Saying Good Bye

This last weekend we had to say good bye to our dog Mies.  Mies was the first dog that we acquired nearly 12 years ago.  We found Mies at the Kansas Humane Society.  At the time he was a little ball of white fur with brown ears, one of which sat crooked across the top of his head.  The Society thought that he would be about 50-60 pounds, but he turned out to be 100. 

Mies was a gentle dog, but he started off as crazy as they come.  It was not until we got our second dog nearly a year later that he calmed down.  Apparently, he needed someone to be a role model to.  Mies' favorite activity was having people pet him.  When he was younger, he would sometimes race with Kate while chasing tennis balls, but he seemed to prefer just sitting beside us and having us pet his head. 

We knew that he would not live to be much older than 11 or 12 years old since he was such a big dog.  Over the years he started moving slower, but he still would show signs of being as excited as a puppy when we would come outside to play with the dogs.  On Friday night, he was laying in the yard and could not get up.  Apparently his back legs just would not work.  He did get up later, so we thought that we would wait through the weekend and take him to our vet on Monday.  Saturday he began having more trouble getting up and around.  We thought about taking him to the animal hospital at that time, but we again thought that we could help him get through the weekend.  Saturday evening he began to go downhill quickly.  He could not get up at all and he had become stressed to the point that he did not appear to know we were with him.  Matt took him to the animal hospital at 1:30 in the morning.

We knew that our time with Mies would come to an end soon, and we are thankful that there was no doubt regarding his condition and what we should do, but saying good bye was harder than I expected it would be.