Goodbye Tesa

Before I tell you the bad news, which I am sure you have already concluded from the title of this post, I want to share with you the positive things that I remember about the eldest dog in my family, Tesa.
Back in 1995, I was in the 8th grade. My mom always wanted a yellow lab, and had a name picked out for years. We already had one dog, Maico, a black lab. We had always been a one-dog family for the most part, so when my mom and dad told me and my brother that we were getting a second dog, we were very excited. Around Christmas time that year, we got a fluffy, shy, beautifully blonde baby lab. Enter Tesa. Automatically the center of attention in our house, Tesa, became a family icon. I remember family movies my mom filmed with me and my little brother sitting on the couch holding this puppy like she was a newborn baby sister just being brought home from the hospital. We were arguing over who's turn it was to hold the puppy. My brother was 8 or 9 years old at the time, and especially took a liking to this dog. Being the entertainer and comedian of the house, he created the "Tesa Voice" which he used all the time growing up. Whether he was pretending to be the dog talking, or if he was using the voice to get out of trouble with my mom, which worked every time, we heard the voice more than we really ever wanted to hear it. To this day, when my brother calls me on my cell phone, the ring tone that he recorded on the phone is him talking in the Tesa Voice.
I remember Christmas a few years ago, when my mom worked very hard in the kitchen to make desserts for the family Christmas dinners over at my grandmother's house. I guess one dessert in particular Tesa liked, because on Christmas eve that year, in the middle of the night, somehow Tesa pulled that dessert (The Honey Bun Cake) off the counter where it was neatly wrapped up on to the floor and proceeded to drag it into the living room, under the Christmas tree, where she demolished the whole thing. We found the evidence of the honey bun cake (crumbs and some saran wrap) under the Christmas tree the next morning. My mom wasn't very happy about that, but we just chalked it up that being Tesa's official favorite dessert. Tesa also had many other favorites (picked out by my brother of course in the Tesa voice). Her favorite movie was Big and as you can probably guess from the movie, her favorite actor was Tom Hanks. Some other things that she enjoyed doing was running away from strangers (she was very shy) and crossing the street where I lived growing up into the neighbor's perfectly manicured lawn to "do her business." I guess she thought that she was a contributing factor to keeping their yard remarkably green.
As Tesa got older, she got bigger (as you can see in the picture) and the hip problems that we saw forming when she became younger became more of an issue. In recent years, she moved into the mountains of North Carolina with my mom and dad where she pretty much became a couch potato, but still an unwavering dedicated dog that our family loved very much.
Just last Wednesday, January 30th, my dad told me that Tesa had gone off into the woods earlier that morning (which was very unusal for her, she didn't like to go far from the house) and hadn't come back home yet. I was very worried about her, but had hope that she would show up later that night, and she would be dirty from playing in the woods with the other dogs. She never showed back up. Our family believes that she ran off to die, which isn't terribly uncommon for dogs. We will always remember Tesa, the sweet, shy, but mischievous lab that we loved very much. My mom made a Honey Bun Cake in her honor last weekend.