Yesterday I watched my dog die, after cautiously stepping towards the hope that maybe he’ll get better on his treatment. Watching him take his last breath and realizing I’m the last thing he looked at, I’ve only felt pain lace through me like that once before. My hands reached and faltered and I screamed and screamed and screamed as if either the pain would go away or I’d wake him up, but neither happened, so eventually the hollers ebbed away to pitiful sobbing and desperately petting him. Saskia, my poor girl, watched for a while and then eventually went to lie down. She’d cried all week as if to say “Say it now, I can feel him going.” I bit the bullet and got tattoos on that morning, but now I’m starting to believe it was my subconscious giving me one dose of endorphins before it came crashing down.
People still don’t give much value to the life and death of a pet. Being Tswana, the first encounters with dogs for us were centered around one thing: dogs are for protection. But what I got out of getting a dog, and then many more, was not protection. Or maybe not the protection they were talking about. How do you disregard the way they devoutly bow to you, even though they can happily fend for themselves? How do you ignore the way they treat your appearance as a blessing?
Yesterday I watched one of my blessings die. And I felt a part of me die with him.
Ink Trails 