She always ran away, but never for more than a few hours. She had been gone for almost a day. I was so scared that we would drive around looking for her and find her dead  on the side of the road. That she would die alone, only to have her family find her lifeless body already drained of all its warmth. She was such a good dog, she didn’t deserve to die like that. She always came back though, even though her adventures took longer each time. And yet I still worried that she would be run over. I thought that I wanted to be with her when she left, that she deserved that much. But I hadn’t taken into account how that would affect me, and it did. It took a huge toll that I still feel today.

A german shepard mixed with a yellow lab, 2 by the time that I was born. She knew me since the day I was born and I missed a whole two years of her life.She loved me from the beginning, I mean what dog wouldn’t like a baby. They drop food all the time and the dog is there to help clean up the mess. She had never tasted human food before I was born, but she was completely fine with trying it. I was the one to introduce her to human food, so I was then the one who was blamed for teaching her to beg for food.

She was 15 when I realized how old she looked. She wasn’t as fast,  she didn’t want to play outside anymore, she slept a lot. That’s when my fears changed. I didn’t fear of finding her dead on the side of the road because she didn’t really run away at that point. Since she was so old, she took long deep breathes and in between were long pauses that made it look like she wasn’t breathing. Sometimes I would look at her in the middle of her breathes. My chest would constrict and I would think that she was gone, but her chest would eventually rise again. My new fear was that I would come downstairs to find her asleep, but realize that she had stopped breathing.

I didn’t think about how her labored breaths must be painful, or that the fact that she had stopped eating should have concerned me. I guess I just didn’t want to believe that she was getting worse. I wanted to hope, because I thought if I hoped enough she could get better.

My parents telling me that we were going to have to put her down shouldn’t have shocked me, but it did. I thought I had more time, at least more than the few hours that I did have.

It was one of her better days, she had that funny dog smile and she was walking around. All I could think about was that we were about to take it away from her. My parents continuously attempted to comfort me.
“We are ending her suffering,” Mom reminded me.

“It’s the right thing to do,”  Dad added.

And yet it still didn’t feel right. She probably thought that we were going to the vet and she would get a shot and then take a nap, but only we knew that she would never wake up.

In the end I was with her when she left for good, just as I wanted. I always thought that the worst thing would be not being there for her when she left, I realized that being there just made it more painful. I thought that being there when she left would bring me closure. I hadn’t realized that when something happens, you feel it more when you are there as opposed to reading or hearing about it. I was front and center when she died.

  In movies and books they always talk about seeing a light leave someone’s eyes. I was looking straight into her eyes when they were closing. There was no light leaving, just the look of a dog drifting off into a forced sleep. It hurt, watching her fall asleep thinking she would wake up, but knowing that she never would.