Goodbye old friend

15 and a half years is a long time for a dog, even in human years, but Bugsy's clock finally ran out last week. The fact of the matter is that his clock had run out months ago, but his body kept ticking... eating and expelling but little else, and with none of the locational awareness you like to be associated with the expelling. It seemed like a hard decision to make at first, to take a dog... a friend on that one last trip to the vet... a friend who at first glance looks completely healthy and not very old at all. Unfortunately, after spending just a tiny amount of time with him, it would become apparent that he could neither see nor hear you, and even though his nose seemed to still work, your scent failed to ring any of the bells in him that used to set the tail wagging and the feet running. We might have let him and ourselves suffer through it for a while longer if he hadn't fairly abruptly lost the ability to get food into his mouth.

I realized the day after when it began to set in that it was real... when I was feeling guilty that I was feeling relieved that the burden of cleaning up piles and puddles had been lifted... that's when it hit me that I was missing Bugsy, but that the feeling wasn't new. I'd been missing Bugsy for months, maybe more, because the Bugsy that was my friend and companion had left me well before we helped turn his body off.