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December 2, 2006
alfie, the best dog in the world, died in his sleep...just like you will someday, timmy...if you’re very, very lucky...goodnight!
When I arrived at the vet's for our 5pm appointment, the receptionist showed me to a special room I'd never seen. There was no sink, no table, no examination equipment of any kind. There was a chair, an end table, and a couch with quilts and pillows. On the end table was a box of Kleenex and several children's books about pet death. "I'll always love you," the child narrator assured the still corpse of Alfie, the best dog in the world, lying at the foot of his bed. 
And you couldn't fabricate a more comforting fate than Dog Heaven, where, I gathered, entry does not require that you worship like us and not like them. Every pooch gets in. Dog heaven easily beats that imperious country club called People Heaven.
Man.
As if I hadn't thought enough about my dog's death in the past few days, my vet gives me tales of Alfie's lifeless body? If the idea behind this room is to make people who thought their dog was alive completely tweak out, I'd have to say it's pure twisted genius. If that's not the idea, I'm more at a loss to explain what they could possibly be thinking. It creeped me out.
I'm going to tenatively say that Ed is okay now. Tentative = a battery of tests and $850 later, there's no real diagnosis beyond "bacterial imbalance." So the horrors could recur. On meds, she's certainly feeling better and comfortably sleeps when she's not insanely mining her bowl for food she somehow missed.
posted by john at 8:09 AM • permalink