Goodbye to Mitz a.k.a. "Captain Jack Sparrow" - R.I.P.
May 2007 - November 8, 2007

Today we had to say goodbye to the newest and youngest and itty-bittiest member of our family. First I named him "Mitzi" when we got him from my daughter's horse trainer in August, when we assumed he was a girl. Then we found out he was a boy, so I turned his name into "Mitz," then Jasmine got the notion to call him "Captain Jack Sparrow" (as he was born with only one eye). Little Mitz was a brave little warrior, but he was no match for what fate had in store for him in this wicked world. The eye infection in his one good eye went from bad to worse, and he went almost totally blind and was in too much pain. On the vet's recommendation we had no choice but to put him to sleep. It's a damn shame, and we'll miss him more than we can squeeze into words on a simple blog posting. All the inscrutable idiosyncraticies that made him unique: playfully biting my nose when he lay in a cute little pile next to me at night; shedding his white hair everywhere and getting it clumped up into dread locks; climbing up my leg when I was in the kitchen; and so much more - all gone, gone forever into that strange shadowland of death, that cometh for us all sooner than we'd prefer and swallows us all into its vast waste...eventually. Too soon for him. We love you, Mitz. See you on the other side, little buddy.

"May you stay forever young."

- Bob Dylan, "Forever Young"

"Are we listening?
Hymns of offering
Have we eyes to see
That love is gathering?

All the words that I've been reading
Have now started the act of bleeding

Into one....Into one.

So I walk upon high
And I step to the edge
To see my world below

And I laugh at myself
While the tears roll down.
'Cause it's the world I know.
It's the world I know."

"The World I Know" - Collective Soul

"They brought him in and put him on the stainless steel examination table. He had grown so thin...So thin. Shaking, knowing what was going to happen to him. But still a puppy.

I cried and my nose swelled with the crying, and he buried his head in my arms because we hadn't done much crying at one another. I was ashamed at myself for not being able to take it as well as he was.

' I got to, pup, because you're in pain and you can't eat. I got to.' But he didn't want to know that...It was impossible to tell the moment he passed over from life to death. He simply laid his head on my hand, his eyes fluttered shut and he was gone...

I wrapped him in a sheet with the help of the vet and I drove home with Ahbhu on the seat beside me...I took him out in the backyard and began digging his grave. I dug for hours, crying and mumbling to myself, talking to him in the sheet...

I laid him down in the hole and he was so tiny in there for a dog who had seemed to be so big in life, so furry, so funny. And I covered him over and when the hole was packed full of dirt I replaced the neat divot of grass I'd scalped off at the start. And that was all.

But I couldn't send him to strangers."

Harlan Ellison "Ahbhu" (from "The Deathbird")