No kid who reads makes it to middle school without boo-hooing through Old Yeller and Where the Red Fern Grows. And there are a million more boy-and-his-dog-who-eats-it-at-the-end stories out there. In fact, a few years ago, Gordon Korman published a young-adult novel called No More Dead Dogs, in which the main character laments having to do a book report on yet another tearjerker in which Ol’ Shep meets his maker.
I get that. It’s cliché.
But there’s something about it. The death of a dog. It’s a pain like no other I’ve felt.
I was having dinner Saturday night at my sister’s house. And when Wa’s computer goes to sleep, it scrolls through and displays the photos in the archives. A new, random picture every four seconds. Mostly they’re of chubby babies and birthday cakes, of course, but halfway through my turkey burger, I looked up to see
And it was so sharp in my throat just then.
I wish the quality were better, but this was one of the crappy pictures I took in the few months I had my Blackberry, before I decided I didn’t really want to pay for the data plan and gave it to Wa. Later, she saved the photos to her computer and emailed them to me.
I think it’s the first photographic evidence of myself I ever put on the blog. I was finally like, fuck all this semi-anonymous bullshit: you already know this is my dog, who died; well, here’s me—I’m the asshole who let it happen.
Anyway, when this pic popped up on my sister’s monitor, a sob welled up. My nephew was asking me to watch Spongebob Squarepants with him though, so I blinked and blinked and the tears crawled back into their ducts. But I’ve been thinking about that moment—when Boonie piled into my lap in the big blue chair at Nana’s—for four days now. I can feel the weight of his chest on my chest and his silky ear against my chin.
I just can’t believe I still miss him this much.
And I just cry.