R.I.P Pal

Reading Time: 4 minutes

On Wednesday morning (12/4) I woke up to a picture sent by my family with Pal on a scale with the message, “what is wrong with my baby” 7,000 miles away I didn’t know anything had been wrong. Just last Thursday on thanksgiving when I was FaceTiming my family he was begging and barking for food while everybody ate. Fast forward to 11:15 am on Wednesday, I was at school, extremely excited to be getting a second monitor for my desk; while one of the teachers helped me install it I read the message “Very sad news we’re at the emergency hospital, the vet found a tumor in pal he has cancer all over and only has a couple of days to live”. I started crying but tried to hold it in because the teacher was still there setting up my monitor. If he noticed he probably mistook them as tears of joy.

When you’re around family and friends it’s easy to cry, but being at work around coworkers who you can’t communicate with makes it much more difficult. It’s also hard receiving bad news from a text; when you’re talking to someone you can tell when it’s coming, the bad news can be prefaced, but a text hits you at once, your heart drops out from under you and for a second the words become unreadable and the world closes in around you. It was a similar experience when I found out my Aunt died. I was at school during the break when I read the text from my mom.

For 13 years Pal has only meant one thing to our family, the cutest little brown and white Shih Tzu who wined almost human-like. We were scared when we first got him that our neighbors would think somebody was trapped in our house. Everyone loves their pet, a pet is another family member. They’re always happy to see you and make you happier by just being around, without them doing anything they become a part of the conversation by just sitting there. Pal didn’t do much, he wasn’t very active, but always got excited to play, he’d do laps around our dining room table when he got really excited. Every time I FaceTimed with my family I always asked, “how’s Pal?” and he was always good, lying right next to or on them. If you saw Pal on Thursday you would have thought he was good too, he was playing and running around with my family and he was healthy in his last check-up less than six months ago, but his body was covered in tumors. He was hiding it and on Friday he couldn’t eat. It’s shocking because it came from nowhere and happened so fast, I was hoping and figured he’d still be alive the next time I came home.

The hardest thing is that for me, he won’t feel like he’s gone until the next time I go home and he’s not there; picking him up and giving him a long hug was the first thing I did after a long flight home. I have a picture for every time over the last seven years. One-third of my favorite pictures on my phone are of him. Going to sleep my Wednesday night (Wednesday morning in the U.S) knowing he probably wasn’t going to be alive when I woke up made it extremely difficult to actually fall asleep (he was still hanging on when I got up).

In the end, my friend Ian said, “they lived good lives, that’s all you can ask” and Pal lived a great one surrounded by people who loved him.

Around 12 am Friday morning (12/6) for me and 10 am Thursday morning (12/5) for my family Pal was put down to rest. I wish I could have been there to say one last goodbye.