A Post in Honor of My Little Best Friend

It’s amazing how much can change in just a week. A day. An hour. It’s almost ironic. Two weeks ago I wrote a blog post about Frisky and how thankful I was that he seemed healthy and that he would hopefully get to meet Natalie. Exactly one week later, he was gone. And it was one of the hardest weeks of my life….

Monday morning, July 15: I woke up to the sound of Zuka barking. I looked over at the clock, it was a little before 2 am. Jake was still asleep. Quite groggy, I got up to see what Zuka was barking at. That’s when I realized he was outside. How on earth did he get outside?? Then I remembered I had left the laundry room door open. To let in some cool evening air. And I had forgotten to close it before bed. I turned on the porch light and called to Zuka. He barked once more before he came, and he seemed strangely anxious. We went back to the bedroom. I checked on Kiva, she was laying in her bed with her ears down, like something was wrong. Also strange. So I checked for Frisky, he wasn’t in his bed. I went into our bathroom. Our closet. The living room. All the places he sometimes sleeps when he’s not in bed. Nowhere. So he must be outside too, I thought. 

I went out back and clapped for him. (He was partially deaf and couldn’t hear us call him anymore, we had to clap.) He didn’t come. I went to the front of house and turned on the lights, thinking maybe he had wandered to the front yard, even though he almost never did anymore. I clapped from the front door. Still nothing. That’s when the fear started to kick in. He clearly wasn’t at home… I went in and woke Jake up, asking for a flashlight. Jake was as groggy as I had been when Zuka woke me up, but he shuffled out of bed and grabbed two flashlights, starting to recognize the tremor in my voice. We went out and walked our neighborhood streets, trying to clap quietly, listening for any sign of his collar jingling, attempting to see anything in the pitch black. I tried driving slowly with the headlights for extra brightness. Jake tried to take Kiva and Zuka to find him. But after an hour of searching, it became clear we weren’t going to find him, at least not until it was light out. So we headed back home around 3 am to sleep for a couple hours before Jake had to be up for work. 

I think a part of me knew then. A part of me knew if we gave up and didn’t find him that night, we would lose him. I sat in the living room bawling before I could go back to bed. But finally exhaust kicked in and I crawled into bed in defeat. When the alarm went off shortly after, I woke with a start and looked over the edge of the bed, praying it had been a bad dream and I would see Frisky curled snugly in his bed. It was still empty. Jake hurried and got ready for work so we could look one more time together before he had to leave. And I had small glimmer of hope then. I prayed we would find him asleep in someone’s yard, or walking lost along the side of the road cold and hungry, trying to find his way back home. But after 20 more minutes of searching, Jake had to go. And I knew then. I tried to suppress the feeling of absolute dread and horror, but I knew something had happened to him. I just didn’t know what. 

Throughout the morning I went driving around 5 more times. My dad drove around and looked. Jake’s family took the car around and looked. No luck. A little after 1 pm I decided to take a walk and look. Because he couldn’t have gotten that far, he was an old man after all. Maybe I wasn’t looking closely enough… We live across the street from a golf course and I thought maybe he was lost somewhere on the course. I walked for a ways next to the golf course until I got to the big pond. I scanned it from the street, and at the last second saw something in the water. My heart jumped to my mouth. I slowly made my way down the hill towards the pond. As I got closer, it looked like it was just a rock. I sighed in relief. But something inside me told me check again, to be absolutely sure. So I made my way down closer towards the edge of the water, and that’s when the scream came.

I don’t remember screaming. I just remembering hearing a scream as a feeling of numbness took over my body. It wasn’t until a man in a golf cart across the pond asked me if I was ok did I realize I was shaking and weeping uncontrollably. I tried to point at Frisky’s limp body floating in the water, but I couldn’t breathe. I thought I might puke. I didn’t want to leave him in the water, but I couldn’t bear to look at him, so I just turned and made my way back up to the golf cart path above the pond and slumped down in hysterics. The rest of the day is somewhat of a blur… The kind and caring man in the golf cart gently brought Frisky’s body out of the water. Jake’s mom and my mom came, then my cousin and my dad, and we sat and cried. Jake got there as soon as he could. He held me tightly. Then he carried Frisky back up to the house, washed him off, and laid him on the living room floor so that I could say goodbye. (I still don’t know how to thank Jake for all he did. I couldn’t have gotten through it without him.) Lastly, we took him to the vet to have him cremated. I held him on my lap on the whole way, giving him pets and telling him how sorry I was, until someone came out and sympathetically took him from me. The lump in my throat wouldn’t go away and the tears wouldn’t stop streaming down my face as we made our way back home, a home without Frisky…

