“Dogs are our link to paradise. They don’t know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring–it was peace.” ― Milan Kundera
This has been a tough year for Carolann and me. We have lost our girls, Cricket and Lady, within a span of just a few weeks.
Cricket was a Yorkshire Terrier we bought out of a box outside of a Northern California church when she was barely six weeks old. She had several brothers and sisters but when we looked in that box she fairly leapt into our hands, choosing us. We picked her up and she crawled into our hearts, to live there forever.
Lady was a Papillon mix, a sweetheart we inherited from Homer, a Southern California neighbor who died in his mid-nineties. We had taken her in from time to time when Homer went off to visit his middle-aged children. When Homer passed his son asked us to take Lady and we did so happily, because she and Cricket had become close friends over the years.
In February of this year Cricket, age 13, became seriously ill and we had to kiss her goodbye.
A few weeks later I awoke for work at 3:30 a.m. and found our lovely Lady in her peaceful, eternal slumber. She hadn’t been sick at all.
Now, some eight months later, we have another dog halfway across the Rainbow Bridge. We named him Gizmo because his face was the spittin’ image of the vicious critter of the 1984 movie, Gremlins, though he is far from vicious. I love him and took to calling him my “little twit”. He has an enlarged heart and is older and sicker than anybody knew when we got him from a local rescue organization. He’s comfortable but terminal.
I’m 62 years old and have been blessed with the selfless love and companionship of many animals in my life. I’ve mourned my separation from each of them. But the thing that has just struck me is one of the most joyous realizations of my life:
For all my faults and the pressures of life that confound me, I am loved, unconditionally.
Dave Williams