Dear Annika

Dear Annika,

Mom called me this morning to tell me that your fish was injured after getting caught in the water filter, and was probably going to die. That made me very sad to hear. I know that you are a very thoughful and sensitive girl, and I know that you might be thinking all kinds of things right now. In all the years I have lived, I have had a lot of pets, and they have all died eventually. Here is a list of the animals I have loved.

• Arf
• My dad got a dog for my brother Erik and I when we were about 3 years old. We named him Arf because that is what we said when we saw him. I don't remember a lot from when I was that young, but I remember the day we got a dog. It was a hot summer day. Arf bit me once and made me bleed and I was scared of him sometimes.. Erik and I used to get on his back and ride him around the yard until we fell off. He was a mixture of german shephard and black lab. Arf lived in a dog house in our backyard. He was not an inside dog like Yorkie. One day I woke up and Mom told me that she couldn't find Arf. He had bit through his chain and run away. I don;t really remember crying, but I'm sure I did. We kept the dog house and Erik and I used to play on and in it. It smelled like dog. Years later, my mom sold it to someone when I was away at a friends house. When I came home and it was gone, I was mad at her and I cried all night. A few years ago, my mom told me that she thought that a neighbor shot the dog because it used to go and bother the horses at the stable we lived near.
  
  
• Fish
• Erik and I has 2 goldfish. I don't remember their names. GrannE might. We had them for a couple months and one morning they were gone. My brother Paul told me they had moved. He said this so that I wouldn't be sad. They had died at night.
  
  
• Peer Gynt
• We had a cat that we named Peer Gynt. He was a good cat but soon after we got him we learned that Erik was allergic to cats and we had to give the cat away to our neighbors. They named him Max, I think.
  
  
• Smokey and Tiffany
• When Erik and I were older, I asked my mom if we could get a pet. I said it was unfair that Erik had allergies and we couldn;t have pets. Erik wanted a pet, too. That summer when we were at my grandmother's house, we got two kittens from a lady at her church. We named them Smokey and Tiffany. They were girl cats. We loved those cats so much. They were inside cats and spent all their time together. Smokey was very loving and Tiffany was very shy. We kept them in the basement at night and in the morning my mom would let them out and they would run upstairs and into our rooms and lick our faces to wake us. I loved them very much. When my cat was three years old, Caroline and Delton came to visit us for a week. Smokey was scared and hid. We didn't see him for a week. When he finally came out of hiding, he was very thin and yellow. We took him to the vet and my Mom spent over a thousand dollars to give Smokey the very best care and the vets tried to make him better. Instead, Smokey died. We had him cremated and his ashes were given to me in a little urn. I kept those ashes in my room for years. When Smokey died, Erik's cat became more loving and friendly. She was very healthy and lived for a very long time. She died when she was 18 years old. My mom buried her in a wooded area in our backyard. She took a box and laid a blanket in it, then put Tiffany in, and then broke open my urn and spread Smokey's ashes on top of Tiffany so they could be together. I am sure that when she did this she was crying.
  
  

Throughout my life, I have had many pets. When they have died, I have always been very sad and cried. Even when I have had pets for a just a short time, like a bird that I tried to rescue when it got run over by a car, or a crow with a damaged eye that couldn't fly, I have loved them and cried when they died.

No one knows for sure what happens when a pet dies. But I think that what happens is that the pets go to heaven where they can play with other animals, and when we die, as we all do eventually, we will get to be with those pets we love and miss so much.

I hope you know that Charlie was not in any pain when he died. I thought it was beautiful that when I said that we could bury Charlie in a little box, that you said that the box should have water in it. I am sure that Jesus will make sure that Charlie gets a special place in a pond in heaven.

I love you,

Dad