I'm at the parking lot of the grocery store and see an old black hound with gray on his face tied to a lamp post waiting for its owner. I'm walking towards my car looking at this beautiful animal; he is wagging his tail at me. We have a connection. I go over and pet him and say what a good boy he is and he is howling in delight back at me.

As I'm driving away all of a sudden my body remembers. I find myself crying. No, not crying... sobbing. It comes back to me. I remember you. You were a small pup when I brought you home with my mother. I carried you inside my jacket the whole 5 kilometer walk home. You were sleeping the whole time.

It was a winter evening, already dark outside. My mother had gone on a walk with her sister and you went with them. You were independent and we didn't walk you on a leash. You sometimes even went alone on walks in the neighbourhood without anyone accompanying you.

I remember I was on my computer and my mother came inside crying and not making any sense, hardly getting any words out. I understood right away by the way she was acting that something very bad had happened.

Nobody cries like that about something trivial. It's a weird feeling when you are still a child and the only grownup with you is breaking down. All of a sudden you feel this heaviness on your shoulders but you're too young to understand what it is. You will get to know it better when you get older. On your first encounter it scares the shit out of you. The heaviness of responsibility.

I'm trying to calm mother down enough to understand what has happened, but I already know it has something to do with you. I'm crying now too. In my childish naiveté I'm hoping that maybe you just got lost because that has happened before. The yawning pit in my stomach knows otherwise.

We bring your limp body inside. There's some blood on your nose but otherwise you seem fine. Some part of me is still thinking that you will wake up any moment and everything will be back to normal.

We put your lifeless body inside a blanket and make a coffin out of an old cardboard box. The ground outside is frozen so it's hard to find a suitable place to dig a hole. We take a shovel and go to the ponds where the ground is softer because of the water.

When I place you into the hole we dug I'm worrying that maybe the cruel kids will find your final resting place and disturb you. We leave it unmarked.

We get back home and mother has calmed down now. I've stopped crying too. I ask my mother if I can play Age of Empires on the computer to take my mind off this evening. She allows it.

That's the last time I think we talked about that evening.