All Dogs Go to Heaven

She came to us as a surprise - an almost-hairless bundle of flesh inside a mesh bag.
Less than year later, she left us, perhaps sometime in the night, in the same manner as she came - quiet and unexpected - just three weeks before I was bound for home.
To some she may just be any other four-legged critter and may find my sobs oddly misplaced. But to my family, she was our baby.
Yesterday morning, I was walking around the Hall of Justice which housed the different RTC branches for my Crim Pro paper, looking for the best courtroom to spend the morning when I received a phone call from my mother, telling me they found our dog Eunchae dead in her usual spot in our kitchen. Later on in one side of a small, packed courtroom, as detainees in their yellow garb threw us a variety of looks, I quietly wiped tears as I sat on a bench with my classmates.
Eunchae originally belonged to my uncle. He was surprised one day to see little puppies inside his dog's cage. Originally, it housed his female dog and her son. Now it had four more little inhabitants inside. He asked me if I wanted one although he would warn me that the puppy was a product of...er...dog incest. All I could think of was an all-white puppy to match my all-black Balrog so I said "Sure." She was then brought to my mom's office where she was alarmed by the puppy's sorry state. I first saw her when I was home for Christmas break. She was a little over a month old, almost devoid of hair and her little body was covered with sores and lesions. She was severely underweight, skins and bones all over except for her little tummy which was unhealthily protruding. Her only beauty came in the form of a pair of clear, black eyes. The first time I tried to carry her, she pushed herself against the basket, shivering from fear. She was so small and fragile but she seemed to understand I was not going to hurt her. Less than an hour later, she was following me around, trying to clamber on my lap but never went beyond the kitchen.
Perhaps because of her pitiful state, everybody seemed drawn to her. Our household helpers were always fussing arund her, calling her "Smallie." My dad just couldn't ignore her skin lesions so he called her "Leprosy." I didn't think that was funny so I told everybody I was naming her after the female lead in my favorite Korean serial because they both had big, dark eyes. It didn't matter that it proved to be a tongue-twister for some people and just to get it right, they resorted to calling her "Once (pronounced 'On-se')," the local word for "eleven."

Eunchae of the K-serial and Eunchae my dog shared the same eyes...and hair?

Eventually her hair slowly grew and she gained weight. However, she was still a little paranoid and she would usually cower into a corner when a new person arrived or if she was brought to a new place. She was afraid of everything - even frogs and anything loud. For more than four months, she never left the kitchen and venturing into the living room left her little heart pounding in her little ribcage. But it would not take too long for her to be befriended by strangers so she practically made herself a useless guard dog. I surmised that if robbers would break into our house and cart off with some of our belongings (knock on wood!), they would definitely bring her along with them.

My mom, sister and I take turns poking Eunchae's wet nose.

A veterinarian told us that puppies born from closely related parents, like humans, may have certain abnormalities. Surely for Eunchae, that meant her recurring allergies. The veterinarians were at a loss as to what was wrong with her. We had to apply ointments on her, watched what she ate (no chicken, pork and seafood), used sulfur soap for her bath and later on mixed antibiotics in her milk. The skin lesions would disappear for a while but resurface again after sometime.
But that didn't stop her from being everybody's darling. Eunchae seldom barked, growled, whined or made any sound that it almost seemed abnormal. Dad figured out a way to make her bark. He dangled a small piece of meat before her which made Eunchae's big eyes even bigger. As the meat hung on the tip of my dad's fork, she made an almost inaudible sound - something like a cross between a purr and a bark. Dad gave her the meat then dangled a slightly bigger piece. Her purr-bark turned into a small yelp. By the end of lunch, she was pretty much barking. She loved to be hugged and carried around and could not seem to get enough. She hated her collar with a little bell and was desperate to get it off her. She loved to take little nips off our 13-year old dachshund's tail and then scuttle off like a mouse when Nicky bared her teeth.
I just hate the fact that she left us like that, especially when I had been looking forward to running around the house with her at my heels. When I left for school, I closed the kitchen door so that she wouldn't see me leave. She had a habit of waiting in the garage for inhabitants of our house to arrive at day's end. On second thought, I don't know if I would have done the same thing had I known I would never those beautiful black eyes ever again.