Sam

UPDATE: MWF this week. Don't think I can manage more.

Ah hell, I lay odds I'm gonna be crying by the end of this.

So, anybody who can scroll down the page and see my twitter feed will probably already know this. Kind of. So here's the somewhat less abridged version.

Sam was never really my dog, you know? He's a little toy poodle, purebred, not like it matters since the first thing Grandma did when she got him was cut off the breeding bits (with a vet's assistance but still). He had a bunch of genetic problems - his teeth were messed up, his knees were messed up, his heart was failing him for the last five years of his life. Which, see, is why inbreeding is a bad thing, purity or not.

But yeah. So, initially, he belonged to Grandma, and she took care of him, I guess, at least until she passed away from liver cancer. I miss Grandma sometimes, but it's finally distant enough it doesn't hurt so badly anymore.

Then, my Great-Grand-Uncle (I think?) Tom inherited him. We always called the old man Uncle Tom, which come to think of it is part of the name of a book, right? They were basically inseparable, right up until he, too, died - from pneumonia and old age. There's a little bit of a pattern here.

Grandpa took care of him from then on. There's this old recliner in our house, and I've got all kinds of memories of Grandpa sitting in it, learning computers and watching television, whatever. He retired, and less than a year after that, we found out he had lung cancer. A couple of years after that, and he's just gone.

Two days before Sam died, I saw him just -staring- at that recliner, the one that sits empty most of the time anymore. Sam used to sit in it with him, you see.

And now Sam's gone, too.

We couldn't even bury him properly, because of all the snow. We'll do it, yeah, after the ground thaws out, but still.

I was never really all that close to him.

The house seems so much more empty now that the last of the pets have gone.