Franki - No "E" - Lew

8/4/2026 - I’m sitting here, thirty years old but as powerless as if I were still thirteen. In my life I’ll always feel somehow thirteen again, but it feels that way now more than ever. I’m watching my dog of twelve years, Shelby, die. 

I’ve only ever really had two dogs my whole life. Ginger and Shelby. Rachel was a spaniel my sister really liked and wanted to keep when I was four-five years old; before her there was Mocha. Mocha was rehomed and so was Rachel. Annie, on the other hand, was the family’s dog, not mine. From the moment we got her Annie had her favorite persons in the house; my dad and my sister; and her second favorites, my mom and me. Somehow, even though we got her as a puppy, I never remember Annie as being one. I remember her being small but, like a lot of Jack Russels (we ALWAYS suspected her former owners were lying when they said she was purebred; not that it matters. Mutts or mutt-out!!) she had the energy of a full-blood wolf packed into that little body. She was a runner and a ball-fetcher I think before she even knew what either of those things were. Annie was our pet dog and she was also wild at heart. So wild that, when she came home unspayed with this chihuahua mix behind her, whom she ran after once he bit my dad's hand, my parents and sister knew exactly what was to come. Annie is the dog that truly set in my mind that animals are individuals like people. Wolves, foxes and all other canines have this instinct to nurture as a species, but Annie herself didn’t know, didn't care and didn't want to be pregnant. My mom stayed with her the day she had her litter and several times throughout the day Annie was getting up mid birth or dropping one of her puppies in the middle of the hall as they nursed. She continued that trend well into the month and before they all opened their eyes. When they did, we named them Digit, Rocky, Peewee, Dexter and Ginger. Three were all black and brown, the two left were a brown-coat. Ginger was the one I “named” because her fur color reminded me of gingerbread. 

My sister and I were as dazzled by the puppies as we were every other animal that came into our lives. Which, to be clear, was a long list... Around the same time (or not. How does time even work) my sister had gotten a mouse named Whisper as part of a project whom she loved until our cat Poppy killed her one night while we were out at a Halloween party. After that, with my sister and I’s love of Hamtaro, we had a revolving door of hamsters whom we probably never should have kept to begin with - not because we were 'bad' owners, but because we were kids and we followed the instructions of the kiddy-bopper magazines told us on how to raise hamsters. Which were wrong. In the “Mocha” days of my life (so, when I was a toddler) we had three bearded lizards, but around the same time as Whisper and Annie and the puppies, the time I could remember, we had Bandit. Bandit was a kingsnake one of my dad’s students had saved from a cat. He became my dad’s classroom pet and my sister and I’s early morning mascot. We dreaded feeding him(he was wild; couldn’t be trained how to recognize frozen mice as food) but we loved that noodle dearly- but it would still be the last real time we had with a non-mammalian pet. By the time I was seven or eight I knew how to feed/water and even how to clean rodent cages, but my sister still was the ‘rodent whisperer’. The cats stayed the same and stayed outside as we moved from Salinas to that god awful Gilroy suburb (Gilroy and the house weren't awful; our lives were, to be clear). Annie was of course coming with us, but we were set on finding the puppies their forever homes. All of them did- except for Ginger. She was nearly taken in by a woman who would be my special ed teacher, nicknamed “Lola” briefly, before she wound up back home with us. She'd stay Ginger.

I won't sugarcoat things, Ginger deserved a better life- a REAL life away from her mother. Annie already didn’t like having the puppies around but now that one of those puppies was a full grown dog and competition for her attention from us, she never let Ginger be anything more than her ‘addition’; Annie was the alpha and was my dad’s favorite, NOT GINGER, and Annie made sure to let Ginger know that. When I was a kid and figured out I wanted to be a writer and I set out taking the lives of my pets and making them into literal cartoon characters for me to draw. Because, I mean, that’s what Beatrix Potter did with her animals so I had to do it as a writer too. That's how that works, it is law. In my weird changing cast of “adventures of the animals in this house” comics and stories I’d 'write', I portrayed Ginger as this meek and miserable daughter always competing with her mom, Annie, who acted more like an abusive older sister than she did her daughter (when, of course, cartoon!Annie wasn’t characterized as being obsessed with playing ball). I wrote it because, in my eyes, what Annie and Ginger had was just an unhappy relationship and not an abusive one. I wrote that because abusive relationships were just that- relationships. I didn’t know what the problem was, if there ever was a problem, with ‘abuse’. I thought that was just the way some people and some animals just were with each other and to each other. .

