Death Of A Friend

It was a broken leg that so abruptly ended her life. Descending the three stairs she had gone down thousands of times she fell and shattered her leg, a fracture almost as long as the bone itself spiraling down from near the top to the lower joint. My wife was there first and saw the leg hanging at an odd angle and clearly unmoored.  A strange, almost nauseating sensation, a limb should not just hang free, out of control.

She shared our home nine years and was as firmly a part of the family as any of us. Her fast days were behind her but was still breathtakingly beautiful. She slowed with the coming grey but her nobility, her innocent beauty only increased. Cancer had weakened her bones. Incurable. The break would not have healed. Amputation and chemotherapy would have only delayed the finality, the slope to death perhaps not as steep but just as sure, just as final. She died in the embrace of the man who perhaps knew her better than all the others. For her the crash of pain eased then ceased. For us the pain ebbed with false hope then came the flood with the true loss.

Angie was a beauty, as kind and gentle a soul as ever there was. She was a Greyhound, an ancient breed and to my mind, the most beautiful of all dogs. Before injury forced her out more than a decade ago she had literally lived in the fast lane, racing under the name Angie’s Foxy Lady. She was more than a friend, more like a daughter. It was an honor and a privilege to have been there holding her when she crossed the bar.