Oh Sophia, I am so sorry for your loss. Losing a family member is so hard, even when it's expected. Poor sweet Dutchess! May she rest in peaceful doggie heaven, as I know that there has to be one. I have few there myself, and they're probably all chewing on slippers and perched on pillows, lolling in the sunshine.

Love and hugs to you, and to Tess as well. Slurps from Chloe and Champers.

Thanks guys, your kind words are much appreciated!

Tina that is absolutely beautiful, and I am going to include it in an album that I am making for my daughter and myself.

Thanks again!

Sophia

aww thats a great poem Tina.


and I am so sorry that you lost your dog, that is so devastating.


COOL MySpace Comments

Moore your stories are so sad. My MIL just recently lost there dog. She was a retriever and oh was she pretty. They had he for 11 years, and the sad part about her dying is that she was a victim of the bad pet food. Still makes me mad to think about it, and of course sad. She was a great dog

Tess, we have Gypsy's ashes, and she died about five years ago. It was actually comforting to have them. However, I put them away in a cabinet after several months, so they're not out in sight anymore. Still, I know that they're there...

Your cat and canine Tess will adjust soon; Lucy did. Just keep petting them, and reassuring them, and they'll be okay. The blessing part of this is that animals don't have the same kind of long-term memory that we have about some things. They'll begin to feel safe again, and will interact with each other.

The secondary tragedy with Amanda was that we weren't with her when she died, and the aftermath of her death was equally distressing.

As I said, she was just short of her sixteenth birthday. She was a little feeble, but hadn't been sick. Also, she was beginning to become a bit deaf...

Our kids were still quite young, and we had planned a week's vacation at my sister's condo at the beach. Because of Amanda's age, we decided to board her at the vet rather than have a neighbor be responsible for her. It was also an opportunity to have her checked.

We'd been at the beach for just a few days when the vet called to give us the bad news. He was so sweet, and was also terribly upset himself. Amanda was the very last dog he had checked before leaving the clinic the night before, and he had actually remarked to a member of his staff that she was in amazing shape for a dog her age! She was dead the next morning...

It turned out, as I discovered during my conversation with Judy, that Amanda's mother had developed a brain tumor right behind her ear. That's one of the things that Judy and I had talked about during our conversation, along with what great dogs we had had. I speculated that this was the cause of Amanda's deafness, and that she and her mother must have had similar tumors.

My husband and I decided that we wanted to bury Amanda on my in-laws' property in the country. They had nearly thirty acres about an hour from here, and were HUGE dog lovers. We told our vet what our decision was, and he said that they would accommodate us.

Well, the NEXT morning, this poor upset vet had to call us again with more bad news. It seems that while he was in surgery, the people from the animal mortuary arrived, and took Amanda with those pets who were going to be cremated en masse, even though he had specifically tagged her to be left behind. By the time he realized what had happened, it was too late...

I really thought that my husband was going to go off of the deep end with that news. It was difficult enough to lose her, but to have her taken away with the other pets when we had so wanted to have her back was almost too much to handle! And, because our children were so young at the time, both he and I were trying very hard not to go overboard with our grieving. But, she had been our only "child" for nearly eight years! It was just devastating all by itself, but there was an enormous amount of guilt involved. Why weren't we THERE for her???

My sister said that it had been Amanda's very last gift to us. She was such a good dog... If we had been home, we would have been traumatized by finding her (or our kids would have). We were also spared from making that difficult decision to put her down because she had appeared healthy until the end. So, I think that my sister was right.

That was a VERY difficult year, from beginning to end! In March, when my kids were still very little, we were burglarized while all of us were at home and sleeping (3:00 a.m., on a Sunday morning, and my husband awoke to a man shining a flashlight through the doorway of our bedroom as we lay in bed), in June, I underwent a biopsy for breast cancer (negative), Amanda died about three weeks later, our water heater burst on Halloween afternoon (as I was finishing up my kids' costumes) and flooded our basement, I nearly died of a blood clot in November, and I lost my only sister six days before Christmas.

Not a good year...

