Marley & Me

One of the books I read this weekend was Marley & Me.
If you haven't read the book or seen the movie (or heard the ending), stop reading now! Spoilers will follow...







Oh my goodness...I don't know why I read this book! I saw the movie and I was prepared for what would happen at the end. Before we went to see it, David said, "Baby, you know the dog might die, right?" and I thought, now why in the world would they make the dog die? Movies are supposed to make you feel good! And I said, "How could you say such a thing? The dog is NOT going to die!" and he said, "I just want you to be prepared, just in case..." Then my friend in my running group who had seen the movie the day before said, "Take tissues" and I knew that David was right. But that didn't make it any easier. I cried through the end of the movie. I cried on the way out of the theater. I cried all the way home and didn't stop until I fell asleep. I swear I cried for 3 days after that movie.
And yet for some reason, I still wanted to read the book, which was EVEN SADDER than the movie! So sad, in fact, that I am willing to abandon proper grammatical structure. The first time I cried in the book was on page 48. There were 288 pages. Probably around page 170 the tears just came in an endless stream. I was lounging on the "floor bed"--the bed that I didn't think the frame/headboard (which I didn't like anyway) would fit in the house so it's just a mattress on the floor. I like to read there because I like reading on the floor, but this is more comfortable, plus there's a nice sunny window in the room. I kept walking to my bedroom to get more and more Kleenex. I thought, "I could just bring the box in here", but I decided that walking to get new Kleenex was a good way to give myself a break from reading this sad, sad book (and clear my nasal passages).
David didn't cry during the movie. I couldn't believe he wasn't crying, and he said that, in addition to being naturally more hyper-sensitive than he, it probably had something to do with the fact that I had gone through this with my own treasured pets. While reading the end of the book, I realized that I was sitting and crying on the same bed that I sat and cried on when my mom called to tell me that my cat Dusky had died. And that just made me cry even harder. Then I started thinking about other people losing their pets... Ami's Mandy and how sad she was when I got to her house right after I heard, Ms. Kobe's Rocky-dog and how hard it was for her to make the decision to let him have a peaceful good-bye instead of a difficult ending, my first boyfriend's Casey and how he cried on the bench outside of the dorm when his parents came to tell him...and I lost it even more.
Until we watched Marley & Me, I had been begging for a puppy. But when we came home, I had a lot of second thoughts. Not because of all the hard work it would be to train a dog, care for a dog, and make whatever repairs would be needed after the dog ransacked the house, but because of how hard it would be to say goodbye to a dog. If you're a pet person, you know...