A Short "Tail"

Jason Mraz recently wrote in his blog about a cat he had to put to sleep on Christmas Eve. He is a fairly decent story teller, although perhaps anything he says seems dreamy to me...hmmm...At any rate, I felt this posting was appropriate:

We had a dog when I was growing up named Sweet Pea. She was small and gray and fluffy and so sweet she gave you a toothache, so you can see her name was fitting. Being a family dog, I had a certain connection with her, as the rest of my siblings and parents probably did. After years of deteriorating health, limping limbs, and lost eye sight, I came home one day to find she was not there. I was told she had been put to sleep. That was almost 15 years ago.

...I only recently found out she had indeed NOT been put to sleep but had been found in the middle of winter frozen down on the running trail by our house. My brothers had been out looking for her and found her peacefully resting on a very frozen and snowy hillside.

This opened up an entirely new wave of questions about my childhood and "lost" pets of the like. I often question the endings to many of my pets' lives: the guinea pig we found on top of the garbage can coming home from church one day, the babies of other guinea pigs that had all been "sent away to good homes," etc.

I suppose I may not want to know the answers to those questions, and I suppose it's best I don't.