The following is a guest post by my colleague Eva.

Gone but not forgotten

I lost Lady Rose my first summer back from college. Once the kind of dog who would do a frantic tap dance on the hardwood floor of our kitchen when my parents would come home from work, old age had turned Lady Rose into a perpetual napper. Around age 12, Lady really began to show her age. First to go was her hearing, then her sight, then finally her organs began to shut down. I hoped she would die peacefully on her bed by the window—her favorite place to sit in our house because it allowed for undisturbed people-watching. The thought that bothered me most was that she would live through terrible pain and discomfort. None of us wanted this for her, so we watched, knowing that we had to be there to help make the end as painless as possible.

I know I had considered euthanasia. I know I ran the scenario through my head. Would I want to be with her in the little room when they gave her the injection? Would I hold her paw in my hand or just watch? I didn't know the answers, but I was confident that I wanted to be there for her as much as possible. I thought of the times when I had stayed home sick from school and she would make her rounds through the house, checking in on me in my room and then walking away as if to say, "Still in bed? Good. My work here is done." I never considered that I wouldn't be there when she died, but that ended up being the way things went.

It was on a July afternoon after coming back from my summer job that I found out that Lady Rose was gone. My dad had a miserable look in his eyes as he told me: "Oh, Eva, I'm so sorry. Lady Rose died today." My parents had wanted to wait for me before they took her to the veterinarian. She had been hacking and breathing in shallow shudders all morning before she finally began coughing up blood. When they took her to the vet, they were told that she was in a lot of pain and that the right thing to do would be to put her down. My dad was in the room with her when she died, and I know that had to have meant a lot to her. After he was done telling me what had happened, I lay down and cried beside my parents on their bed for an hour, thinking in my head the same thought over and over again: My poor baby, I never wanted you to be in pain.

Initially I felt guilty, thinking we should have had her put down sooner, but these days I feel that we did everything we could. We didn't want to make the decision and think for one minute that we had decided to put her down because she was inconveniencing us with her old age. We hoped she would help us make the decision, and in a way, I think she did.

Four years later, I still have her dog tag on my keychain. Four years later, her ashes are still sitting in a jar in my parents' house, waiting for us to take her back up to the Sierra Nevadas to toss her ashes on her favorite hiking trail. I've also thought about retiring the dog tag and keeping it in a box somewhere with other mementos from my childhood. I'll do those things eventually, but for now I like knowing that she's still a part of me wherever I go.