Good-bye, Old Friend

tonight i deal with a concept quite foreign to me by way of luck: grief. i am paused at the loss of a dear friend and family member who fortifies the bridge of my adolescence with her years spent with us as the family pet. this new gift of life was discovered by my 6th grade eyes at the onset of my confusing, pubescent years and she remained an unsurrendering presence until today, the onset of my adult life. i must count myself as one of the more fortunate people i know: i come from a strong and caring family of six and all of us are in good health. the loss of jingles, our family dog, after thirteen years as a staple and contibuting member of the family comes painfully but not without forewarning. her health had been in steady decline, dear thing, for many years now. many of her ailments are found typically in her breed; there were things we anticipated and things that surprised us along the way, but we knew what to expect with her and things were getting difficult. at the end she wasn't eating or drinking, and i would see no other option. i wouldn't have allowed her to suffer.

many of my friends are dealing with loss and its imminence as it gathers around their friends and families in the form of terminal illness coupled with unexpectancy. a close friend of mine kills himself incrementally with cigarettes. one friend's mother suffers a stroke in canada while her daughter is here, overseas. another watches her best friend die of a disease that women never get, but she's dying of it anyway, and there's nothing to be done. so often you can see death coming, but we're no more comfortable with it, and we continue to do what we can to make its presence invisible as best we can. a friend of a friend is watching her entire family, the environment and structure of her youth, die of lung cancer simultaneously. it is horrific. it is relentless. it has yet to arrive.

to lose a pet. it was time for jingles anyway, and there was nothing that we could have done to reverse her condition so she would have only gotten worse. we did everything we could for that little dog, and she reciprocated to the best of her ability. but we knew it was best and for that i feel fortunate. being all the way over here in japan has prevented me from seeing the worst of it. the dog we knew and loved had died long ago and, when she became more of a skeleton without a passion for even life's most primal requirements, we knew she had given up. as a family we had unanimously decided that should should never be made to suffer. that dog was our family's little girl.

there was nothing more important to my adolescent development than having a network of love all around me at all times, so that even when things got arduous and tensions mounted, there were more important things than the present moment. that dog was a constant reminder of the joy we as a family could bring to each other by way of surprise and sincerity. jingles met most of my high school and university girlfriends, was avidly protective of the house and its residents and was quick to spot a fake. i learned not to trust her judgement in her later years, after taking a long time to accept the fact that she was nearly blind and might have been a little bit racist when it came to greeting guests at the door. my father paints her disposition in a more elegant light, claiming that her resistence to be friendly to andrew yap in my younger years was because his presence indicated my departure from the household whenever he would arrive. i still think that she just didn't like asian people. she mellowed out as she got older.

that miniature schnauzer changed my life. while i would never label her a good listener, she would overhear a lot of my youthful ranting without storming out of the room. she didn't complain when i would take her for a walk to have a cigarette back in my super-secretive days, but you could tell that she never approved. she was a good dog. and she loved carrots.

that miniature schnauzer could eat more carrots than any creature i have ever known. her night vision must have been spectacular. she would eat carrots until she was sick, and on more than one occasion i witnessed that dog contemplating reconsuming her carrot binge. we usually tried to call her off of it. she wasn't very good at fetch because she didn't like to share when she was younger, but when the game moved indoors she wouldn't leave you alone. loved the attention, and loved more than anything to have all six of her packmates home and gathered in the same room. christmas. elementary school summer. exam breaks. family emergencies.

that miniature schnauzer would raid the garbages in our house to get gratifying revenge if we left her alone all at once. she really didn't like that. it didn't matter what was in the tissues in the bathroom refuse. she would stir it up nice and well for us to have to pick up when we returned to her. usually by the time we got home she had all but forgotten her outburst of tantrum and her ears would press to her head in that "oh-my-god-what-have-i-done" kind of way. we loved her too much to ever strike her so we had to condition that dog with guilt. if any family knew how, it was ours. she would usually get sent outside and usually just seeing her ears go down was indication to us that she understood and she was sorry for flipping out, like an alcoholic having a moment of clarity or defeat at an intervention.

that miniature schnauzer was conditioned not by foodbell but doorbell. that miniature schnauzer was conditioned to react to the words "biscuit," "carrot," "outside," "walk," "who's that," "daddy's home," and "where's 'so-and-so'?". she could spot another dog out the front window before we could and always whined with a sense of identity conflict, torn between the need to be outside eating garbage and sniffing strangers and the desire to be at home, just another human like the rest of us. that miniature schnauzer would wake my mom up for her breakfast so early. that miniature schnauzer had a pacemaker but, in a way, there was never anything wrong with her heart and i loved her. that miniature schnauzer would run away from home and not look back and we would panic but if we couldn't find her she would always find her way home and bark stubbornly until we opened the front door for her like anyone else. that miniature schnauzer saw us as one of her own, and we will always lovingly see her as one of us.

i'll miss you jingles. i wish i could have been there.