My Two Writing Teachers colleagues and I are hosting the 16th Annual March Slice of Life Story Challenge, in which teachers from around the world participate by posting a story per day.

This year, the SOLSC gives me a chance to record memories of our little dog, Indie, who died in January. I want to write these down while they are still fresh, so that my family and I can read them later and remember not only Indie, but little slices of life across the years.  

For a lot of Indie’s life he didn’t have a dog bed at all. He slept in our bed, sometimes on the couch. When the kids were born, he’d get up in the night and rotate around to each of our beds — especially Lily’s. Occassionally we’d find him sleeping downstairs on the basement couch, or in the living room. But we never really thought about gettin him a bed until later on.

Come to think of it— it was his fear of thunder that led to me getting him a dog bed. When we lived in New York, we really didn’t hear thunder storms come through. It wasn’t that there weren’t thunderstorms — I’m sure there were plenty. It’s that the street our apartment where our apartment was located on was already so loud that we literally didn’t hear thunder. (That’s another story).

When we moved to Vermont, we could suddenly hear nature. The first time a thunderstorm rolled through, Indie panicked. He cried and cried and whined and whined. He wanted to go outside, but then inside. He wanted to be held, but would then wriggle out of arms. There was nothing we could do but hug him and wait for it to be over.

So I bought him a Thunder Jacket. It’s exactly what it sounds like. A jacket that fits snuggly onto your dog for them to wear during a thunderstorm to calm them down. As you can imagine, the Thunder Jacket had the exact opposite effect — Indie hated it.

Then, I saw one of those adds that you see on Instagram or FaceBook — for a doggy stress bed. It’s a donut shaped dog bed that is super soft and fuzzy (in other words—just a dog bed). It promised to relieve stress and anxiety so I bought one for Indie. He loved it so much I bought him a second one. So, for the rest of his life after that, he had one bed upstairs, and one bed downstairs.

When Indie woke up from a deep sleep, he’d raise his head (usually from my bed, or my husband’s pillow, sometimes from his own doggy beds), he’d look around, and just.. thump…let his head fall back down in bed. Other times, he'd look up, with the fur smooshed down on one side of his face where he had been sleeping, like he’d been out all night and it was too early in the morning. If he could talk, he would have told us to turn out the lights and stop talking.

In fact, a lot of times, we did exactly what he told us. We’d jus turn the lights back out and let him go right back to sleep.