loss

Last month we lost our dogs Red and Taska. We'd been expecting Red to go- he had cancer and was getting on in years. We were shocked instead by the passing of Taska, who was deaf but otherwise sound in health, or so we thought. Rob went out to give them their morning cookie and Taska was gone. A few days later Red went too. We figured he'd been hanging around out of loyalty. It was his personality.
As sad as I was to hear that, and as strange as it was to think when I went home I wouldn't be hearing Taska's howls anymore, it wasn't as hard of a loss as it could have been. I didn't know those dogs all that well. They mostly stayed outside and I was mostly inside. I met them towards the ends of their lives and we didn't interact much.

Today I recieved the painful email from my mother that our Chihuahua-Pomeranian Tamale, or Molly for short, has heart failure and is in the final stages of it. She's had a nasty cough for a few years, as if she had something caught in her throat, and apparently it's fluid in her lungs. We didn't know. I always thought since she was so small she'd be around well into her teens, maybe even twenty years old. I've always heard how you simply can't get rid of small dogs.
But she's dying.

She was one of our first pets- second to Pico, the cockatiel. We had ginea pigs before and fish, but they came and went before I was six or seven years old. We got Molly when I was either seven or eight. Shortly after her came Emma, the cat that has been my bedfellow for the majority of my life. I spent my fair share of nights with Molly too, the little furnace, a tiny black fuzzball who sleeps selfishly and generates incredible amounts of heat and has always inexplicably smelled like corn chips. She was always a little bit more Kayli's dog, and after Kayli went to be with dad she became Rob's dog, but she has always been an inseparable part of my family. With kayli not in the house, her dogs, Buster (who died the year I went to college, the start of all of these pet tragedies) and Molly kind of stood as surrogates of her presence. It's not that I miss her being around; rather her absence led to me finally relaxing a bit and expanding socially. But that was the status quo of my adolescence- my mother, my sister, and I. When all is said and done, that was the core of my world, even if it was dysfunctional and I felt like we were just trying to get away from each other within the confines of the house. She was sent to live with my dad, but Molly remained, and so Kayli remained in a way. Now thinking about Molly being gone, that fundamental base is chipping away, disappearing.

Pico went like this too. Pico was the first animal, maybe even the first creature whose death affected me in that way. I've lost distant relatives, my grandpa died a few years back. But i've had a very blessed life in that I haven't lost people I interact with daily. Pico I spoke to every day. I sang for her and she would puff up and squint her eyes and show such pleasure even though I could never hold or touch her without getting chewed up by her little round beak, I felt a connection with her. The slightly yellow tint of her beautiful white feathers, the weirdness of those feathers and the soft, hot, prickly skin beneath them on closer examination, her dark round eyes that looked black but were actually gray if you looked closely, the pink holes of her nostrils in her otherwise pale and rosy beak. I got to know her. And then, while off living my life and having my fun new adventures in college, my mom called and told me Pico had gotten egg-bound, that her insides had come out, and that she had quietly died wrapped in a towel in my mom's hands, that she didn't seem to be hurting.

I still sort of expect to hear her squaking when I get in the door, want to sit in the stool beside her cage and just look at her or hum a few bars to catch her attention. I can't put into words how it hurts to think that now I will go home and molly's little bed under the table will be empty of her tiny body, her little pink tongue comically and eternally jutting from the side of her mouth since those teeth got pulled a few years back. I won't be able to keep progress on how much white fur she's getting, and any idle fantasies i'd entertained of her going from pure black to pure white have disappeared like smoke in open air. Her weird little grunts and the clack of her tiny nails on the tile, as well as the scrabbling of her dashing to escape Roxy's big feet will be gone by the time I'm home. I won't be able to thump the floor slightly in front of her paws, sending her wriggling on her belly towards me. All of her unique little quirks.

And as sad as that loss will be, there are harder complications that will come of it, because that little dog has been the only creature I have ever seen Rob love. He's already had to bury three dogs, two of them last month. Roxy's in dangerous health, though she's had scares before. But none of the other dogs, not mom, not me, not anyone he has ever talked about or interacted with has ever recieved the love that little tiny creature did. And with her gone I am genuinely worried about his balance, and the strain it's going to put on Mom. She has to deal with this loss just as hard, probably harder than me, but she still has to handle Rob and hold it together to keep looking after Roxy, who is slipping.