Your Pet Loss Stories

'Blackface Jet'

by Arlene E Phillips
(Hampshire UK)

My daughter had been to visit a dog friend in Wales, when she came home she told me that she'd heard of a collie that was 'surplus to requirements' to a shepherd there, and would I be interested, I already had a German Shepherd and a collie, but I agreed and went to Wales and picked up this beautiful little bundle of black fluff with a white leg. What else could he be called but Blackface Jet. He settled in and was the kindest, most honest lovable dog.

One day he just slowed up, I gave him some medication, he recovered for a couple of days and slowed up again, I took him to the vet, and he was diagnosed with an internal bleed, there had been no indication of anything wrong in the slightest, he was 12, not old for a collie, anyhow the vet put him on a drip but Jet sadly died without even coming round.

My world just fell apart, it's been over four years and I still get upset thinking of him and wondering what did I miss, why didn't I notice something was wrong, but I didn't. I wrote this to him a few months before he died.

Soliloquy For Jet

I wrote this to my boy on the 30th June 2005, how was I to know that not so long after you would be gone from me?? back to the Welsh hills and valleys perhaps? I'm so sorry I never got the chance to say goodbye.

Jet 27th May 1993 - 15th September 2005

I look out of the window and see you lying there by the gate, nose pointing up the path, nothing unusual in this, it is becoming more and more the norm with you, but again I wonder, why?
What makes you always prefer to be on your own, whether it's lying in the porch when I bring you indoors, or as now, in the garden?
What are you thinking of my boy? Do you wish for the hills and valleys of your home in Wales where you were born.

Do you feel the confines of a domestic home too claustrophobic, perhaps you dream of the sheep that you could have rounded up, the streams to be forded, the dykes to be jumped? Instead you have been asked to do my bidding which is so alien to your instincts, having to learn the commands of heel, watch, find, that we use in competition obedience.

The timeless commands of your birthright, way to me? ? come bye? nothing but a misty memory. If you do remember these things my Jet, and mourn the loss, I am so sorry. You touched my life so briefly and so lightly, sometimes I hardly realized you were there but when you left, you left a space as deep and as wide as the ocean.

I miss you so much my lovely black boy.

Time hasn't eased the passing, I doubt if it ever will.