PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

I was 12 when my great grandmother died. It is sad for me that when I think about her I cannot remember the same things my parents remember about her; how she was so wise, how se was so loveable, how she was great with my brothers and I. What I remember of her is a bit bleak. I remember how she didn’t remember my name or my father’s, how she said random things and how her mind fled from time to time, I remember how kind she was; but most of all I remember her dog. A beautiful Schnauzer named Lola, it was grey and small; it was also as old as my great grandmother herself (in dog years of course). It used to bark at us every time we came into the room. We couldn’t pet it or it would bite us. Lola was a petty mean dog to be honest. Just by looking at Lola you could see the decline of my great grandmother’s mental health. The last years of her life were spent in solitude; when we used o visit her she was usually watching some religious things on TV or listening to music. She used to love The Beatles and Johnny Cash. For our last couple of visits before she died where the worst ones to me. She was non responsive and for me that made me hate visiting her. I usually looked for a distraction and normally I wouldn’t find one; but the last couple of visits Lola had changed. She wasn’t mean anymore, she wouldn’t bark at me. Now she would let me pet her and she would let me lift her and it was the saddest thing ever. When a mean dog turns noble and nice out of the blue you know something has changed around it. The realization came to me a couple of years after my great grandmother’s death. I would spend nights thinking about how much Lola had changed in our final visits. The truth was that Lola wasn’t being loved anymore and therefore she would accept all company and any type of touch just so she would know she was loved. She was an old dog that had been loved by one woman all of her life. But when that woman became non responsive and had fallen into mental health issues she wasn’t loved. So now I remember her every now and then to think about how that loyal dog deserved more than to be petted by a child who didn’t actually care for her.