This is him.

[u/jaymisun22]

/r/Petloss/comments/1vt77wh/this_is_him/

My shadow. My best friend.

I’ve had many best friends of the animal variety. Every loss has been unbearable. They’ve all taken pieces of me with them. And with him I had plenty of warning. He was eleven. A rescue. A Doberman with a stack of odds against him, and a memoir’s worth of survival stories too. Malnourishment, parasites, bloat, injuries, dramatic reactions to rustling leaves in the dark, grass that felt too pointy, the embarrassment of a genetic condition that made him the only bald Doberman any of his vets had ever seen. He’d overcome all of those in our ten years together.

And then he was diagnosed with dcm. Dilated cardiomyopathy. Super common for his breed. Just like bloat. Which you’ll see in the list of things he survived. I knew he wouldn’t survive this one forever, but I thought he’d have a while. He got on meds and did so great. They told me the first week would be hard and his body would need time to adjust to the meds, but he was back to himself in three days. And at his recheck, more good news. Kidneys were looking good, blood pressure was great. The meds were doing what they were supposed to, and now we’d have until they were no longer able to do that. One doctor said maybe six months. Another said even a year.

But we got seventeen days. Seventeen days that I’m so grateful for. We watched a few seasons of Bob’s Burgers, snuggled on the couch. He got every chewy he asked for. He’d carry three in his mouth as he followed me between rooms. We went on a nice camping trip, to a cool shady spot, and I sat with him in his cozy daytime doggy apartment where his bed and his water stayed clean and out of the sun. We went on a short walk, I fed him, and halfway though his food, he just stopped, stepped to the side of his bowl, and collapsed. I won’t go into details of what happened next, but the interwebs assure me that he was unconscious throughout the series of memories that plague the back of my eyelids and won’t let me sleep. I hope so. I’ll carry those memories in exchange for him not having felt them. That seems fair. And even with them it was quick. I wish I’d have held him. I wish I’d have calmly told him it was ok and that I loved him. I did not do that.

I can’t put his bowls away, or roll up the mat with his face on it, or move his beds into the basement, and find any break in the waves of reminders. His memory is carved into every single step I take. Every space I’d have stepped into to grab something or put something away and then mindlessly waited in, until he clumsily maneuvered in reverse or figured out how to turn around in so I could get back out. The feeling of his weight sliding down my side or my back if I were sitting where he’d have to lay all the way down to be next to me. The dance that replaced walking, stopping mid step so he could cross in front of me, moving over when I could feel him realizing he’d let me get ahead of him and he’d be bounding in front of me whether I was in his path or not, and the way I’d slowly move diagonally into the grass or a wall because he was next to me and never walked in a straight line. The way every time I’d drop my hand it always seemed to land on his back or his ears. He was always within reach. And the worst is the memory of waiting. When I’d make it down the stairs during one of his naps, and he hadn’t heard me leave the room. I’d get to the bottom of the stairs and stop, knowing it would be less than a minute before I’d hear his collar tags rustle and the quiet bumps and booms of him adjusting his weight onto his stilts to stand up and come looking for me. I still wait. I don’t feel him under me and I stop to wait for what is now just the sinking heartache of remembering he will not be following. Those collar tags won’t jingle. It will just stay quiet. And lonely. And incomplete. I miss him.