You know, I fought back and forth on whether or not I should blog about it. I didn’t want to come back and re-visit this post over and over. I finally decided I should say something about him.
Bear passed away yesterday on February 8th, 2011.
I guess it’s hard to figure out what to say. He was 16 years old. I still remember my mother picking me up from school way back in May of 1995 and taking me home. There was a puppy running around in the backyard and I was so blown away that my mother adopted a puppy out of the blue like that.
His story is this – My sister wanted to adopt a puppy for her house so she and my mother went to look around. My sister adopted a puppy and named him Squeaker. The other puppy, his brother, was already reserved for a family that had a little boy.
The house we moved into has such a big beautiful backyard, lots of room for a dog to run around. I guess the idea of moving into our own home for the first time instead of living on base or a rented house must’ve made my mother go back to the shelter a couple weeks later. She saw the same puppy sitting there and asked about it. It turns out that the couple returned the puppy because he was just too rambunctious. The little boy named him Bear and my mother decided to keep that name when she adopted him.
He had this very bad habit of jumping up on people (which was probably a deal-breaker for the couple that returned him) and we never could get him to stop jumping up on people until he got much much older. I mean, he somehow kept that same puppy-ish outlook through his whole life. He was always healthy and lived for so long. I think it stuns me at how quickly he fell apart the last couple of months. He just got worse and worse and the veterinarian finally gave the advice that he had to go, that it was his time.
It’s going to be weird for a long while. To not have him around anymore is just going to be tough to deal with.
Location: The Green Room
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