Buckey, our beautiful Golden Retriever 2003 - 2015

Buckey, our beautiful Golden Retriever
2003 – 2015

I realize that it is Wednesday and not Monday.

Two things happened to delay my post on Monday:

Classes resumed, which I absolutely despise.

Secondly, but more importantly, my golden retriever, “Buckeye”, passed away and it has been very difficult to even think.  Buckeye would have been 12 years old in February.  After one year of battling epilepsy, he passed away at home in our bedroom, unable to move any more . . . but to just breath.

I laid on the floor with him and told him how much we loved him and that it was ok to go to sleep.  We told him to go run and see his best friend Abbie across the Rainbow Bridge.  After 15 minutes, he breathed his last breath . . . at home.

Buckeye was absolutely the best animal friend that I have ever known and his constant  devotion to me is now gone.  He was forever by my side, even waiting outside the shower door when I would be showering.  Buckeye was the last to say goodbye in the morning when I would leave for work in the morning and the first to be waiting at the door when I returned.

In his entire short life, Buckeye never did anything ‘wrong’, his behavior was exemplary.  He was perfect.  The only thing that ever frustrated us about Buckeye was when he was a puppy, he ran a few acres away to the creek on our acreage and romped around the water and rolled in the mud and returned hours later to worried parents wondering where he had ventured off to and if he had possibly become lost.

Our second golden retriever passed away in April of throat cancer . . . the two goldies were 2 weeks apart from separate litters.  When puppies they took the drive every day to the acreage while we built the house we live in today.  Every day of our lives in this house and on this acreage included Buckeye and Abbie.

Now this house is empty of their large presence.

There is no sound of their loud thumping paws on the hard wood floors.

There are no loud barks at strangers.

They will no longer walk up the long front pasture to the mailbox every day.

It is all too quiet.