goodbye Gracie and Mollie

It's hard for people in their 50's.  So much is changing.  Once again our bodies are changing, our needs are changing, we're losing our mojo but desperately trying to hang onto it, too.   For a lot of us, the kids have gone off to college, graduated, moved away---we got through that hurdle, survived it, figured out what to do with each other if we're still married---and a lot of time we're left to finish raising the pets, the pets that the kids begged for when they were seven or eight--So the pets are themselves about seven or eight by the time the kids go off to college or out into the big world, and then another seven or so years pass and there are the beloved family pets---old, infirm, blind, deaf, tumor-riddled, hip-displaced, dying.  By this time they have in many ways replaced the children as the objects of all that attention and tender-loving care which just doesn't end the day the parents drop the kids off at college- in truth we were made to nurture and love from beginning to end, so, no children, no problem---give all that love to the family dog.

Today we put down our Mollie and Gracie.  Gracie came to us 14 years ago via a friend of Joe's.  She gave birth to six puppies four weeks after we got her.  We kept the one pup that we thought would not be adopted easily---Mollie.  I saw Mollie come into this world on February 3rd, 1998.  I raised her.  Me and Gracie.  I walked those dogs every single day for 13 years, until they could walk no more.  Gracie could no longer see, and Mollie could barely walk.  I got up every morning at five am to feed them and let them out.  I worried about them when we went on vacation.  Every move you make in a house is always a move around the dog---because they were always right there beside me.  They licked out every can and pot and pan I had.  I never had to rinse anything.  You are never alone in a house when you have a dog in it.

So Joe had to do the dirty work---he took them to the vet,  watched them get a sedative and lay their old gray heads down, and then get the IV and THE drug, and watched as they slowly stopped breathing.  And he cried and cried, I know he did.  Joe has become a crier in his 50s.  So tonight the house is so quiet--once again, the parents sending their second set of kids off---off and never coming back.