Life was never short on ‘house changes’ that made my sister and I cry at least a night or two for most of the 2000s. With our hamsters we shouldn’t have had it was commonplace. It wasn’t until 2006 that we both truly understood grief. But, not from a pet. That was the year we got a feeder mouse and rat to compete against our hamster BJ for my sister’s middle school project. The mouse passed away and I hardly even remember his name, and BJ died old enough for a hamster but still too old to have really lived the way hamsters ought to. Our rat, Algenon, never got his cage. She got her own. Algenon (no, I'm not mispelling it. I legit fur wrote her name out as 'Algenon') was the first 'real' pocket pet to belong to us as a family like Annie, Ginger and the cats, since we had Bandit. Alegnon was special. She was not sociable and by sister and I observed her making high-pitch squeaks in the middle of the night. She had been a feeder after all. Unlike other rats, unlike healthy rats, I think Algenon preferred to be alone. She instead enjoyed our company as our shoulder buddy and noodle inspector. We brought her outside with us to play in areas she couldn’t escape. Inside, we were skeptical of Annie and kept her well away from the cats, but Ginger was always a safe bet. Annie had a terrier in her. She had a buried instinct to hunt and kill the pocket pets we brought into the house and it was clearly just barely buried. If Ginger ever did have that instinct in her it was snuffed out by her mother who would ALWAYS beat her to the catch. We were smart and careful with Algie and kept her a safe distance from both the cats and dogs. That winter my sister and I would need Annie, Ginger and Algenon’s love more than anything-- our Grammy was dying. Grammy didn’t die suddenly either- from fall of that year all the way to December 26th, when she finally passed, all we could feel in our house was death. Christmas and Nightmare Before Christmas or Neopets or Pokemon were NO comforts. My Grammy’s death deserves to have it’s own story, but it will always be when our real era of mourning truly started. It always feels like, in hindsight, that you knew a part of you (innocence) was truly dead, but what it actually felt was like being stuck in place. What was happening in our lives, the life we had known up to that point, was over. But the world was always telling us that we ‘lived on’ while Grammy was gone. Our lives were dead. 

My sister had gotten out of her own hell in junior high and was in highschool and, more importantly, FFA. I keep forgetting if we had Algenon around the same time that we had ‘the bunnies’; my sister’s project and her beloved pets: Jack (nee Tony) Bunny, Sally Bunny and Napoleon the dutch buns, their litters, Nessa Rose (the other dutch whom Laura had got much later) and Sparky and Fiero, the guinea pigs (we also got, later). If we did it was around the same time Algenon passed and her impulse-replacement rat, Janie was in the picture. Janie was her own rat but important to me then and now was she was not Algenon. The only important thing was Ginger left Janie alone like she had with Algie, the cats did nothing, Laura’s bunnies ruled our lives, Annie ruled her ball and all our lives were still dead inside despite the life that surrounded us. The joy of our animals and the joy we gave to our animals couldn't keep us from the fact that our dad was dying inside. He was self medicating all the way from 200 to 2009. Annie was still his dog, though she’d hide from him like everyone else did when he ‘went off’ the deep end, usually at our mom. When our parents fought, my sister and I would climb into one bed and Ginger would join us. The three of us all bundled together, making fun and our own world and habit instead of facing anything outside. We had tnbc.eu, we had at least one of our dogs, we had my sister’s fan fictions and we had the rabbits. Together we all escaped briefly in small ways before we'd literally escape with our mom for the night to dinner. When my parents finally split apart and my dad started stalking us at our new safe home and threatening my sister’s rabbits as they lived at the highschool’s farm, we stopped by a few times to our awful Gilroy house to get things then storm off. Once or twice we’d look behind and Ginger, specifically, was following the car -knowing it was ours and we were inside. That we were her people and were driving away without her. It was December 2009 that we finally were allowed to pick up the dogs and cats from our old home. The cats stayed outside at the safe home while Annie and Ginger came to spend time with us and our cousins up in Nevada that Christmas. Annie, at heart, was still the family’s dog and still truly my dad's. She didn’t get along or understand this new home. So very suddenly, very casually, Annie just lived went off to live with him and I never saw her again. Punkin (“Gigantor”, as my aunts would name her) would wind up with our dad’s family while Poppy ran off and was never heard from again. Perhaps she found another family. Poppy was always a neighborhood cat than she was ours. Ginger stayed. 