The first couple days were obviously the worst. I think it was partly because of how traumatic finding him had been, and also because I blamed myself. I couldn’t help but feel like it was my fault for leaving the door open. My fault for not looking harder and clapping louder as soon as I realized he was gone. My fault for giving up and going back home in the middle of the night. But now… now I am convinced that it was his time, he was ready, and he wanted to go. I have to be. Because I couldn’t live with that guilt. And too many little things happened to create this whole situation, the perfect storm, for it to be coincidence.

I normally block the laundry room door when I open it so Frisky won’t go out accidently, but for some reason that night I didn’t. Jake normally goes around the house to make sure all the doors are closed and locked, but for some reason he was extra tired before bed that night and he didn’t. Akiva normally wakes us up if anything out of the ordinary happens during the night, but she didn’t, she just laid in her bed. Zuka knows how to herd Frisky around, he’s done it before, but for some reason that night he let Frisky go. Where I found Frisky he was literally two feet from the shore (in a pond with no waves or other water source). He didn’t have mud all over him like he had struggled. It was like he had waded into the water and let himself go…

Frisky was old. Very old. And in reality he was declining faster than I think I wanted to admit. Yes, he seemed so happy on the outside, and I’d like to think that was because he knew how much he was loved. But I also think, maybe, he was feeling some pain. He just didn’t show it. And I never would have wanted him to live in pain. I just hadn’t prepared myself to say goodbye to him that way, and so quickly…

But I can finally talk about him again without sobbing. I can see his picture and start to smile instead of breaking into hysterics. I’ve missed him every day though. I miss waking up and seeing him still asleep on my side of the bed. I miss fixing three bowls of dog food instead of just two now. I miss patting his soft head. I miss his welcoming smile and wagging tail when I come home from running errands. I miss the jingle of his collar and the tapping of his paws on the floor as he follows me around the house. And it will take a long time for all of those things to fade away. But I am slowly adjusting to life without him. Life without my little best friend.

Some of you might think I’m being overly emotional. A little dramatic. Maybe even irrational. And maybe I am. But Frisky truly played a huge and irreplaceable role in my life, and the hole he left in my heart will never be filled by anything else. Sure, it will seem smaller as time goes on, while my heart continues to grow with love for Jake, for Natalie, for my family, for new people in my life, and even for new dogs… but there will always be a small part of me that misses the little dog who stole my 8 year old heart and got me through the craziness of being an adolescent and the beginning of my adult life.

So I am writing this blog post. It’s probably more for me than anything else. But he deserves a blog post at the very least. And I want it to end on a happy note. Because I know that he would want me to be happy. He gave me so many happy memories for 18 long years. I am blessed to have had a little best friend as loyal and loving as him. Here’s to Frisky, the best dog in the entire world.

This is my favorite photo of him, taken last fall.

Jake would joke that he was my very first model. I used to dress him up and take pictures of him constantly when I was growing up. He was such a good sport and let me do anything I wanted. These are seriously only a handful of the photos I have of him back then…

And I loved giving him baths. Well, not the actual giving him a bath part. But seeing him all happy and hyper when we were finished? That was the best.

One time my cousins and I decided to throw him a birthday party, complete with milkbones, homemade hats, and a new toy. (Yes, that’s me in the back with Frisk. Yikes lol.)

As I got older I stopped dressing him up (thankfully lol), but I never stopped taking pictures of him. He would sleep in my suitcase when I come home from college. I loved it.

This is how he responded when I came home after graduating from college. Made my day.  

He loved getting a haircut. Haha.

During and post bathtime!

Yep, I thought he was absolutely adorable as a pumpkin :) (And ok yeah, maybe I didn’t totally stop dressing him up… Ha.)

Love his happy face.

Zuka and Kiva miss Frisky too. All last week we would often find Zuka laying by Frisky’s empty bed.

The very last photos I took of him, almost 19 years old.

But I’ll end on this one, my favorite picture of the two of us. Because it makes my heart happy. 

Love you and miss you Frisky. XO.