We Don’t Deserve Our Dogs

My dog died yesterday.

She didn’t die naturally. She died when we made the decision to put her ‘to sleep’.

It was simultaneously the most difficult and easiest decision I have ever made in my life. Sitting on the floor, holding her and patting her and reassuring her while she sat on my couch panting. Her tongue and mouth so dry from refusing water that I couldn’t get her pills to the back of her mouth anymore.

Selfishly, I wanted her here. Her ravaged little body that, in health, used to seek me out when I left the room for even five seconds. In health, she physically had to be with me. In sickness, her last hours – her hind legs no longer receiving the messages her brain tried to send them – her little head would turn to where she saw me leave the room, waiting for me to return. I didn’t deserve her.

She came into my life when I needed her most…just as my divorce was finalized. I would hold her 4-pound puppy body and cry and she would lick the tears. Even when there were no tears – no physical evidence of my sadness – when a wave of emotion overtook me, she would snuggle into my neck in an act of reassurance that made me think she was human. How was this little ball of fur so able to read me and help me heal?

She only lived to see her 6th birthday, and she only weighed 11 pounds, but her impact on my life was immeasurable. She taught me while she lived and now in death she teaches me even more.

I want to be the woman that existed in my dog’s eyes. She saw beauty, even when it wasn’t there. When she looked at me she saw kindness and love and patience and hope and only good things. These are all the things that I now want to see when I look in the mirror. I owe this to her. I owe it to her to believe what she was trying to teach me – that I can be this person to everyone, every day.

Her suffering has ended. That is the gift that I gave her yesterday. My love and my need for her physical presence overshadowed by my love to set her free. She deserves to be wherever dogs go when they are finished teaching their lessons here on Earth.

Please God, help me to be the woman that she saw. Help me to forever keep her lessons in my heart right next to the place that she will occupy for eternity.

RIP Chloe ❤️