raising heller

this is a sad post for me. let me first start off by way of explanation. we have 2 dogs that have been part of our family since shortly after jana and i were married. the first dog we got was a white chihuahua/jack russell terrier mix. that’s roxy quiksilver. a couple months later, we were worried that roxy was lonely so we bought a black chihuahua. morgan le fay. fast forward about 8 or 9 years later. roxy is a pretty normal dog, while morgan has a lot of quirks. she has snaggly teeth, she’s gone blind, she has a propensity for escaping the back yard and she’s extremely frightened of high pitched noises. she’s escaped several times but she usually just goes around to the front yard and hangs out by the front door. a few times we’ve found her wandering up the street, but we live in a pretty quiet neighborhood and she always comes back.

this saturday, in the middle of the night, a battery in one of the smoke detectors died causing the it to do that random chirping noise (is it a law that those things have to die in the middle of the night?). morgan went nuts. she was shaking and wouldn’t sit still. we tried to bring her in to bed with us, but she wouldn’t stay. we put her in the garage, but she just kept scratching at the door. finally, i put her in the back yard thinking that being away from the noise might help her calm down. i wasn’t too worried about her getting out because the only gap underneath the fence had been blocked by a pretty big rock.

i was wrong.

apparently she’s a lot more determined than i give her credit for. she managed to move the rock and get out. we discovered this when we got up in the morning and immediately set out to find her. we searched the neighborhood high and low but couldn’t find her. we assumed she would find her way back as she always does, but by sunday night, we started to give up hope. we had her micro-chipped as a puppy so we held out hope that someone might find her and take her to the pound where they would be able to find us and get her home. we found out this morning that someone took her in to the vet after she had been struck by a car. apparently she was having seizures and they had to put her to sleep.

i’ve never been a pet guy. i had fish as a kid. i tried to pretend that i really liked them. i didn’t. i had a bird. it was boring. i was really hesitant to get dogs, but i have to say that they’ve really become part of our family in a big way. we’ve had morgan longer than we’ve had any of our children. it’s still kind of hard to believe that she’s gone. that we’re not going find her scratching at the side of our bed trying to get under the covers, or jumping up on the couch to sit in our laps.

so, today i’ll be pouring one for my homie, morgan le fay. we’ll miss you.

words