Terri
When I was about 12 years old, I told my parents I wanted a dog for my birthday. It was August, and a little early for me to be making birthday demands, but one Sunday afternoon neither parent was working, and we went to the animal shelter “just to look at what they had”. We saw a German Shepard who looked skittish and my mother said was a definite no, and a yappy Shih Tsu mix none of us liked. Then we came to a brindle Staffordshire Beagle mix with a white ruff around her collar who looked way too excited to see us. She wagged her tail with so much enthusiasm her whole body moved past her barrel chest, and though her eyes were red from crying I swear she was smiling at me. I told them she’s the one, and my mother said “well, let’s think about it for a day or two”. I angrily but calmly explained that if we left her there someone else would come along and take her on the spot, and she would be gone forever. She looked up at my mother and gave her the best sad puppy eyes she could manage, and my mother caved. On the way home we had to come up with a name and I saw a banner for the Terry Fox run and said “she’s a terrier, how about Terri”. So that’s who she was.
The first time we left her alone in the house, we tethered her in the basement because my parents were nervous about her destroying the rented house we lived in. She wasn’t allowed upstairs because they were afraid her claws would scratch the wooden stairs, but confining her to the basement was apparently too much for her, as she jumped up onto the staircase and clawed/chewed the shit out of the doorframe. I’m sure there was a discussion about whether she would be taken back to the pound for that one, but we were already attached to her so it was forgiven. She was never tied up in the basement again, and though she once jumped up on the counter and ate an entire chocolate dessert while we were out (and we’re lucky she didn’t die from that one), the fact she wasn’t confined to the basement appeared to appease her anxiety and she just slept on the carpet when we were out and greeted us when we got home.
She was so gentle, you could hold a ball out at arm’s length and she would run and jump to grab it out of your hand, never letting her teeth touch you. She didn’t like to see my brothers and I fighting, and any time a fight would break out she would tackle whoever was on top and hump his leg to keep us from hurting each other. It didn’t always result in laughter, but often it did. There was a period of time, my last year of middle school and my first couple years of high school, when I couldn’t trust anyone to be faithful because kids are mean. I would see things like a “slam book” where I was voted the ugliest kid in school, or have my head shoved inside a locker. I would be dragged by my feet through the snow until I cried for mercy. I would have other kids punch and kick me in groups, and on one occasion push me out in front of a city bus (not in front of a stop mind you, so I’m only alive because of that bus driver’s reflexes) and every day I would come home and she would be overjoyed to see me. One night, during a thunderstorm, she was scared being down on the main floor of the house by herself and cautiously came up the stairs so as not to wake my mother. She scraped at my door until I came to see what was up, and guided her back down to the rug where she was supposed to sleep. Five minutes later she was back, and I didn’t have the energy to fight her on it, so she slept in my bed every night for years from then on.
I didn’t kill myself in junior high because she would have missed me.
As she got older, the fur around her eyes greyed. She got creaky, and while at one time she would protectively bark her fool head off every time the doorbell rang, eventually she would just walk to the top of the stairs at my mother’s townhouse to see if the visitor was worth bothering with. She developed a cancerous growth in her bladder, and it would have cost thousands of dollars to operate. She was incontinent, and miserable. She still loved us, but she wanted it to be over. I have to believe that to be ok with killing my best friend. One afternoon my mother and I took her to the vet, and he explained how the injection would work. He gave her the first one and she was high as a kite, she crawled up on my lap and if she had been a cat she would have been purring. We moved her over to the table and he gave her one more injection, and then she was gone…
I held her while her heart stopped. I thought there was one more injection to come, that I had a few more minutes to say goodbye. But no, she was gone. The vet and his assistant left me and I sobbed over her body for a good 10 minutes, and then I left her.
I told her I hoped I would see her again someday, but we’re not sad at funerals because our loved ones have passed over to paradise, we’re sad because we know we’re never going to see them again.