In 2010 when my mom, my sister and me moved from that quiet little safe house to Capitola in Santa Cruz, Ginger came along. The bunnies stayed at a barn a block away from our apartment and my sister and I wasted many a free day I had from charter school and she had from college trekking up there with Ginger to feed them. The mood was killed of course when Fiyero the guinea pig was stolen from his cage one day and later when Sally Bunny herself passed. At this point in time, Laura and I shared a room and Ginger shared my bed. Laura had taken in a cat named Sam who was her gremlin. Ginger and I had always been close but now she and I were inseparable. We both felt free- me from my dad and his stalking/outbreaks, she from her mom. I felt more independent and was starting to be actually independent at last. I wanted my dog to feel the same thing as me. This was, though you couldn't tell teenage me anything else, stupid. I’d let my little dog out to roam our complex and usually the park up across the street, alone to pee and do her business, then scream her name to come back every morning- and she’d be right back sometimes not even a minute later. Ginger was gruff and over ten years old but she had the roaming sprint of a dog at two. She might as well have been my puppy for all the new life she had and the new life she had with me. In being cynical, not the same thing as factual, Ginger had imprinted her new ‘follower self’ onto me now that her mom was finally gone. She was once a family dog, but now she was mine. And she came with me to live in Ben Lomond. I hated Ben Lomond. I hated my mom’s passive aggressive, emotionally, financially abusive boyfriend who made my sister give up her rabbits and Sam so we could live in that Ben Lomond house. I hated how he tried to assure our landlord that Ginger wouldn’t be living in the house with us when Ginger and I couldn’t sleep without each other. I hated how squished and unhappy and uncomfortable Ginger, Laura and I were in that one bedroom while he had an entire room for storage of stuff he didn’t even use. I hated how all of 2013 felt like a progressively uncomfortable blur because I took up such space just to avoid him and his unfriendliness. Most of all though, I hated that once my mom finally kicked him out, in February 2014, when everything was fine and good, I hated how Ginger died--

Ginger would follow my sister to the bus stop near the corner of our street- across from the episcopal church my maternal grandmother worked at. Laura hated and still hates driving so she took public transport instead to get to her job and save gas. It was a busy street. That day I called and called as much and as loud as I could for Ginger to get back- she always did come back, after all. I finally reached the end of that drive to the street and the bus stop. At least one either time I’d met Ginger halfway and she’d then race me all the way back to our house. When I got to the street, Ginger was on the other side. Her eyes wide open. She was lying completely motionless. I called. She was dead. I went screaming and crying my eyes out into my grandmommy’s office in the church- two of the neighbors on the street had seen what had happened and yelled (not at me, but whoever had hit my dog and kept driving. No, we never caught them) that ''this street was not safe''. I could hear her say this but at the same time couldn’t. Ginger was dead. Her bed was still in the corner of the room we'd finally gotten to ourselves, away from Laura. Her water bowl was left out and her kibble was uneaten. All of Ginger’s things were strewn about. And she wasn’t there to pick them up. I was devastated. I called into school and spent the whole next day crying my eyes out volunteering at the SPCA as I’d been doing for awhile. I was sick with tears. I was sick with grief and horror. My little dog could have lived to be 18, being a chihuahua mix and all. She was dead at age eleven. 2014 was always my personal darkest year. I was sometimes more disturbed in 2013 as a person, I think, but 2014 was me at my most depressed. With every new high there came a new low: I’d graduate high school the same day as my birthday but only felt numb, angry and unfulfilled. I had a highschool diploma but felt like Spongebob in the episode where Mrs. Puff gave him extra credit. I hadn’t even thought of enrolling in college, which, in my family of educators, meant to me like I had no future. What was a future without a foray into college? I felt like I was already a failure. My mom took my sister and I to Vegas for a vacation and I only kept worrying about if we would crash and die on the plane ride over due to newfound intrusive thoughts. We took a simpler vacation up to Tahoe that same summer…and a bear got stuck inside my sister’s hand-me-down-from-my-now-dead-dad’s car and totaled it from the inside.

Oh yeah, my dad had died. He died all the way back in 2010. I didn’t even remember the exact or specific date because to me, internally, he had been dead for years. I’d been afraid of my father since he screamed at me on a road trip in 2007. I’d still been deeply afraid of him. I was stunned and sad but somehow more mad at his death than mourning for him as a person. It only really registered that he was gone and my childhood was to in 2013 when I was taking a Disneyland vacation to see his extended family and felt sick to my stomach just seeing them at all- that his name appeared overhead at the Shark’s Game where we had his memorial. But it didn’t hit me. Not until I saw the puppy’s, the puppy he helped me name and who’s living helped me stay alive, dead eyes on the sidewalk pavement and watched as the car which was his all my childhood be pulled away...from a bear being in it. With that car's passing and with Ginger’s even more so in my mind, it was the first time I think I actually felt what I needed to about my dad being dead. No nightmare I still have that he’s still alive and stalking us with su!cide-bait could convince me otherwise: my dad is dead. My dad is dead and everything is worse now.  My dog was dead and everything was worse now. Not because of regrets, the kind Bojack Horseman meant when he said that same thing -though, I have those too. But, because my everything was my life back in Salinas and Gilroy. My everything was gone with Ginger. My childhood was gone with Ginger. People all over the world have much, MUCH harder childhoods than mine and loose much worse than an abusive parent or a co-dependent dog. People all over the world don’t have ANY childhoods to speak of. I will never not feel guilty for feeling sorry for myself. I will never not feel totally happy when I know others are not. I will never not be mourning that childhood. I will never not be free of it yet stuck in it in time. I know that. I’ve made it now into a part of my art, forever.

