Another New Year's Eve has come and gone, and as usual I barely acknowledged what has always been my least favorite of the holidays that I understand. (There are many holidays that I don't understand, but I don't consider them holidays. St. Patrick's Day is one; I'm not Irish, and I don't see why anyone would want to celebrate a guy who ran all of the snakes out of a county anyway. Another is Cinqo de Mayo. Again, I'm not Mexican, so I see no reason to celebrate a Mexican holiday. After all, how many people do you know who celebrate Bastille Day? Same principle.)

I always understood why New Year's Eve was a holiday; I just never got into celebrating it. For one thing, it usually meant that the end of football season was only one day away; that was before there were 32 bowl games, some of which are played in the week after New Year's Day.

But mostly, I just never could bring myself to celebrate. If it had been a good year, I didn't want to see it end; if it had been a bad year, I didn't want it to be the subject of any revelry whatsoever.

The closest I ever came to celebrating was 2005, and that was more of a "good riddance to a very bad year" than anything else. That was the year of big losses: in chronological order, we lost my wife's old cat, my Mom, our cabin, one of my wife's best friends, and our thirteen-year-old dog, who defied the vet's projections and stretched a two-month prognosis into five, before finally giving in just before Christmas. So when 2005 was ending, I was happy to see it go; there were too many memories for me to be celebratory, though.

2007 got a similar send-off. For the most part, it wasn't as loss-filled as 2005, but it had its moments. My cousin Walt died in September; we were never close to that particular branch of the family tree so I had only met Walt a couple of times, but we were kindred spirits. We were the oddballs who kept snakes and other exotic wild things in our homes, and we were the kids who managed to stray from our expected paths early and often. So while we never got to know each other well, we knew where the other was coming from. And in my family that's important, since so few of the rest of them seem to have any idea what to make of me.

Thanksgiving 2007 was the first time my Dad looked at me and said "Now, who are you? Are we kin?"  I knew the day was coming; his memory had been getting progressively worse for several years, so that moment was always somewhere up ahead. Fortunately, it's at a point where he has good moments and bad moments, so it wasn't long before he recognized me again. Still, hearing "who are you?" from a parent is not easy; in addition to the kick in the stomach that follows the realization that you're a stranger to the one person who has always known you, there's the immediate concern of trying to figure out how to answer the question without embarrassing the person who asked it. Because as hard as it is to not be recognized, it's probably even harder to realize that you no longer know your own son.

Of course, the fact that my Dad is forgetting who I am is no big surprise, considering his disease, and the fact that my sister has effectively erased my presence from the house where we grew up, which is where Dad still lives. While pictures of her are plastered all over the house, you'd be hard-pressed to find one of me; once you found it (hidden behind a lamp) you'd probably notice that the glass in the frame is cracked. (Just an accident, I'm sure.)

Dad and I were the readers in the family (something he can no longer do) so the hundreds of books were "ours;" in fact, he promised to leave them to me, and even told me to go ahead and take them since he could no longer enjoy them properly. I didn't, because I thought the bookshelves would look depressingly empty without those books, many of which had been handed down for generations.

And I was right; the bookshelves do look depressingly empty, ever since my sister took it upon herself to throw the books-- all of them-- into the dumpster. Also relegated to the landfill were the antique Nativity set that my Dad had said I could have, along with anything in the house that had ever been mine, was going to be mine, or was in some way tied to me, such as the photo album from the one trip he and I took together. The final step was telling the care workers to call her any time I appeared at the house, and to take note of everything I said while I was there.

It's very strange feeling unwelcome in the house you grew up in.

Two days after that Thanksgiving, our other old dog, the sister of the one who had died two years earlier, collapsed. We rushed her to the vet, who managed to get her stabilized; then came a battery of tests and x-rays. The x-rays didn't look good, so surgery was scheduled; the best-case scenario would have been that they could remove the suspicious large masses that were on her liver and spleen, but at the very least, they would take some samples and biopsy them.

As it turned out, all they could do was take samples; they were sent to the lab, and after a couple of days Snickers was sent home. For five days, she got progressively better; had I been through what she had, I can't say that I would have been moving around and happy, but she was. But then a bad night was followed by a bad morning, and we were off to the vet again.

That afternoon, we got a call; Snickers was doing much better, and the biopsy results were negative! We still needed to find out what had caused her bad episode of that morning, so she stayed at the vet overnight. And when we got a call early the next morning, it was bad news. We rushed over, and with one look I knew what Snickers had known the day before, so I held her head, stroked her ears and looked into her eyes until she was gone. It was as hard as it had been two years before, but considering all she and her sister had given me over the years, I wouldn't have had it any other way.

So good riddance, 2007; I lost too much to look back at you fondly. If you want to do me one favor, then please ask 2008 to take it easy on me; a kick in the teeth every other year is about all I can stand.