My God
I meant to say "dog" but I don't feel like changing it. I'm sad right now.
My dog is old. His name is Eddie and he is one year older than me, meaning he is almost 17 years old. He has a limp, a fur condition, pees on himself wherever he walks, and poops on the sidewalk instead of the yard. He's deaf and nearly blind and bumps into objects frequently. He was lost for a night because he wandered across the street by himself quite a ways and a neighbor saw him, mistook him for a hit-and-run victim, and took him to the pound the next morning. We had to pay the $30 to essentially buy back our own dog.
And still... he's a part of the family. We took him to the vet over the weekend to board him while we took a trip, and the vets wrote a daily log of how he was doing. They have done this ever since I was a little kid... Eddie was around when I was born. He's the last of the original pets in our family that have survived since my birth. His sister Millie died of seizures when I was 9 and our cat Sammy was put to sleep when I was 12 after a peaceful 21 years of living with my mother in college and moving to our current house with her. Eddie is the last one, and we've seemingly already replaced him with a younger puppy the same breed as him.
The first entry on the vet's log said "Hello mister Eddie!"
I teared up. I look upon Eddie as a nuisance... just another thing I have to take care of when I get home from school. I have to replace his pee pad in his cage, lure him outside with a Beggin Strip, watch as he pees in a zigzag line down the driveway and slowly meander to the little patch of browned grass he has claimed his own all these years, call him back in, and finally coax him to climb back into his cage. That's essentially what happens... what his entire day consists of. Think of how a deaf and partially-blind animal views this. Same movements, same stiff joints painfully twisting while stepping out of the cage and jumping down the one step from the wood to the tile... stepping outside to release the bladder, sniffing around, senses dull and dimmed... what quality of life is that? What joy is there? Joy of obeying a master? Joy of what once was your life? What you once had?
I don't want to live like that. I know animals don't have the capacity to love, but... I'd like to say Eddie loved life, like all other dogs seem to do. I'd like to say he's still happy, although that's not true. I'd like to make it easier on him, even though I was very young when he was at his prime. The only Eddie I remember is the aging, soiled one that sits one floor below me now, covered in his own feces while my dad angrily tries to usher him outside so he can have room to mop the floors clean.
I don't think Eddie has much of a memory anymore, but I hope mine never goes away. If I end up in a nursing home, unable to do anything for myself one day, then I want to at least have the memories that confirm my life and its existence, no matter how small a part I played in the grand scheme of things. If dying is nothing but that - no frills, no clouds, no sweetcream goodbyes, then... today is what I have, and tomorrow is what I will have soon, but yesterday is mine forever.