August Fourth/August Fifth 2026- this is the worst week I've had in years. The most miserable I've been in awhile. We're hitting up every place Shelby might recognize and enjoy in her life; Ben Lomond and Glen Arbor road where we lived, Watsonville's slue and the Community Life Services Office. We're letting all the people who knew her best as part of the "Franki and Shelby" variety pack say their goodbyes. She isn't herself. She isn't the same. Coming home and fixing myself dinner that I don't want and can't find appetizing is all that remains of her true self- her mooch-pooch tendencies come out and she still waits patiently with her tail up, expectantly and anxiously, hoping that Laura and I drop something or waiting for us to do so, so she can have her first course. She hasn't been able to pass kibble in a month. As of last week she can barely hold down wet food. She can't possibly eat or even swallow the food if it were to drop-- but OF COURSE, it's ours so Shelby wants it.

I hate it. It's agony watching my dog like this. My dog is a well-worn pos, and now her own body and age has taken away that part of her.

In 2014, before summer, before my graduation-birthday, Vegas or the bear- a week after Ginger had been hit by a car and I was more alone than I ever possibly could imagine -I was erratic and I begged my mom to get me a new dog. Maybe she and Laura don’t remember it that way but that is what I remembered: I was horrified, alone, scared to be alone but hating to be with other people and their happy animals. My mind went to something my sister said her teacher had once said about her [the teacher's] parents: How, after the teacher’s mother died her father instantly remarried- not out of hate for his wife but because of love. Because of loss. Because without his spouse he didn’t want to be alone. My mind was set and I thought that was a good idea. 

We found her at an adoption fair inside Wishbone petstore in Watsonville. I don’t know if I’d ever been in there with Ginger, but right now I was looking for someone else. I saw her there and, somehow, she looked nothing like Ginger but exactly like her. This far more shaky chihuahua pupper-thing, small and skinny enough to be a whippet. We walked her around the lawn and gave her small snippets and commands. That night the adoption people met us at our house and we sat with her on our Ben Lomond couch, a week or so after Ginger had been sleeping on it. Her name was Shelby.

My sister called Shelby “the wallflower” for the first few months of knowing her. Shelby was the epitome of what everyone who hates chihuahuas thinks chihuahuas are like. She’d shake constantly and look constantly like she was about to cry. She was smaller than Ginger- even today we don't know if Shelby was born in 2013 and only a teenager or if she were over a year old but malnourished at the time of adoption. In time, as I made her stay in my bedroom and walked with her every day, Shelby was every bit as wiggly and happy and excitable as Ginger had been, but of course in her own Shelby. Endearing and utterly adorable as it was, it also did not help, I don't think. Half of 2014 was mourning Ginger and the other half was feeling guilt for not having properly mourned Ginger and forfeiting this new dog to this ‘fate’ of being with me. October 2014 was the truest turn-around in mood and stability I personally had felt in awhile. I was drawing again- CREATING again, and I felt this need to be alive with all these fandoms and things reminded me of death. My Tim Burtonisms flourished my fandom-brain and brought me out of my shell for the season. I was enjoying being myself and enjoying things again. By the end of 2014 and ESPECIALLY the ends of 2015 and 2016, also personal 'bests' for me, emotionally, I'd fallen absolutely in love with Shelby.

Shelby was not sociable with other dogs. In 2014 my mom was still friends with a guy she’d dated named Carl and his dog, Sheila taught Shelby how to make friends: aka how to play fight. I don’t think Shelby ever understood that being friendly to other dogs does not mean being snotty and/or ready to throw hands with the friendly face who wants to sniff your butt. Shelby had apparently been a stray before we found her. We still have her 'mugshot' from her adoption. She looks so weirdly serious for a little chiweenie pup/teenager/womanchild-dog. She liked to roam free off the leash- a thing I was a lot more cautious of after what happened to Ginger, but wasn’t cautious of ENOUGH. The shelter had described her as an escape artist and ooooooooh THEY WEREN'T KIDDING.