Tess, again, I can just offer my condolences, and say that -- as with any other loss of someone you deeply love -- only time can begin to heal the hurt. Hang in there, and keep on expressing your love to your other pets.









-- Edited by Moore ideas at 21:21, 2007-07-07

my goodness moore you got me a little spooked with what you said about the burglar. you will have to tell me what happened in more detail. Most times I am here alone with my daughter so i am interested in things like that

You guys really are the best, and your words and wishes are the best.

I truly have the best internet buddies out there, each one of you is special beyond words.

Shelly, I strongly suggest a dachshund. They are wonderful companions who have great personality and are wonderful with children. They also travel really well. Also, when they go, it is not really that big, and makes for easy poop scooping while out on a walk, with not having a yard.

At one point there were six of them in my immediate family. Dutchess was the last one, my sister, Sarah, lost her girl Molly last month. It all started with Duke, who was with my parents for 17+ years. He and Dutchess were inseperable, and they had two litters of puppies. My aunt has one of their babies, her name is Boston. Duke and Dutch were amazing to see together. One summer I rented a house on Cape Cod, on the same road as my parents lived. Every morning Duke would come down to the house, and literally bang on the door for Dutchess to come out to play. For the first four years of Dutchess' life, my parents lived up here, in the same town as me. I very rarely went anywhere without her.

I believe that mlnorman also has a dachshund, and her daughter is younger.

Tess, my husband's family always had a lot of dachshunds, and had two when he and I began to date: Trinka and Beau.

A little off topic here, although it DOES end up being about dogs:

I just ADORE our new Junior Moderator on the AMC Board over on SOC. JCMojoe81. He's SUCH a great guy, and I think that he's doing a wonderful job. He's only 26, so he has the ability to relate to the younger posters, but he's also very traditional, and loves the vets. And, even without a lot of moderator experience yet, his judgment is always absolutely spot-on.

Well, he recently moved into a house with two friends, and he was really worried about breaking the news to his very traditional Italian mom! I warned him that she would go through a couple of separation stages during this transition, but that it wouldn't take her long to get on board with it. And, she did. So, it all worked out, and JC is now happily settled in the house with his two good friends.

I had forwarded pictures of my "Patriotic Lucy", and he wrote back to say that it was really funny timing because he and his roommates were in the market for a puppy. Naturally, I immediately worried that these three young guys, all of whom work of course, wouldn't be up to taking care of a new puppy, and that it would end up being a pet failure! So, I did my usual thing of passing on a huge heap of totally unsolicited advice...!!!

WELL... JCMojoe81 has gone up yet another fifty points in my opinion-odometer, if that was even possible!

It turns out that he's had dogs all of his life, and totally understands the commitment to training them. In fact, he says that it's his favorite part, even though it's a lot of work. He loves it.

He has owned a Lab mix, a Yorkie mix, and a Cavalier King Charles. He lost the Cavalier King Charles ("Lucky") just this past February, but was so committed to his pet that he learned from the vet how to give him shots twice a day to regulate a thyroid issue, how to give Lucky a nebulizer, and how to give him carpage treatment (a breathing exercise that gets air into the lungs).

So, I certainly won't worry anymore about whether JC is up to taking care of a new puppy! What a nice guy... I just love him to death!

I just wanted to pass that on during our conversation about little dogs.

Aw, separation anxiety! I could write a treatise on that subject, lol!

JC sounds like a really great kid. I know you kids over at SOC need all the sanity you can get hold of, too. Say HI to him from me, okay? Maybe he'd like to pop in here from time to time.

And Tess, when my sweet Candy died in 2001, we lasted all of two weeks before getting Chloe, then a few months later, Champers. It was the saddest 2 weeks I can remember, so empty and heart-breaking. But no sooner was Chloe in our home, I could sweetly savour all the memories of the lost pups. I have a little etagere in the hall with all my puppy pics on it - a tribute to the wonderful years we'd spent together.

I've had dogs all my life, kids grew up with them from babyhood. I know we all usually outlive our pets, but I couldn't imagine living without them.