When I was eight years old my parents divorced and shortly after my father remarried a woman from South Carolina.

As he had just retired from the Navy and found there were no jobs to be had they decided to move near her family in SC, thus separating me from my mother and the tiny private school I grey up in, and the ocean I had always lived on.

A few months before the move we(my stepsisters, stepmother, and I) bought my dad a dog for father' day. She was a six month old doberman/german shepherd who we suspect had been badly abused and since she was free and we were poor we took her though she had a broken leg.

The puppy and I emmediately bonded. We had hour long games of tag on the beach every day, we sang together and shared everything. She became extremely loyal to me.

Anyway we all made the cross-country move to South Carolina. For two years she was my only friend.

Finally I got the opportunity to visit my mother in California. I stayed a month, but I was pagued by severe nervousness, sleeplessness, a strange rash, and nightmares about my dog. I should have been having a perfect time home with my friends--in my home--away from the hellish place my stepmother's home became.

When I returned I learned that my stepsisters had been forbidden to talk about my dog though I had asked about her and told them about my nightmares they always lied and said she was fine, when indeed she had been missing much of the time I was gone.

My dad had taken to tying her to a tree on a choke chain to keep her in the fence and safe. The first time I saw her when I returned home she was on the chain stinking--like dog that had been roaming the street for weeks.

The following moring I went down in my back yard and called her. My dad was in the far corner of the yard buring trash and branches--on a new spot, different from his usual buring spot. My dog(I can't bring myself to use her name) came to me that morning. She was clean and smelled like she normally should. I remember rubbing her and asking if she felt better that she had had a bath. We nuzzled eachother and then I told her I had to go in and finish my chores. I said,"Sit high" and she sat up on her haunches with her paws up and I got on my kness and put her paws on my shoulders and we hugged as we often did.

After dinner that evening I went to feed her when my dad stopped me and told me that she wasn't down there. I asked if she ran off again and he told me know that early that morning he went down to bathe her for me and found her dead at the end of her lesh at the tree. She had strangled herself trying to pull off the chain. The new spot my dad was burning on was over her grave.

I protested. I knew I had just talked to her that morning. They all said it was just my imagination, but I couldn't explain it. I still can't. Was it really just my imagintion? If this was an encounter with the spiritual world, wow what a solid feeling, what a happy feeling.

I'm thankful for having a last moment with her. I wish I had stayed with her longer. She and I were mote closely bonded than I have ever been with anyone. This isn't the only expereince I have ever had, but the most vivid. For a while after I had a hard time believing that she was really gone, because I had seen her, held her, smelled her, played with her.