My Dog Ginger example essay topic

I had known it was coming for a couple of days, actually a couple of months. Ginger was an old dog. She had all kinds of health problems. She had terrible arthritis and many benign tumors all over her body. She was nearly blind and could barely hear anything. For the last couple of months it had taken me effort just to get her attention.

She died on Wednesday, March 26 on my porch after lying in the same spot for nearly three days, not eating anything and drinking very little. Although before she died I had had no idea of how her death would affect me, after it occurred I became acutely aware that her it marked the beginning of a very significant transition in my life. My family got Ginger about a year after I was born. As long as I can remember back she was there. We grew up together. When I was very young I had a tendency towards mischief, and this lead me to have many memorable run-ins with Ginger.

I can remember playfully (or so I thought) trying to grab Ginger's legs when she was lying down. She'd get really quite angry and start barking at me. It didn't take me long to decide not to do this. Just like it didn't take me long to figure out that I could neither walk under Ginger nor jump over her. In fact, I received many important childhood lessons from her. Ginger and I had fun together though.

For many years after we first got Ginger, my family would take her on many walks, and other outdoor adventures. I can remember once when I was about five, sitting in my little wagon and being pulled by Ginger during one of her walks with my family. We took her everywhere with us; hiking, swimming, and even into town sometimes. She was part of the family. Although Ginger was just a dog, she seemed to have her own character. She felt things in her own way.

You could tell when she was happy. She had qualities so similar to human's that many times I regarded her in much the same as I did humans. As I was familiar with my family whom I lived with and saw every day, I was familiar with my dog. Ginger also had a tendency toward mischief too though.

Her trophies include many squirrels, a cat, the pet rabbit of Normal Rockwell's son, and a goat. Supposedly there's not proof that she actually killed the goat since no one saw it, but her and two other dogs were seen, bloody, on the scene of the crime. She probably would have hunted more, but she was so unskilled. She was fat and slow.

Her body, at a young age was like the body of many dogs much older. When I was in Kindergarten, Ginger made many appearances at the playground during the school day. She would quickly become the center of a crowd of curious six year olds. Almost as quickly, the teachers would sound the call that Ginger (they knew her by name) was on the grounds once again and my mom would be called. No one had any real problem with her being there though.

Sometimes Ginger's adventures away from home were not quite so harmless though. She, like most dogs had an intense fear of thunderstorms. She could sense a storm in the air hours before it came. We'd get a free weather forecast from her when a storm was coming.

We knew the signs; she'd pant, she'd drool, and you could see in her that she was afraid. We all knew that if there was a storm coming Ginger had to be kept inside. Unfortunately we had to relearn many times why this was necessary. If Ginger wasn't inside and there was a thunderstorm she would bolt.

This reaction lead to some adventures that are really fun to look back on, but weren't funny at the time. Once she ran down to the lake near my house and jumped into somebody's rental car. I was the one home when the guy whose rental car it was came to my house with Ginger and showed me one of the doors of the car that was all scratched up. Another time, Ginger was found in the basement of a neighbor's house during a thunderstorm. As you might imagine, it gave the neighbor quite a scare to find a big dog in her basement. Many other times our family would receive phone calls during storms from local stores, neighbor's, or random people, saying that our dog was loose.

Because of this Ginger developed quite a relationship with the dogcatcher. As Ginger got older she developed many physical problems. Her arthritis impaired her movement. There was a time a couple of years ago when she would often fall down our entire flight of stairs.

Eventually she just didn't go up stairs anymore. She was becoming an old dog. We thought she would die a few years ago at the age of 12 or 13 because she was a large dog who wasn't very healthy, but she stuck it out through her 14th 15th and 16th years. Her days were mostly spent lying around the house or the yard occasionally getting up to bark at our cat and scare her into giving up her food. Last fall though, Ginger's condition got significantly worse. She barely moved.

She'd bark when you tried to help her. She fell down a lot. Generally, she was in a lot of pain and it was hard to watch. Her health got so bad that we were sure she would die soon. I can remember one night during a thunderstorm when my mom and I had to put a makeshift tent over Ginger because she couldn't move.

I was sure that I wouldn't see her alive in the morning. Somehow though, she regained her health a little in the next couple of days. When she was roaming around the yard a week later, it seemed like she had done the impossible. For the next couple of months she lived on, relatively comfortably.

Four days ago her condition worsened. She lay on the same spot on my porch for three days, not eating and barely drinking. On the third day she was lying in her own feces. My dad had told me to see her in the morning before school that day because she might be put to sleep in the next couple of hours. Around 2: 50 pm, just after school ended I was told to go to the main office because my brother had called.

He told me that Ginger had been put to sleep and that my dad thought I should come home before she was buried. I had known that this news was coming so it wasn't a shock. I didn't think that I would be affected much by it and for the first couple minutes after I found out, I practically didn't even think about it. But I was feeling something that wouldn't go away. I didn't know what I was feeling, but it got more present and it started feeling heavy like something you'd want to get rid of. Before I knew it I was crying over Ginger.

It took me by surprise that I would react like this, but I couldn't stop. When my dad picked me up ten minutes later I started crying all over again. When we got home he and I filled dirt into her grave. I could not believe the pain that I felt when I saw Ginger in a bag at the bottom of a hole, lifeless.

It didn't make sense that my dog who I had seen practically every day of my life was nothing more than a body in a bag. It seemed no different then if that bag had been filled with rocks. Witnessing a death or something that is dead always puts things sharply in perspective. You almost wish that you weren't seeing life so clearly because what you see is painful. It was only after I'd experienced the initial shock and pain of Ginger's death that I realized there was much depth to what I was feeling. Ginger's death signified the end of the period of my life that started when I was born.

Next year I'll be leaving the house and the area that I've lived in since I was born. My brother and sister have already started to make the transition to living on their own. Even my parents are thinking strongly about leaving the area soon. Everything that I know in life is starting to change. My childhood is coming to an end and it is amazing to look on it as a thing of the past.

My memories of life up to this point are strong and will be with me forever, but now they will only be memories of a time that I have detached myself from. Before, I always felt like I was in the midst of my life. There was no vantage point from which to look back upon things. Now my I can think back on my whole childhood as one experience not a series of experiences.

There is something very sorrowful about looking back at a time that you " re leaving behind. You almost feel like you " re an observer of life. You can see it go by in a split second. Luckily I know that I will be starting on a new path in the next couple of years, and I will again find myself in the midst of my life. I will miss my dog Ginger, and I will miss my childhood, but right now I'm ready to move on.