answer:My parents got a puppy for me when I was five, to help me adjust to a new half sister. She was a little curly haired mutt and she was my excuse for not running away from home when I was horribly unhappy (I wouldn’t be able to carry enough canned dog food to ensure that she wouldn’t go hungry). When I was 6, I went to a birthday party at the house across the street. A group of us went off into the woods and got lost for hours. The other little girls were crying and screaming (even then, I was the type to have a breakdown after to drama is over) and night was falling. My little dog managed to slip out of my house and damned if she didn’t come find us in the woods. After a while, she decided it was dinner time, so she headed home…followed by a group of subdued, snotty kids. She led us directly home (and then I cried). She also protected me from the neighborhood bully and even attacked a German Shepard that was chasing me on my bike (she weighed about 12 pounds). I had that dog for 18 years. She went to college with me, got married with me – we were inseparable. I performed a dental cleaning on her and while under anesthesia, she either threw a clot or suffered hypoxia. After surgery, she had enough brain damage that she circled incessantly and was nauseated from the vertigo. I put her to sleep three days later. She had been such a fixture in my life, I dreamed of her often and would sometimes imagine that I saw her out of the corner of my eye. I’m not normally the sort of person who cremates a pet, but since her only wish was to be with me, she’s with me still, in an urn on the bookshelf.