When you accept pets into your life, they come with a deal. You get all the love and joy they bring, but since there's opposition in all things, you also get the pain and helplessness of sometimes not being able to help them when they're sick, not being able to have them tell you how they feel.
But it's a deal we make every day.
And in our family, it's a deal we keep making, even after some of those pets have left us.
Years ago, we got a call from our neighbor friends. They said they had a Shih Tzu puppy at their house and wondered if we were interested in taking her home. I went and took a few of the kids with me to check things out.
I saw the puppy.
I called my wife.
"What do you think? my wife asked. "Should I come up and see her?"
I thought about it, then I responded. I said, "If you come up here and see this puppy, you'd better be prepared to take her home with you, because once you see this dog, you'll not be able to say no."
I was right. She came over. We brought the dog home with us.
That was almost fifteen years ago.
We named her Patch. She's seen many days. Lately, she sleeps a lot. She's blind, deaf, and we believe she's got dementia. There's been a few times when she seems like she's on her last legs. One of those times was this past weekend. She didn't get up. She didn't eat. She didn't sleep. It's happened before, but she'd never been that bad for that long.
Then, she got up and started eating and drinking, not a lot, but some.
Lazarus dog.
We're still pretty sure her days are few. She's not eating enough on a daily basis to keep up, and she's sleeping more than before. When she leaves us, we'll be sad--it's part of the deal we made when we decided to bring her home and make her part of the family. She just keeps tricking us as to when that time will be.
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