Today I bury a dog.

 

It was not by psychotic compulsion to kill which eventually led me here. Nor was it by the reflections I’d be able to wring from seeing a life come full circle, and back to the crushing finality of expiry. It was a burden of duty.

The dog was 13 years of age. From the time I met her until today, she had been a constantly annoying little thing. Broke some things in the house, generally smelled bad, would urinate everywhere (especially during New Year’s when all the fireworks would be booming), and squeezed into places she was unwelcome. I despised the dog.

It came as no small surprise to me when she started going blind. She would bump into the walls, get caught between grills on gates, whimper sadly for food she could not find. Within a year the dog had curled up in a small section of the garage to live out the last remaining days of its life. It had begun to occur to me that I had been callous, unfeeling, and cruel. That through indifference I had made the dog’s life worse.

Certainly I had never seen such a heartbreaking sight as that of a broken animal clawing at the cemented driveway, all washed up and dirty, urinating on itself and without the strength to even creep towards its blanket. And when the question came to me, I had said without flinching that the best thing to do was to put the dog to sleep. I had not known such detachment before, and it troubles me to think of how uncaring I could be, in my darkest of hearts.

 

As I displace the dirt with an old rusty shovel, I wonder about the food this dog consumed in its life. I wonder if it was all worth it. I wonder about the ants who will carry bits of this decaying body home to feast on, and if they will eat to their satisfaction. And to how long those ants will live, themselves. As I lay the soil over this beaten body, I wonder if I deserve to fade into obscurity, to be forgotten as I have done.