Stuff

I put my dog to sleep last week. Lucy was my will-live-six-months-at-the-most trial dog to see if I was suited for dog ownership. That was six years ago. I don't have any regrets about putting her to sleep because it was definitely time, but now I have all this stuff that I don't know what to do with.

As many times as I joked about buying small bags of food over the years, I still ended up with nearly forty pounds of geriatric dog food. That and some of her medications (and she was on three on a daily basis) went to a friend with a geriatric large breed dog, but what about the rest of it? I don't know anyone who needs gabapentin or trilostane. It was insanely expensive while she was alive, but now I can't even give it away.

Then there's her collar and harness, with three rabies tags and a variety of address tags because once those things get put on the collar, they never come off, and besides, the jingling of her collar was the only way I could find her when she was hiding in the ivy because she didn't want to come inside in the morning when I had to leave for work.

How do you get rid of a six-foot couch? It ceased to be human furniture about a year ago, but you don't take the dog's couch away without a good reason, and you don't rearrange the living room furniture when you have a blind, arthritic dog without feeling like a complete jerk.

Her jar of peanut butter that I put on a cookie every morning to hold the pills together? Oh wait, that I can use myself.

The wading pool will probably disintegrate in the next few months as it breaks down in the sun, but I'll be digging up moldy rawhide bones every time I plant something for as long as I own the house.

And how do I get rid of the big empty spot in the bed, and the silence that used to be filled with the snoring that kept me awake every night for the first week I had her?

They say that when you lose someone, there's supposed to be an emptiness. So why do I have all this stuff?