Memoir

A couple of days before my twelfth Christmas, something pretty depressing occurred. Lady, the cocker spaniel at my dad's house was probably 14 years old, and I knew her for about four or five of those years. She was kind of small and about 25-30 pounds. Her fur was a pretty dull gold color, her ears were floppy and the fur on her ears was wavy. Lady had become ill and skinny and was not getting better. She couldn't really control her bodily functions that well anymore, and had trouble walking up and down stairs. My dad's girlfriend had to buy her diapers, which she cut a little hole in each one for Lady's tail. At the end of the first week of December, my dad's girlfriend went outside in Arctic tundra that is Minnesota in the winter to go check on her poor dog. (I wasn't at their house at the time, but I was told what had all happened.) She finds Lady outside in the dog yard laying on the ground, motionless. She picks her up, hoping the worst hasn't happened, but it had. Something else unfortunate had happened, too: the door to outside was locked. She was out there with Lady for a while, but she eventually got help.

"I have some bad news, Lady died," my dad said dully when he picked my brother and I up for the weekend. I cried in the car all the way to his house. Lady was laid to rest in the backyard next to their other deceased pet, a cat named Tommy.