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When I was 13 I woke up one morning and mom was very worried. Our beloved pet lay under the house curled up in a corner wheezing and whining. His eyes were bloodshot, and for the first time since we had picked him up off a baseball diamond in a backyard of someone's house in California, and my brother and I had said, "I want that one.", we could not make him smile. Next to him lay a pile of vomit swirled with blood and pieces of what we found out later were his vital organs. We loaded him in the car and rushed him off to the vet as quickly as we could... and later, my brother and I went to school, and mom stayed at home calling back and forth to the vet. After a couple of days the vet called, and my mom was crying after she got off the phone with him. Duke had ingested a huge amount of rat poison, and it was burning out his insides. He needed a new liver, a new set of kidneys, and surgery about everywhere else. It would cost $10,000 and still there was only a slim chance of him surviving. The vet specified that he was in utter misery, so we chose the most practical option...
The next day, my mother and my brother went to pick up our euthanized dog's corpse... the vet had offered to dispose of it for a little extra money, but we had this romantic notion of burying our beloved pet in the back yard. I stayed at home and set to work digging a grave under the platform we had built for my brother and I to play on when we first moved into our house. After a couple of hours I had a hole dug, 3 feet wide, 4 feet long, and 4 feet deep. It was square. I had leveled out the edges and even the bottom of the hole, and set the dirt in two neat little piles on either side. I cared about this hole. I wanted my dog to be comfortable, for his body not to have to be twisted and squeezed into the ground, but rather to set him gracefully down and cover him up. As soon as I finished my mom arrived, and I rushed to the car to help her and my brother pull the bundle out of the back seat. They had wrapped Duke several times over and tied off the bundle with a rope... It was unrecognizable as a dog, and to me it felt like dead weight... which it was. When he was alive, he was never so heavy... Maybe 55-60 pounds. Why then, did it feel as if he weighed 100? We laid Duke on the ground next to the hole that I had dug. And my brother and my mother cried. I could not bring myself to tears, and I felt bad. I never could cry when it was appropriate. I can't remember if we "said a few words" or not, but I do remember one thing very well. As I stood in the hole and started to pull Duke in to lay him to rest, my mom stopped me. She wanted to kiss him... She stared at the bundle, and felt it, and then was overcome with a new wave of sadness...
"I don't know which end is his head? Which is it!", she cried....
You could not tell. He was wrapped very tightly in a thick cloth.
All of a sudden it felt as if my vital organs had all been burned out... Romantic... HA!
To comfort her, I pretended I knew. I picked one end and told her I was sure that was it. She kissed Duke and I lowered him, as gently as I could, into the hole... My mother and brother watched me throw the first few shovel-fulls of dirt on, and then went inside... I finished the rest.
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(C)SESEU (Sir Edwin Santos Enterprises Unlimited)
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Marty
