My Baby Bear

Well, we've had kind of a hard week. Late Sunday night, Wookie started acting strange--he'd done the same Saturday morning but had quickly recovered, so we made him comfortable and decided to wait and see. After an hour or so, we rang the vet, who advised us to give him some aspirin, as he guessed it was his recurring spinal disc problem. He was having trouble moving, so I carried him into the house (he'd been lying outside in the back yard) and laid him on the floor on some blankets, and we pulled out the futon so we could sleep downstairs with him. I knew something wasn't right, that he was really having trouble, but there wasn't really anything we could do. I eventually heard his breathing relax a bit and assumed he'd fallen asleep.

We finally fell asleep ourselves around midnight, but I woke back up around 1:30, checked on him, and discovered to my complete surprise that he'd passed away not long before. D and I were both devastated. It was a real shock for us at the time, and we had a very hard time on Monday dealing with the "empty" house. But after spending the last couple of days looking back at videos and photos and remembering with D, I finally realised how really old he'd looked recently. His aging had happened so gradually that I think I hadn't noticed it.


I've found myself wishing that he'd lived long enough for Molly to remember him. They were really good friends--she learned from him what it means to be "gentle," and he guarded her carefully whenever we went for a walk. We do have several photos of them together, and she definitely remembers him when she sees them or when she drops her toast on the floor (which she had started to do on purpose, as it attracted his attention every time!).


At this point, though, we've come to be very grateful for his long and happy life and for the fact that he died so peacefully, lying next to us, in his own home. We have a lot of wonderful memories of him, and we've been trying to collect as many as we can. If you have one or two Wookie memories, please do send them, if you feel like it. This morning, we laughed out loud for the first time since Sunday night after reading my brother-in-law's very loving memory of Wookie working his way down into the foot of his sleeping bag on a particularly cold camping trip in northern Arizona, and then flatly refusing to come back out until the sun was up. He spent the entire night down there, wrapped around my BIL's toes.


I know some of you didn't know him very well, but I'm sure you all remember him and how attached we were to him. He came to live with me in Clemson, South Carolina, when he was 8 weeks old. Afterwards, he lived in Phoenix, Arizona; Raleigh, North Carolina; Flagstaff, Arizona; Baltimore, Maryland; Arlington, Virginia (Washington, DC); Red Mesa, Arizona; and Oxford, England. He had a very exciting life for a wriggly little "rabbit dog" beagle puppy who ran out to meet me for the first time from under a garden shed in Anderson, South Carolina over 14 years ago.


We still miss him terribly but are finally starting to get back to our normal lives, slightly changed... and have started to laugh again and remember him fondly.


Photos:
1) On Mount Snowdon, the highest peak in England and Wales, 2005
2) With D in Wales, 2005
3) In the back garden, last week
4) Windy in Wales, 2005
5) With me in Wales, 2005
6) Christmas 2006, taken by our friend Jeremy