When I was ten, my father surprised us with a puppy he brought home from a pet store. Now, this was September of 1986; back then no one had heard of puppy mills, and unethical breeding practices were not something that were part of the public conscience. It was common practice to pop into a pet store and buy a pet; in fact (and I know this because as a child, from the age of six on, every day I read the “pets for sale” ads in the newspaper because I loved animals and just liked reading about them) at that time there weren’t even many people selling dogs out of their own homes, in our province. Pet stores were the norm.
And Oh! how my brother and I loved that puppy. She was a sweet little all-black poodle mix. She snuggled, fitting perfectly into the crook of my neck. She gave kisses. She was beautiful. We named her Midnight. On her first day home, she was pretty shy. She barely wanted to move, but of course we thought that it was because she was in a new place and nervous. And she was a puppy – puppies sleep alot. Same with the second day, although she did play with us a little. That night, like the night before, we put her to bed in our bathroom, with a dish of water and plenty of newspaper on the floor, just in case. In the morning, when my mother went to let her out, she found bloody diarrhea and vomit all over the bathroom floor. Not just a little bit. There so much that you wouldn’t believe it had all come from the same three-pound dog, and in a two-hour timespan, at that (Dad had been to the bathroom at 4 am, and there had been no problems. At 6, when Mom got up? Everywhere).
We immediately brought her to the veterinarian, where she stayed for three days with an IV full of fluids and antibiotics. And at the end of those three days, she succumbed to canine parvovirus.
I was ten years old. My brother was nine. We had never lost anyone close to us; our grandparents were all still alive, and no one we knew had died in our lifetime. Sure, we’d heard of people dying, our friends’ grandparents, Terry Fox… but it was so abstract. Death was not familiar to us. And this? This was immediate. This was happening to us. And our hearts were torn in two.
We had loved her so much, and now she was gone – how could that be? Surely if you loved someone as much as we loved Midnight, that love would be enough to keep her alive? We’d seen the Very Special Episode of Punky Brewster where her dog got hit by a car and was on the brink of death, and Punky’s impassioned speech at the last second (“Oh, no Brandon! I can’t give up! I’m not going to let you die! You still have squirrels to chase, and bones to bury! You’re going to be around for a long long time, you’ve just got to wake up! Brandon, wake up! Please Brandon! I love you, I love you, I love you!”) had woken him from his coma. Why wasn’t real life like that? I remember crying so hard into my pillow that my eyes literally swelled shut. My brother went to his room and punched the wall, over and over again, his tiny fists making dents in the drywall.
Months later, our parents drove to the Humane Society, two hours away, and brought home another dog. We named her after an Ewok (again – it was 1986). She was an incredible, beautiful dog, and lived for seventeen years: long enough to see the theatrical re-release of the Star Wars movies so that people didn’t look at us all quizzically when we called her name (“what’s a Wicket?”) . As I mentioned in a previous post, she was never sick. Not once in her entire life, up until the final week. We loved her, and yes, I’ll admit, the painful memory of losing Midnight was pushed to the backs of our minds, because we had a running, barking, sock-chewing, alive dog to love, right in front of us.
That brings us to this:
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