Goodbye Soy
Me: Do you want to stay in the room?
Liv and Max: No.
Lauren and I stayed in the room. Sawyer’s sick body laid there on the couch with a port sticking out of a bandage covering his little paw.
It was time to say goodbye. I fought through tears and kissed him on the head.
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On Sunday, we lost our dog Sawyer after 16 years. He lived a long life. He was so old he was named after a character on the TV show Lost, which was huge in 2008.
Back then, Sawyer and I actually started on the wrong foot. We got him as a friend for our dog Marzi who we were worried was lonely everyday when Lauren and I went to work. Sawyer wasn’t Marzi and I didn’t like it at first. He was wild even for a puppy. At the breeder the first time we saw him his stomach was enormous. The breeder told us that he hogged all his mother’s milk from his siblings. This continued when we brought him home and he ate his food a mile a minute and sometimes threw it up. He also licked everything in site obsessively. Marzi’s face would often be covered in saliva when I got home from work.
Sawyer was Lauren’s dog and Marzi was mine. That’s how we looked at it. Then in December 2012, Marzi got sick suddenly and died at a young age.
Marzi’s death was brutal for me. I cried and was angry and my depression got worse in the months after his death.
Sawyer who was 4 at the time, fell into his own depression after losing his big brother. He wouldn’t eat. He stopped being playful. He was miserable. He missed his big brother.
Somehow through this mutual grief, Sawyer and I bonded. He started sleeping on my side of the bed, even curling up next to me sometimes.
It wasn’t until we got him a new brother that Sawyer started to behave like himself again.
Smurf became his new canvas for him to lick hours on end.
As the years went by, things changed when kids came into our lives. Liv and Max became the center of our universes and the dogs got left behind a lot of the time.
But it wasn’t all bad. Our kids, especially Liv, became attached to the dogs. Sawyer even began to sleep in her bed some nights. She was so in love with him. I always dreaded this day for my kids. How would they react? Could they handle losing their little buddy?
It turns out Yes. They cried, sure. But they’re kids and have been resilient
It’s me who’s having such a hard time. Dogs are our children that never grow up. They’re so dependent on us for everything, but in return they just give us unconditional love.
Sawyer gave so much love. I will miss so many things about him. The way he looked and smelled after a fresh haircut. The way he walked like a duck because his back legs were always crooked. The way he went into a trance when his head was rubbed. The way he would bark at his own reflection in the mirror, because he was not a rocket scientist. The way he would start barking for dinner at exactly 530 and even adjusted for daylight savings time. Wait, maybe he was smart.
Even the way he would lose his shit if you offered him a piece of a banana, which made sense since he looked like a monkey.
2008 is a long time ago. Sawyer moved with us 6 different times. He slept in our bed thousands of times. He was a part of us. He was family.
The end is always the hardest. And it was. But it was still all worth it.
