One of my dogs is dying

In reply to Snowdoggie :

I feel your loss, while she’s Over the rainbow bridge she’ll be there waiting for you.  

So strange to see this thread revived in 2018. I just lost another dog five weeks ago just before the coronavirus shutdown. She looked a lot like the one I lost in 2011. Here she was last year making friends at the Doggie Beach Bash at a local water park last September. 

My poor Nubia. She was a lot like Porsche, and then she wasn't. Porsche was more motherly. Nubia was more fiesty. Nubia would go to the dog park and flirt with the biggest baddest Alpha Male dog she could find. She was always the leader of my pack. 

When she died five weeks ago I was just numb. For the first time I could not cry when one of my dogs died. With the Coronavirus crap, dealing with my mother almost dying two years ago, having to be her sole caretaker (Dad and my younger sister died about 18 years ago) and then putting her in a nursing home last year, financial pressures of putting her estate in order and the general insanity of life, I was just too damned numb to cry about a silly dog. 

Tonight when I found this thread, I finally cried for Nubia. 

Thank you to everybody who posted in it. 

Losing a dog is tough. Sometimes, we don't understand why it hits us so hard.

I've been through it with my own dogs, and with many, many of my clients. 

O don't know if this makes sense:

Sometimes it is a channel for the grieving that we need to do for other reasons, which is one more way that loving a dog helps us. 

I'm very sorry for your loss.

In reply to Snowdoggie :

It's like losing a family member. 

It took me some time to recover from the death of my first dog. It really is hard to say goodbye to a good companion. 

So very sorry. This is the dark and painful side of being a dog owner - they just don't live as long as we do. 

Just as an input: When I was young, my father had to take the same decision for a very special dog that I grew up with. Selma hated (!!) the vet office, so my dad hired the vet to come to our house instead. She had a last steak dinner with some sleeping pills in, before the vet came. She fell asleep in her favorite spot on the sofa, got the injection right there and never woke again. Painless, no stress, and with dignity. 

Snowdoggie, I'm sorry to hear about your latest loss.  My thoughts are with you.