rest in peace, sammie

yesterday morning, i said goodbye to my long time companion and friend, sammie. he was 19 1/2 years old. we adopted him from a mississippi animal shelter. sammie was a third timer, abandoned twice. according to the shelter representative, he was supposed to be a bird dog, but was afraid of loud noises. just before i got him, he had been dumped on the highway. when we got him home we found that not only was sammie much older than we were told (6-7 years as opposed to 1 1/2), he also had stage 4 heart worms.

sammie loved to dig, and this little hobby often got him lost. he would make holes near our fence line, slide under them and then he couldn't get back in the yard. on so many occasions we went looking for him and invariably found him glad to see us, tail wagging, in the apartment complex behind our house.

sammie was petrified of thunder and whenever it rained we knew because about 2 hours before the deluge, sammie was off in some corner or under furniture drooling... and there he stayed until the storm passed.

about 3 months ago, sammie woke up one morning unable to use his back legs. we took him to the vet. we were told that it was probably time to put him to sleep, but just in case, the vet gave us a muscle relaxant to try. it worked. for the last three months, i know we had sammie on borrowed time. he began to show other signs of ill health. his head shook like an old man. he started panting a lot and barking for no apparent reason. in his last months, what sammie most loved was to sit in the middle of the yard, like a wise old soul and sniff the air. he looked so content in those moments.

monday, our luck ran out. sammie had to be carried down the stairs again. he didn't want to walk and had trouble going to the bathroom. i called the vet and made an appointment for the next day. i didn't have the courage to take him in on monday. it was a beautiful day and he spent the afternoon outside in the yard with heart, one of our other dogs.

i really can't talk about the details of tuesday's visit to the vet, except to say that it was cold and rainy all the way to the office. it was a long visit, and when i left sammie, all i wanted to do was go home and go to bed. instead, i took heart and keely to the doggy park. we got in the car and as we headed out the sun peeked through the clouds. i felt like sammie was with us.

that afternoon, i began the collage above based on this photo i keep as my iphone background. i worked into the night. the labor and creation of his likeness with paper was cathartic. i felt sammie's presence with me the whole time. each detail of his face took a palpable form in my memory's eye.

when i woke up this morning i laughed/cried because sammie had left a little puddle upstairs for me to clean up! just one of many little reminders of his time here that will meet me in the days and months to come.

it's strange... first you count down, knowing the days left are limited and then you start counting up... the days they have been gone... eventually you stop counting, as pain disappears and only the good memories linger. sammie's life will eventually become a representation of so many memories; a series of vignettes, glued together like bright bits of paper; his life as collage, but the likeness will be unmistakeable...