For some reason my family never believed in Kennels, so we simply left Ginger with my Grandmommy and Grandaden, who lived a couple blocks away from our house in Ben Lomond. So, we did the same with Shelby for our 2014 Vegas trip. Because Grandmommy's was a couple blocks away, and because Shelby knew that was where her pack was, the moment Grandmommy let her off the leash, Shelby had escaped the moment from their property. For the 2014 trip where the bear mauled our car, Shelby was the first to know something was wrong when my mom got up to walk her because she came with us to Tahoe, but for our Vegas trip, we had only noted that Shelby could and WOULD escape from wherever she was in Ben Lomond and track down our house. In 2015, while we were off on a different family reunion (a really nice one in Washington) I hated to leave Shelby and she hated to leave me, but we left her all the same at Grandmommy’s once again. On the very day we were flying back to California, THE DAY we were returning, Shelby had escaped Grandmommy’s backyard AGAIN. This time she’d escaped while wearing a little pink harness in 100° weather in the middle of what we in the mountains called “Cougar Season”; we'd learned of the situation by phone, which made the plane ride back so nerve wracking. By the time we got back to our house all of our family was still looking for her throughout Ben Lomond. I was hurt, numb and taken back- Shelby was smart around cars but I was certain I’d just lost another dog in only a year. At twilight, in what had to be eight o’clock at night in the summer, my sister, mom and me get out to begin calling again. And right up from behind the corner comes Shelby~ I had never been more happy and more annoyed at that little dog. All her wiggles and waggles and shaking in happiness- I couldn’t stop hugging her and neither did the rest of our house. Everyone was relieved. Everyone was so happy. When she was inside I almost chucked her into the bathtub and let cool water run over her feet. She hated baths but she didn’t resist, which is how I knew she was overheated. She needed this more than anything. Shelby loved the sun and she was a full-blown sun dog, but even a sun dog has their limits, like mountain dryness and summer heat. That night she slept in my room in her bed and then on my own. It's weird to think how much the scene in Mouse the Witching Cat, my picture book, where Mouse's owners scoop her up in relief, is probably based on this memory.

Shelby really was a sun dog. In the light of the sun that peaked through ANY window that dog could be found curled up and more comfortable than a cat. Her favorite spots in Ben Lomond were the wrack of shoes and then the white cushion chair and the rocking chair, where she looked just EXQUISITE. Her favorite time, besides her dinner and ours, was probably when Laura, myself or both of us would bum away and lay across the couch, us letting the natural stuffiness of that awful house guide us to sleep. For Shelby if Laura and I were doing that, we were ALL doing that. NOW. It was pack snuggletime for cherish’d warmth we didn’t need any of. It was calming to her. And, her being a little chihuahua mix, a breed which descends from the most ancient and revered of lap dogs, it meant she was always the final nail in the coffin of if we’d ever actually get to sleep. If I found myself in a faemood and had to spend all my day tapping off at my desk, she would be waiting for me on the bed, until of course I got on my bed then NO suddenly snuggle-petting time was over for Shelbys- now was time for her to go to her bed where she’d sleep alone for the rest of the night….I mean until six in the morning or so where she’d wake me up to be allowed to jump into my bed. Then she did feel like snuggles. But midday or when I needed to go to sleep no. No snuggles. Shelby was just as particularly in-particular as me. She had her habits BUT they were always shifting around. When we had to end one of her habits she went and made a new one. 

In 2016, not even a YEAR from her 100° escapade from Grandmommy’s house did I let Shelby outside in just our back porch to sniff around. It was spring, it was mid morning- Shelby did not wander and would always wait at our doors to be let in. I was very stupidly thinking she would be okay in what is still a pretty rural area with wild animals. We didn’t call her, instead my sister and I heard some light yap-yipping and ruckus mid coffee convo- and then we see this startled fawn jump out of the brush. We open up our front door and frantically call, “Shelby! Shelby!” Shelby comes running up screaming, her back scraped wide open and a mother deer in hot pursuit - itsaw my sister and I and dashed away with her baby. Luckily, we had Grandpa Steve and he was still working at the time. Grandpa Steve (my maternal Grandpa; Grandmommy is my mom's mom) and Beth explained how Shelby had just barely missed her organs getting smashed in by that deer. It was comfortably uncomfortable. Our grandpa being a vet meant that he could treat her remotely, quickly and most important of all without much cost. For the rest of that summer poor Shelby had a big long sucher on her shaved back that would give Sparky from Frankenweenie a run for his money. For the rest of her life, whenever we were in Ben Lomond, she ran to the back patio door and, when I opened it, she’d preemptively bark at EVERYTHING there to let the world, and more importantly, the deer, know she meant business!!! Then she’d sniff a second, pee and come back inside all while I watched. I think Shelby’s ego was really fueled by the mountains. The bear, the deer, the squirrels -Shelby was of the opinion that she could take on ANY animal with enough of her might. 

