What a sad commentary I must submit tonight after long years of mourning your loss. There’s just no explaining my failure to understand “your problem” and to give you comfort when you needed it so desperately. You should have lived much longer than two and a half years. It just didn’t make sense how the sweet, lovable puppy you started out to be could turn into a troubled, dis-agreeable grouch. I’d be angry too if my significant other left me alone more often than not in favor of a new boyfriend.
How lonely you must have felt after being doted on your first year! How you really suffered when I banished you to the yard and justified it to myself because you tried to bite me several times! After being my house pal for over a year, your pillow was any number of dirt mounds and your bed became an old rug on the patio. It was a hard, uncomfortable summer for you, wasn’t it? I don’t think you barked much after that or made a fuss anymore. It wouldn’t have mattered that much with no one around to pay attention.
Your heart and spirit gradually slipped away without my notice. Nobody knows how long your lifeless body lay underneath my car in the blazing heat. You just crawled up under there and laid down without
as much as a whimper.
It’s been 17 years with this memory stinging my soul. You paid the greater price though. I have grown old and my heart now understands “The Gift” and that all the little pets that followed you have been appreciated and well-cared-for.
My heart has learned that God gives only perfect gifts…pure and innocent tiny beings incapable of hate and conditional love. He
wants us not to be lonely…He wants us to learn
what the sancity of life is about and what it means to be Holy. He charges us with the responsibility to tenderly care for these perfect gifts and to send them back to Him undamaged and well-tended.
It’s time you were properly memorialized and honored. Even though you have forgiven me, I still need to forgive myself and make an apology that your brief life was not a comfortable one. It’s time to thank you for showing my heart how to care. I thank God every day that He thought enough of me to send me this wondrous, marvelous
“Gift Called Mickers”