Petey

As a little girl, I was obsessed with dogs.  I subscribed to Dog Fancy.  It was a pretty serious obsession.  I could tell you which breeds were best with children (Golden Retrievers), had a tendency to be aggressive (Shar Peis), were easy to train (Border Collies), and had a good temperament (Labradors).   My Dog, Petey, was a Golden Retriever, but the really dark golden red kind.  People used to think he was an Irish Setter.  How silly.  I dressed him up, put him on diets, read to him, napped with him, sang to him.  Petey was my best-friend.  I didn’t have neighborhood friends.  They were all too old or too mean, so my dog was my best-friend.  He probably would not have chosen this relationship himself.  I don’t think he took to well to the “diets” (me taking his food away as he was eating it).  He let me cry into his smelly fur (not exactly sure what all the crying was about, but it probably had something to do with the fact that my best friend was my dog).  He licked my sweaty, sticky face.  He may not have always wanted to be there, but he was.  Petey was also an incredible athlete.  He used to jump from all fours on the ground to about 4 feet in the air when he wanted to come in from outside. With each spring saying Let me in! Let me in!  I need you! I need you! Let me in!”  It’s funny how much a pet can become a part of who you were.  Perhaps that is why we are so sad when they die.  We see part of ourselves dying: a chapter is over, and it won’t ever spring up and down on the back deck to try to get back into our lives.  They have left…forever.  The week before we had to put him down, I had a friend and her boyfriend over.  I told him to come over to say “hi” (like he was my brother or something) and he couldn't get up.  At first I was mad at him.  I still feel bad about that.  And then I realized what was happening.  He was sick.  We found out he had cancer and for a week we sat with him and cried.  I sat with him under his favorite tree.  Sometimes he would forget the pain, jump up, and run 10 feet or so.  Then it would set in, he would slump over, and I would cry.  My dad pulled the red Chevy into the backyard, next to the tree.  We picked him up and pushed him into the back seat.  He loved car rides.  I felt horrible knowing that his idea of a pleasure ride was actually the last trip he would ever take.  We were driving him to put him down.  We carried him inside the clinic, and my heart began to pound that frantic, dreaded, adrenaline drenched rhythm.  The vet and her tech allowed us to come into the room, where my mom, dad, brother and I all stood around him.  We each had a hand on our friend as the vet injected him with the poison that would finally give him some peace.  He took one last breath and we all sobbed into his fur.  We said good-bye to Petey, but we also said good-bye to innocence, to our childhood.  My parents said good-bye to our dependence on them.  We said good-bye to the family we knew and faced the future, in which we all had to go our own ways.  My brother would leave for college soon after that.  In a couple years I would start dating my husband, and then a bit later we would get married, and life would never be Carl, Sharon, Jared, Callie and Petey in the blue house on Twin Ridge Lane anymore.  It wasn’t Petey’s fault, of course.  His life just happened to fall in line with the short time my parents had with us in their house.  It made me sad then, but it scares me now, thinking about how short the time is I will have with my kids.  Soon this chapter will be over.  How can I read it deeper and more fully?  How can I relish it?  How can I stop the inevitable good-byes.  I only want them here with me in my lap forever, is that too much to ask?  I want their little hands in mine, not in someone else’s.  I want to hear their laughter and play and cries from their cribs for my whole life.  I don’t want to have to bury it.  I want to come up with a graceful way to deal with these feelings, but the truth is, I just can’t.  All I can do is cry and try to be more present in all of it, and to be honest, I wish my son wasn’t so darn allergic to dogs, so I could have some fur to sob into.