An large empty spot in my house

I hate to start this blog off with a downer, but this is a big one.

A few weeks ago, I had to my dog to sleep.  He was a Great Dane that spent his entire life sick and happy.  Not a day went by, be it filled with vomiting or heartworms, that he did not wag his tail and pant to no end when I entered the room.  However, the illness finally caught up with him and we had to put him down.  The hard part, though, was that he was literally wagging his tail right up to the end.

And while that afternoon was one of the hardest emotional traumas I have had to endure in recent years, it is the lingering effects that hit me the most.  I used to come home every day to a large nose waiting on the other side of the door.  He used let me scratch him behind the ears and on the tummy, then get so excited that he had to outside and pee.  He would get his immense jowls filled with frothy gelatinous slobber, then shake his gigantic head thereby depositing it on every possible surface.  Have you ever seen slobber marks on the ceiling?

But, alas, now I come home to an empty foyer.

Of course, there is much more.  The walks, the slobber, the undying love, but it is the little things that our pets – our deeply loving friends, really - bring  to our lives.  And while I know that not everyone is pet person or an animal person, I am.  I have lived my whole life loving my animals and sharing the good times and bad.  And although I know I’ll recover from this and there will be another dog in my future, the pain and nostalgia will always be there.

Not to seem trite or too Hallmark Card-ish, but I will always cherish the times I spent with my 150lb, shedding, slobber dispensing, attention addicted, co-dependent, lifelong friend.