The Bad Day

I've had to think about this blog for a while actually. It's not that it was difficult to pick out a day among all the horrible ones that I've faced in my life but quite the opposite. I'm almost like Job in the fact that most of my life has been extremely happy. I've been very fortunate to be able to gothrough life without many of the hardships that I know others have had to face. So I guess the hardest part is for me to type this as a "bad day" when I know that there are others who have suffered far more than I have, who have had to endure as I have not, and yet who still manage to make it through each and every day with a smile.

That being said, here's what I've come up with: I first thought that I might write about the death of one of my mother's parents. However, my grandmother died when I was very young and I only remember her from flashes. My grandfather died several years later when I was in eighth grade, but he had been very sick for a long time and, although the moment in and of itself was very sad, I think that I had already come to the realization that there was nothing that I could do when he finally did die.

My worst day, then, was actually when my first dog died, a little less than a year before my grandfather. Her name was Montana by the way. My parents had gotten her after they had visited the state for the first time and fell in love with the place. Anyways, I don't remember the exact day, but I remember that it was cold. Of course, this is an Alabama cold we're talking about so I guess that it probably wasn't as cold as I've experienced to date, but at the time I thought it was freezing. I remember that it was my turn to feed her, and so I "bundled up" to take a large bowl of food out to the old shed where she slept at night.

The first thing that I noticed when I got out there was that she wasn't in her usual spot. At this point, I'm kind of anoid because I have to go to school and I can't find her. There was a main opening to the shed that had plenty of room for her to lay down and have tons of food and water, but around to the side there was a smaller door that she sometimes went into when she was hiding or feeling playful. So I went to the side door and sure enough she was laying there, but something struck me as odd. She seemed peaceful, but there was something that didn't strike me as right. I remember at that point thinking for the first time that she might be dead. I bent down to touch her, and that's when I knew.

A long, sad story short, my dad had to come home from work to bury her, and I still had to go to school that day. Something that I am still kind of bitter about to this day. The whole time I kept thinking about Montana. She had been there for twelve of the thirteen years of my life and so it was disconcerting to know that something so stalwart in my life could be so easily taken away. I can remember so many of the times that we had together, all the memories and fun. I can remember what she looked like, what she felt like, how she sounded when she barked. But every time that I think about her now, another image of her laying perfectly still comes to my mind now, and the image of me reaching out and touching that still form will probably remain one of the saddest moments of my life.