My dog, Pipo, died last night.

It happened pretty suddenly. At the beginning of the week, she seemed fine for a dog her age. Then around Tuesday/Wednesday, she started getting sick; she stopped eating, began throwing up, starting discharging some nasty, foul-smelling liquid from her vagina, then got weaker and weaker to the point where she stopped moving around and just laid down towards the end. She died sometime before midnight; her body was still warm when we finally noticed she was gone.

I don’t know what she died from, but her mother died the exact same way back in 2011. Perhaps it was cancer – Pipo developed hard lumps on her chest/in her teats in the last few years, and so had her mother in the years before she died – or maybe it was miscarriages.

When I got ready to take her body out of the house, she didn’t look at all good. Her eyes were fixed open and her mouth was in a rictus grin. She looked hideous, like some kind of terrifying dummy. I’ve seen too many dogs and cats dead, and not one of them looked like they were in peace, that they were just sleeping; they always look like they died in agony.

Now I’m worried about her brother, Cheech. They were both born in 2004, and he doesn’t look too healthy himself these days. Now that Pipo’s gone, Cheech is the last living thing I still have from those years – the last thing I have left from a happy period in my life. I don’t want to lose him now, not right after this.

I swear that once I move out of this place and am out on my own, I’m never going to own another dog again. Cats are one thing – I’ve never had to witness a cat die of old age; the coyotes around here make sure they never get that old – but dogs … dogs stick around, they stick around and become permanent members of the family, and so when they die, it’s hard – too damn hard for me to take. I have three dogs left, and it’s going to suck just as much when I have to bury them in the backyard. After they’re gone, never again.