In 2017, just as I’d gotten my first job, Laura and I moved out of Ben Lomond and into the main street of Watsonville. All three of us, Shelby, Laura, and I lived in a single-room studio with only a divider and our oddly enormous windowless bathroom as escape from each other. Amidst drawing sessions, commissions, comic crunches and general moments of mania that came over my ADHD brain, hourly I’d look over to Shelby and ask if she’d like to go out. Sometimes no- but a lot of the time, yes. She LOVED getting out of that studio and marking our complex every bit as much as she loved getting back into our apartment and away from our complex and whatever smell she did not much like was outside on HER territory. Our studio was the apartment right next to the dumpster and right before us was the dinky little dog run for everyone in the complex. To Shelby, that dogrun was practically her own back yard and she was very protective of it. I could walk her in and out of that space like clockwork and she got very used to both me and her not having to worry about a leash when our walk consisted of just the complex. Granted- I THINK some neighbors wrote it down and wrote to our landlord about her lack of leash. Something like “they let their front stoop look like a dump and they let their dog wander all around” was what one email said. False: Shelby was one of the most well behaved leash-walked dogs in that complex. But, she still had that mountain attitude. Two incidents, one right after the other, WAAAY more than anything written by our 'darling' neighbors convinced me that this little dog HAS to be leashed no matter the cost and I was lucky to be OUT of the mountains. The first was when it was night. As we were turning the corner and passing by some neighbor’s cars, Shelby goes up and punks a cat that was hiding underneath. Annoying but, no problem -Shelby LOVES punking the neighborhood cats. Except, as it was hobbling away in the shadows, I realized it wasn’t a clumsy street cat Shelby had punk'd: it was a fat raccoon. Shelby walked SO PROUD like she wasn’t a little dog who happened to get lucky in catching an out-of-shape raccoon off-guard. I bet she did think she'd just punk'd another stupid cat. But she didn't: she punk'd a raccoon and had gotten lucky to not have been mauled, no thanks to me. Then there was the night I was returning to our complex with Shelby. It had been a long day and we were walking back to our apartment anyway so I unleashed her on our way back. Sniffing through some trash near our stoop was not a raccoon but a SKUNK. The moment Shelby and it saw each other they squared off- her barking up a storm and the skunk hissing and kicking and bluff-charging with all its might. I scream at the top of my lungs for Laura inside to hear me but she doesn’t because she has her headphones in. The skunk thankfully darted back on it’s own (it had sprayed itself out recently; which is a thing I learned about skunks, they don't have an endless supply in there), without stinking or charging Shelby, but that didn’t stop her from sleeping that night like the little smug sob she was.

The space in Watsonville was too small for all of us. It was enough in moderation but by the 2020s my sister and I were suffocated by it. The place had no AC so the fans had to be running all the time. In spite of all of it Shelby was herself in Watsonville. She was alive in Watsonville. Watsonville, curled up to me on my nasty ass sometimes rotting futon as we slept a day’s work away until evening was where she lived. Me, Laura and her -her pack. The stuffiness in that apartment was unparalleled and just Shelby’s temperature. What I think she loved the most was that carpet. All but the bathroom and kitchen in our Watsonville apartment were carpeted with this beige looking carpet. For Shelby, even if she rarely had any accidents on it, I think that carpet contained her memories- she slept on it in the sun and splooted on it at night to cool off (it was NOT cooling). Whenever there were crumbs or ANY indication that one of us had been eating anywhere in the apartment- she was sniffing that area all night.

Shelby and I’s lives rotated around each other, especially as I worked at Rite Aid. In the summer of 2023, while I stayed home at the apartment to stave off a Disney vacation and not find Shelby a dogsitter, I went to work by bus and got home by bus all on my own. I'd feel more accomplished about this if I didn't know kids as young as sixteen had mastered this skill while I was twenty seven and actually feeling autonomous. Whatever. Shelby was waiting. In any event of how I got to and from work Shelby was there and she was waiting. She was at my feet when I finished each part of my book and as I concluded by favorite works of at. When I had an otherwise good day at work- I collapsed into my bed and my little gross gremlin dog snuggled in next to me expectantly, before of course I took her to get all her piddle and wiggles out. When my days at work were HELL and I couldn’t stand it, like I did in 2018, I threw myself onto my bed. Shelby would come up, burp after eating her dinner and then lie sandwiched between me and my computer and the wall. I worked for Shelby to have extra care. I worked to give Shelby the care I could give her. My salary could hardly feed me on my own, but it could feed my little dog. 

August Ninth 2026 - I still hear her tick-tacking on the floor. I still expect her with every turn. I still hear her snoring. Where is she?

