My Dog Died Last Week and Life Came To a Standstill
Right now I’m just alive, an empty shell running on autopilot
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It’s rare for me to write an article that is purely personal, with no underlying aim of getting it into a publication. But I feel like if I don’t write this I won’t fully process/accept what happened. I’m a writer after all, and writers deal with their emotions through the written word.
I had a pet dog. A golden retriever. We got him when I was fourteen. I named him Scooby. He was the cutest person ever, with big marble eyes and a constantly wagging tail. Toward the end he became a bit more lethargic, but he was seven years old. It was to be expected.
I regarded Scooby as a human being. My little brother. He had a full-fledged personality, he could express himself and get across what he wanted with ease. I’d tell him the ball was in the kitchen and he’d scamper off toward the kitchen. He understood my emotions, my mental state, and mimicked it in his own behavior. It was uncanny. It was beautiful.
I don’t believe I can capture in any amount of words the kind of bond we shared. We used to play, we used to wrestle. Sometimes I made him food, I bathed him, walked him, applied medicines whenever he got rashes. He ate biscuits only out of my hand (to mom’s great chagrin), he listened and behaved himself only when I scolded him (very much to mom’s chagrin).
We had the perfect relationship. Yes, there were hiccups. Sometimes he’d obstinately do what I told him not to, sometimes I couldn’t give him enough attention due to other commitments. But by and large, I loved him more than I could ever express. I loved what we had.
And then it was taken away in the space of forty-eight hours.
The Longest Two Days of My Life
On the night of Wednesday I walked him, played fetch with him, he barked and took me to where his treats were kept. He was absolutely fine. I noticed nothing wrong. The next morning he soiled himself in the house. He was down and languid. His stomach was upset. We gave him the medicine we always did when his stomach acted up.
The whole day he lay around, with no indication of hunger. That was normal. I chalked…
