This is Grey Lady in 2006 before she started getting sick. I want to label this picture: “hackey sack: ur doing it rite acshully”

Three years ago early this morning, I had to take her in and have her put to sleep. This happened during the pet food drama of 2007, but that wasn’t her issue. She’d been steadily going downhill since March or April 2006, but we’d turned a blind eye to it – and I still feel guilty for that. I should have taken her in months before I did (like three or four).

I laugh just as hard as I cry when I think about that day.

They weighed her. 3.5 pounds. At her heaviest, she’d weighed something like 10 pounds. Inside the exam room, she was content just to lay on the table on the blanket I had taken her in. And when the time came, I held her on my lap, and she purred. She lay there with her little head in my palm with her eyes open looking at me with the pure love she’d always had. And when she went to sleep, her eyes stayed open, and I laughed through my tears.

The nurse thought I was hysterical. I said, “No, you don’t understand. She slept with her eyes wide open most of the time. Please don’t close them.”

After I got myself together and collected her and went outside to the car, I settled her on my lap – because that’s where she rode on the way over there and that’s how I wanted to take her home. I switched on the radio, and Preston had at some point switched it over to AM. And just as I reached out my hand to switch it back to FM, Norman Greenbaum’s Spirit in the Sky came on.

I lost it. Totally lost it. I was bawling and laughing so hard I couldn’t hardly see to drive. I probably shouldn’t have tried to drive, but I did. I had to get home. I can only imagine what the people on Nicholasville Road and New Circle thought when they saw me – probably that I was psychotic. I know I was hysterical by then. And all I could think of when I heard the first strains of that song was, “Oh gods above, Grey Lady. I love you.”

And still, three years later, that song crops up out of the blue, and we know Grey Lady is around. And I still miss her so much that it hurts. I still catch myself teary-eyed in the pet aisle at Wal-Mart or when I see something she loved at PetSmart or Pet Supermarket.

I found her in a dumpster near the first of May 2000 and sent her to live with friends of ours – she’d been malnourished and something had mangled her up pretty badly. In August, during the weekend of the annual Woodland Arts Festival, I brought her home. We had her with us almost seven years. It’s hard to believe she’s been gone three already … Where does the time go?