Teddy was done. He just couldn’t take it anymore. The loneliness, the isolation, the wanting for human contact. Without it, his heart shriveled up and he reached the end of the road. I found him hanging from the fence and his lifeless eyes peered deeply into my soul and for a second, I could feel his pain.
“I should’ve known something was up,” Teddy’s owner told me when I handed him the flaccid body. “He just wasn’t handling things well: he stopped playing with the other toys, he wouldn’t eat. Even when I tried to watch Ted with him, he was just too disengaged to sit through it. How did I miss the signs?”
“Well,” I said with as much counselor insight as I could muster. “It’s often the ones left behind who suffer the most. There’s just so many questions left unanswered.”
He looked at me with a deeply furrowed brow and shook his head a bit. “No,” he said. “I don’t have any real questions. I know why he did what he did.”
“Really? The quarantine? The fear of the virus? The social isolation? What was it, if you don’t mind me asking, that is?”
“No, none of that. He was a Teddy, so he couldn’t catch the virus and he was pretty much used to be locked in the toy box. What happened was, he found out that Teddy Bears aren’t really alive. All his life, he thought he was a real type of bear and lived among us, to the point of being a bit over bearing. Now, we knew he wasn’t a real bear but we just didn’t have the heart to tell him. Then one day, he ordered a meatball sub and BackRoad Pizza and found out that they aren’t selling those right now. Well, he lost it and to calm him down, I told him that he never really ate them, anyway. He just couldn’t process the news and spiraled out of control.”
I was astounded and saddened. It must have been quite a shock to learn that he wasn’t real. I prayed a little prayer and said, “Well, I’m sorry about Teddy and I’ll leave you and your family to grieve.”
“Eh, no worries. I’ll just put him back in the toy box. Thanks for bringing him in!”
