Go Tweety into that dark night

My goodness, time flies. We all get old. We all die. We all do what we do.

Mary and I were walking yesterday and for some reason, I said to her, "You know, the thing that judges you is if you left this world tomorrow, would anyone notice." She said something that made me cringe. She said, "With you, sure, people would notice. With me, probably not." I disagreed terribly, on both ends.

Which leads me to today. Today is different. It's cooler than I remember the end of April being. It's another day closer to leaving our home of four years. It's another day closer to leaving this world.

And today we must take our wonderful sheltie to the vet to be put to sleep.

What an expression, so nice and so neat. It's a different feeling than when my beloved Frankie died when we were in Israel in January. But I didn't sleep last night, thinking about her.

See, she's 15 going on 16 and things just don't work that well any more. She's been coughing for about a year now, gagging on occasion when she got to excited. She's arthritic and barely able to walk back up the steps of our deck in the back yard. We had begun to suspect she couldn't keep from urinating a bit on herself. I had shaved some bad hair off her back legs just last week in an effort to pretty her up. Then when I went to do it again last evening, before giving her a bath, I saw a tumorous growth.

Despite my intention to let her live her life out, we can't go on. Oh, and she's barely able to see, too.

But her dang tail still wags. She still wants to run roughshod over her companion of 10 years, Logan. She still barks viciously at the neighbor's dog. She still is, well, Tweety. Until she's not.

The Bible isn't all that clear on the fate of pets. But in a Bible study we've been having recently on Revelation, it says this in the fifth chapter, the 11th verse:
"Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea and all that is in them singing, "To the one seated on the throne and to the Lamb, be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever."

To me that means there will be creatures in heaven. And what better creatures to sing than the dogs who showed such incredible unconditional love."

I'm getting old. I truly am. I don't know when it happened, but it did. My body aches. My blood pressure needs pills. My blood sugar needs pill. You get the picture.

But when a companion of 15 years, more than a quarter of my life, slips away, I notice even more.

The world might not notice she's gone. But I dang sure will. I love you Tweety. Now for forever.
Amen.