I said goodbye to my best friend Bo today.
We adopted Bo in June 2009, and from the very first moment he hopped in the car until I held him at the vet's office as the life slipped out of him this morning, he has owned my heart. I don't know if I've lost a husband, a child, a brother, a best friend, a hairy roommate, or a soulmate, but it feels like all of them at once.
Bo was not what you'd call well-behaved, but what he lacked in manners he made up for in personality and devotion. At times, I suspected he was able to unhinge his spine in order to reach things waaaaaaaay back on the kitchen counter and snarf them up. Like the holiday treats I'd spent days making for my coworkers and had nestled into cunning little paper boxes before leaving for five minutes to drive the boys to their father's house less than a mile away. While I was gone, Bo devoured everything but the candied orange peel, so the coworkers got a dog-shaming video for their gift that year.
He loved walks and his boys Woody and James. He loved pretending to be Jaws and ramming against the bed where someone was awake but not up, pretending to try to capsize the boat and devour his prey. He loved his cat-friend Bob and tolerated the other felines along the way. He mostly feared his sister Bella (with good cause) but was known to enjoy a nap with her now and then. He appreciated his old-man friend Max, though he never seemed to understood Max's obsession with shoes. He loved rides in the car with the windows down, and late night secret eating meetings.
His favorite activity was chasing, catching, and returning tennis balls, and he loved it so much that we had to hide them on top of the fridge, otherwise we'd wake up with him nudging the spitty things into our faces, demanding a game in the back yard. When Woody was in fifth grade, he hoarded good-behavior stars all year so he could win the Biggest Prize, which was permission to bring your pet to school. I left work early and walked with Bo over to the elementary school where Woody and his class met us outside on the playground. Every single kid in the class threw the tennis ball for Bo, and he ran to catch or retrieve it, and galumphed back to return it. He was having such a blast that all the kids got another turn, and then another. By the end, he'd scraped his poor paw pads on the pavement and was bleeding, but didn't seem to care, still keen to keep catching. He slept hard that night.
Life will not be the same without him, but I am trying to fill the hole in my heart with gratitude that I had so many years with him at my side. His devotion and companionship got me through some very hard times, and the pure, unfettered love we shared made him the best partner I've ever had.
If you can, adopt a shelter pet. If you can, donate to your local shelter or to my personal favorite, KC Pet Project here. And if you can, raise a glass to the memory of the love of my life, Bocephus Bradshaw. He was a very good boy.
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