We’d walk to our mailbox or our job coach meetings together. We always had each other. We were each other's heartbeat. We'd walk into that shabby little studio, fill her water bowl and I'd shimmy on back to my work while she'd shimmy back to her fly-catching or sniffing around for scraps.

...

August Third 2026. Shelby has, as Grandpa Steven puts it, "chronic garabagecanitus". Even the most pristinist or neat-freaks have garbage that's not thrown out or food tucked away in a bag or so elsewhere. Shelby's worst habit is the one that, regardless of if it really is what's tearing HER apart inside, is certainly what's tearing ME apart-- it tears me up because it's my fault for not thinking better or planning smarter. It's my fault for not considering her habits- for being a better dog owner. In 2018, Shelby got into a bag of medical marijuana my sister had tucked away from her condition. This year, I had buried under gloss, paint, sanitized and CLEANED, chicken bones as part of one of my art projects I was selling. Shelby found those too. It was months ago now and she showed no signs then of being sick. She wasn't even upset or gurgly the next day- Beth texted us assuring that she'd be okay. She wasn't even slower.

...

STILL August Third 2026. Two weeks ago Shelby was getting slower and slower. I take up my job coach Cynthia’s advice and take Shelby right into the local vet for a check up- she hadn’t eaten ANY kibble this whole last month. She refused to eat the last bag of kibble before that too and I figured it was just her turning picky with age. She was twelve pounds a year ago. Now she was nine pounds. I knew she didn’t like our newer apartment as much as her ‘domain’ back in Watsonville, much as she did her smells, her dogrun, her smells in her carpet. I knew she didn’t like the floor in our new place and found it cold. I knew she wanted to wander more. I knew she hated being picked up but was, whether she wanted to face it or not, uncomfortable going up and down those flights of stairs to our second-story apartment. I knew she was older. I knew I wouldn’t have her forever. I knew I’d given her a better life than even Ginger had, though Ginger, of course, deserved more. Shelby wasn't a 'second chance' or a course-correction for Ginger or any of the pets me or my family had in my childhood. I simply wanted to do the best for my little dog.

I didn’t know until Tuesday of last week that Shelby hadn’t gained any weight and was, in fact, NOT improving.

Three weeks ago, I learned that she had a heart murmur from the technician on duty.

Last Friday, the vet herself told me Shelby needed to be left with them while we get her vitals tested and her x-rays x-rayed. It cost us a thousand and forty dollars. When Laura and I return to pick our sick puppy up, the vet tells us there is something in Shelby’s stomach. My heart drops. It hurts. All the garbagecanitus and all the crafts I’ve been doing around her.

What had she been eating?? What was stuck inside her? I foolishly go home that weekend with her, scared for her life and trying to make her eat. I figured this was just a new leap into her final ‘years’ but she would pull through. I thought that Saturday night and then Sunday night too. I look over at Shelby, gently telling her “poor sick doggie”, like she’s gonna be okay. Was I in denial? Was I oblivious or fixed too much on everything else I had planned? Was a seriously convincing myself that I could feasibly get Shelby to pass whatever was stuck in her stomach or that a dog stomach pump was somehow NOT traumatic and painful?

What had I done wrong.

August Third 2026 - The vet, Shelby’s current vet, not Grandpa Steve and Beth, who of course wanted updates and have been giving me insights all throughout the weekend and who would be saying the same thing the vet would say, tells me what I need to know this morning. Shelby has acute pancreatitis and failing kidneys. Something is still in her stomach but that isn’t what’s caused her lack of eating; it's her kidneys. I can go into debt treating her kidney and pancreatitis, prolonging her suffering all the while I can barely afford off only my own social security as is, on an operation/pumping she likely wouldn't survive and be alone and in pain this whole time, or, I can chose another option. 

I’m not ready for the other option. I hate the other option. But it isn’t the vet who recommended it to me. It’s Shelby. The way she can barely move, but tries to. The way she can’t even fast walk. The constantly tired look in her eyes. Her accidents in the house, which I avoided writing about for the sake of decency - they've escalated. Her quivering and shivering. My dog is in great pain. She lives in fear of greater pain each day. The pain of seeing her little face- clearly still wanting to be fed scraps and tootle about to punk raccoons into existence- but now too afraid to move. From her mouth comes this odor of rot. Whatever in her is rotting inside. She smells like death.

I’m losing her and I’m not ready. I don’t want Shelby to be a memory or a keepsake. I want her here, with me, where she belongs. I feel so selfish. I feel so stupid. I feel so ignorant. How could I be planning ahead two months already to my next popup event when THIS was going on. How could I be thinking of going to a movie this time last week when now all I can think of is my dog’s death?

