Today is Ginger’s birthday. She would have been fifteen. It is the first birthday that I must acknowledge without her physical presence. She is gone in body but not in spirit. I still think of her every day and hear her toenails scratch the floor as they used to do as she did her nightly security patrol. Now, at three in the morning I sometimes hear her sigh and I look down to floor beside me where her bed used to be.
In the late after noon sun from the corner of my eye, I see dark shadow curled in a corner where she used to snooze. And sometimes I feel the weight of her on my feet at night.
I remember the lovely comfort of her leaning into me as I sit on the couch, and I hear the satisfaction in her sigh as I scratch her back at the base of her tail. She loved that and would have me do it all day long if she could find a way to keep me in that position. As I jumped up to attend to the urgency of one thing or another, the ringing phone, stove timer or my impatience, I can still see the look on her face which clearly read. ‘Oh well, that was nice while it lasted’.
I should have stayed still for one more scratch.
I used to rub her forehead between her eyes and she loved that scratch almost as much as the back massage. Tiny yellow hairs would fly out and attach themselves to my clothes and cling as reminders of her.
Nowadays I often put my hand into the pocket of a jacket that I haven’t worn for 6 months and find a dog bag or two.
I occasionally find a dog hair on a black suit and it melts me into a teary heap.
I know she didn’t want to hang around any longer. She lost her smile, it disappeared when the loss of her sight left her with foggy catharacts. She had stiff old joints and her knees were weak and often couldn’t hold her up. She would occasionally tip over on our walks and after she accomplished her goal of elimination she wanted to go directly home. Once in a while a tantalizing smell would hold her spell bound for minutes as she noted every nuance of lingering pheronomes up and down each blade of grass.
Her joi de vivre was gone. The light went out of her eyes about a month before we took the long walk along the river which ended in a short car journey to the veterinary office. As I lay down beside her in the consulting room and we said goodbye, I kissed her and she kissed me and then she yawned and as I told her that she had been the best friend I had ever had, she stopped breathing and was gone.
But, sometimes I can still remember how it felt to hug her around her big brave chest, scratch her ears and kiss her long nose, then I am the one to sigh.
