It’s no secret that I am constantly confronted with mortality. From anniversaries of loved one’s passing, to looking at the calendar and simply understanding that 2025 is not something I ever thought of back in 1995, it seemed so very far away that it was crazy. What makes it even harder is watching Abbey THE dog beginning to run her final lap. There are moments where she is excited the way she has always been, but most of the time she just paces, either in the house or out in the yard. She always wants to go out, regardless of. the cold, heat, or even in the rain (she has always hated the rain, making it even more hard to watch) and when she goes out all she does is pace around the yard, back and forth, back and forth. Very occasionally she will lay down in the sun, but while she used to do that a lot, that is now the exception. Her back legs are weak and she has a hard time standing to eat her food, so much so that we have a rubber mat coming to make it easier on her. Where she used to spend all of her time laying down near us, recently she has taken to going into one of the guest rooms and laying between the two twin beds by herself. She will still spend most of the night in her bed in our bedroom but will always roust around 3 AM and need to go out and even then sometimes later in the morning she will leave a present or two after we fall back asleep.

I know the day is coming where we will need to make a decision, fortunately today is not yet that day. I keep hoping very selfishly that one morning I will find her peacefully asleep on the rug by her bowl where she has spent a lot of her time. Even though her legs are weak (and believe me I get the age impacting on all things physical, another punctuation mark on my own struggle), she doesn’t seem to be in any additional major discomfort, it more the seeming to slip away cognitively a little more each day.

Anyway…I just felt the need to say it somehow and this was as good a place as any….I’ll let some of Dan’s lyrics from the song that shares its title with this post take it out, all the while wondering if dogs do have memories and do dream

Sometimes in the night I feel it
Near as my next breath and yet untouchable
Silently the past comes stealing
Like the taste of some forbidden sweet
Along the walls in shadowed rafters
Moving like a thought through haunted atmospheres
Muted cries and echoed laughter
Banished dreams that never sank in sleep
Lost in love and found in reason
Questions that the mind can find no answers for
Ghostly eyes conspire treason
As they gather just outside the door
And every ghost that calls upon us
Brings another measure in the mystery
Death is there to keep us honest
And constantly remind us we are free
Down the ancient corridors
And through the gates of time
Run the ghosts of days that we’ve left behind
Down the ancient corridors
And through the gates of time
Run the ghosts of dreams that we left behind