On grief loss and maybe healing

The weekend was long, packed and joyous. I welcome those joining the winterABC both as writers and our readers that keep us going. So about today and that topic. I expect to read a lot on love and heartbreaks today and the death of loved ones. I am doing a special death.

Today am writing about my family’s late dog, since the prompt is about loss and grief and may be healing on part. I decide on a dog because I don’t have any hope of ever seeing it or her again. From my knowledge from the Bible, resurrection is for humans only, the one’s that share in the Ransom. So let me take your back to 2008 then build it from there. That year we left the capital when my mother decided to retire from the cooperate world, she had worked with a water utility agency for 15 years and when she was 38 years she got tired of work. So we moved to a her retirement house a few kilometers from Kampala in a place called Seeta.

In 2008 the place was not yet developed, it was like we had moved into a wilderness, no neighbors at all, it was know for a petty crime so we needed to invest in security. We were advised to get dogs. We started to look around for puppies but before we could spend on good breeds, she got two retirement gifts from her friends a male and a female puppy. They were days old but the male one was lazy, he never used to eat enough so we gave him out and stayed with the female one. The other reason for keep one dog was the training costs that we later avoided.

When you have a dog you must give it a name. Ours was a golden retriever, so we started to suggest names but we kept on eliminating one by one for reasons like that uncle’s daughter is named Esther and we have a relative that called her kid Mini. So Ugandan get upset if they share a name with an animal. So we ended up with Missi. When we got a vet for her he advised us to train her ourselves, he claimed trained dogs were complicated for just keeping a home. We did research and actually a long the way through her 12 years the saying that you can’t train old dogs new tricks is not true at all. They don’t stop learn and they can learn over 300 words.

Missi would eat everything that we would eat apart from pineapples, I don’t know why but I think because they naturally have a high Ph making them acid to some levels. She never liked it when you would wash her. She would never let anyone sleep past eight should be in your room pulling off your covering and putting her cold nose on you. We trained her to recognize only 5 living things, the only 5 five that where there when she was growing up. So she was an attacking dog to anything that got into the fence. She would kill snakes, she killed 3 cats that somehow made their way in.

Making her an attacking dog treatment was an extreme sport but the vet would find his way with our assistance to administer the injections. We were not sure she could actually harm a human till one night in December of 2017 when we had an attempted break-in, by the time police, come to our rescue there was blood all over, she was very tired we just had to carry her to her house. And the boys my age mates could not run because of the injuries. It was a long night for the 4 of us Missi inclusive.

The first time we had the vet visit her, we asked him how long do dogs of her breed live and he said 10 years would be a good run. People seeing her photos at home when visiting would always ask what are you going to do when she dies and we would tell them we get a new one. When she made 10 she had become frail, and we started facing reality. We used to keep home keys on her collar we stopped. She stop sleeping out since she was not a guard dog anymore and with the neighborhood feeling up with houses we felt a bit safer. She was falling sick more frequently and her appetite was off, not even meat would do a miracle. She was in pain. For a dog one year is equivalent to 7 year and she was now 12 years. We made the decision to put her to sleep. We got authorization but it took us 6 months to let her go. The day she died my brother and mother left home and I had to move her to one of out empty properties to hurry her.

I had known that one day she would be no more but coming back home that afternoon and I had to throw away the bones after a meal felt like I was not on earth. She died on a Sunday and on Tuesday we bought a new one who we call Piper but you find us calling her Missi sometimes. It’s now 3 months with her gone. Am keeping my distance from the new babe because have partially moved out of home which means I have to find my own pet. But still she only listens to me for now.