A Good Dog

Today is the day we put Fox down. I have to go help Mom take him to the vet in few minutes here. Right now I'm lying on the bed upstairs with him, which is the place he's been basically living for the past few months. He's just passed out. It's definitely time. He's been going downhill for a while, and he won't even leave the bed to eat now. So, it's okay, I'm okay with that part. I don't want him to be in pain.

 I made him a plate of bacon covered in tomato sauce this morning, he ate the whole thing in like 5 seconds. I wish I had thought to bring him some chocolate, since it can't hurt him now.

 He's a very old dog. Our poor dog. I thought I would write about feelings of guilt, or death, or something like that. But I haven't got it in me. This isn't some solemn introspective time. It's just a thing that happens. Family pets get old and die. It sucks. It hurts.

 He used to be so young, and energetic. He was the most photogenic puppy you ever saw. I'm sad that I have no pictures of him when we first got him, but it was over 15 years ago. But seriously, he was prettier than any dog you've ever seen, he was prettier than all your fucking puppies. I used to have a pocket photo of him looking all perky eared and cute among some daffodils, that I kept in my wallet when I was away at Kent, I wish I could find it now. He used to try and get all uppity with me when it came to Mom's attention, like the two of us in particular were in competition.

 Everyone in our family has a different relationship with Fox. Carrie's got the last year, where he slept with her and she took care of him. Nick's got the years and years of being the one who took him on walks once a day around the neighborhood. He's always been Mom's puppy, definitively and without question. Dad and Fox have some sort of private understanding the rest of us don't know about. And me, after I moved out, I used to love to borrow Fox, take him on play dates with my friends' dogs, because I wanted my own dog so badly. I took him to parks, and on road trips, and made him sit on the rocks at Edgewater which he hated. He would just hunker down on the rock as far away from the water as he could get, and just sit there petrified. He  used to leave the yard every morning when Mom let him out, and roam around the neighborhood saying hi to everyone, so that when Nick walked him, strangers would know him and tell us how pretty he was. Remember when we discovered that the neighbors in the apartment complex next door had been feeding him bologna and bringing him into their homes? God, he would just go anywhere with anyone, he was so friendly. Or when someone picked him up, and later we found him all the way at Parmatown Mall, a week later? When he was hit by that car and was totally fine? And he always went #2 in the exact same place in the backyard, all the way in the back by the fence, always in the same spot. We never had to clean up after him. He loved chasing things you threw, but would never bring them back. And he used to chew through everything, especially pig ears, but also giant marrow filled bones Mom would get from the butcher. He loved fighting you for the rope toy more than anything, and he loved wrestling with you, he would go nuts when I would just put my whole hand in his mouth, or when you curled up in a ball on the floor and hid your head from him. Mom would feed him communion wafers at Christmas and we all rolled our eyes at her because she treated him just like one of her children. Cause he's basically our little brother.

 I'm starting to cry now, so I'm going to stop, because I'm sure I'll have time for crying later but I don't want to go to the vet crying cause I don't want him to see that we're upset. I wanted to write this before, not after, because right now he IS a very good dog, and we love him very much, and I would rather think about him in the present sense while I can.