Duncan for quite a while, and Joe and Dad and Maretta went out back to dig him a grave. Joe’s girlfriend Becky came over and helped me in the house. It was just a sad, sad day.
Duncan had been unable to walk up the stairs for the last few days, and we knew he wasn’t doing well, but it wasn’t clear that he was dying until last night. With Mom’s health failing so much recently, it’s really hard to be dealing with the death of our family pooch. I kept having the title of one of my books, Animals as Teachers and Healers running through my mind. And I found myself wondering if Duncan isn’t helping us somehow. Teaching us, giving us an outlet and an opportunity to experience feelings about life ending. He was a good dog. And he made our family’s life richer and fuller because he was a part of us. Some pictures of Duncan over the last 12 years are in the gallery.
Althea, Bryan, Andrew, and Sylvia