August Fifth 2026 - My stomach is in knots but also stagnant. It's that pain that everyone is going through when they're expecting a death; you're physically hungry but you don't somehow physically feel any fuller or satisfied with food. You can't. How can you? How can something funny like the food you love taste good at a time like THIS?

Even with the knowledge from Grandpa Steve's old paper's and her adoption records showing that she's POSSIBLY FOURTEEN and not even twelve like I thought...how is THAT supposed to comfort me? Chihuahuas and chihuahuamixes can live to be eighteen at least. How could I NOT presume my little Shelb of steele wouldn't make it to sixteen at her rate??!!

What is a senior vs what is a geriatric? How- how could she ALREADY be this old??

August Sixth 2026 - Shelby likes to sleep in Laura's new room, which she has now that we're out of that studio, and on her cloths. I pick her up and have her sleep with me in my bed room, ready as ever for her to have an accident in the night. I lay my hand on her all night. I try to put her into my bed to hold her close. She's grumpy and always gets up and jumps off. She doesn't want my snuggles or pets. She just wants to be alone.

August Seventh 2026 - The procedure is in the morning. I'm letting Shelby do ALL she wants and is most comfortable with tonight. And tonight that means she doesn't want to be in my room at all. She only wants the clothes on her floor. Not even her little bed. I've hugged and held and cuddled her all I can and could all through this week. I think she'd overwhelmed by my sudden-onset closeness.

Why can’t I mourn for her sake? Why can’t I be here for her? I will be here, like I wasn’t here for Ginger, but why can’t I feel scared and alone and in pain as Shelby is? How can I only think of my own mourning and how much it hurts me that I'm loosing her? She needs me to be strong, to be with her --Grandpa Steven is right when he says "animals live in the now; they know instincts, they don't know the future the way we do". She needs me to be her happy Franki again and to do all the things SHE likes to do.

Why does my silly little chiweenie dog, who’s never hurt anyone and has the heart of a warrior, die at age twelve/fourteen while trillionaire pedophiles walk around unharmed?? Why did my dad die at age fifty but Henry Kissinger died at age a hundred? My dad was flawed and my family's scars still hurt, but my dad didn’t commit war crimes on millions. Why do children, elderly, disabled and innocent people have to be gunned down or starved in genocide, in brutality, but their perpetrators go free? Why do those perpetrators have to make it so in this world I have the option of give what bare minimum I can to those who need it; but must in my immediate future give a little to their machines? Why? Why can’t THEY have pancreatitis. Shelby’s committed no war crimes. She’s hurt nobody. 

With Shelby, my adult life, from age 18 to now, is dead. With Shelby’s death I’ll mourn the death of my job at Rite Aid, which I’m still mourning. My routine of coming home to her. I’ll be mourning my existence in that house in Watsonville- of Shelby’s happiness in Watsonville. I can’t allow it or her life there to be forgotten. I won’t forget. I can’t forget. 

August 9th 2026. Familiars, animal assistants of witches which became a part of my life once I decided to write about them, are nothing like pets, traditionally. Familiars, whether they had their own autonomy or not, were vessels for which witches and warlocks would spy on others or experience an animal's vision. Familiars were extensions of their "owners" rather than their own beings. I never liked calling Shelby or Ginger when they were alive my "fur babies" or "babies". I went with "familiar", because I thought calling them 'babies' would belittle their own personalities and their own 'truths'. Like, it would rob them of their dignities.

I still hold to the value that treating adult animals like we do baby humans is literally dehumanizing to actual children and unfair to the animals. But, I get it. For adults, children should be their own people, their own selves, live the lives that they live for and not just that their parents choose for them- though kids have to of course still do what's in a parent's budget and possibilities, still. That was my life as a kid, after all. In return, pets may not break free and be their own autonomous people, but they have the same effect that kids do as we adults raise them. They fit into our lives and our lives become their habits, truths and personalities. There's a reason adults with kids are more forgiving of modern day kiddie schlock: that schlock is their kid's life, their 'fandom', so they better get accustomed to it themselves. Our pets are as much of us as we are them, not vessels for the other. For humans who outlast their animal's lives, I still think 'familiar' is apt in SOME way: with the death of a pet, the person you were and the life that you had together dies with them. You are left alone. Your pet is free and wild at long last or once again. Now, you must find a new life to make warm the one you continue you to have- at least until your free to join them. You have no new person whom you've raised and who's left you to live their own life and will outlive you safe and sound; only a death of a portion of your life, the only you your animal ever knew.

August 8th 2026 - Shelby's gone. She was very comfortable. I sung her "Rider's Lullaby" as she was given her shot. She was so peaceful.

I love you so much, Shelby. I always will, my sweet little sleep paralysis mooch-pooch.