Our dog, Maggie, died suddenly but not unexpectedly at our home on May 25th, 2024. This is a story of our lives together, and why losing a pet can cut so deeply in today’s world.
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They say that grief comes on like a tsunami, a wave of incredible power and uncontrollable force that washes over us. The metaphors are many—trains and dump trucks, roller coasters and rivers—and they all check out. Grief comes on hard and renders us powerless in its wake. But I’ve been consumed less by a powerful force and more by the emptiness of where something used to be. Because grief is, after all, an empty hole. And it hurts because I allowed myself to love so deeply and unexpectedly. After all, loving never came easy until I met this dog.
Rational Vs. Emotional
When an employee at a Houston no-kill shelter led a scrawny, five-month-old puppy named Blackie—yes, Blackie—to greet us, my invisible stoic armor dropped to the floor like lead. Discovered in a cardboard box with her two sisters, Maggie had survived several months of harsh street life, presumably knife-fighting to stay above the fray.
A lovely elderly couple fostered the sisters briefly but couldn’t handle three wild-ass, street-hardened puppies. Like a sad schoolyard kickball game, Maggie-to-be was the last one adopted, presumably owing to her less-than-representative website mug shot.
Securing ‘Blackie’ for adoption involved navigating two white-knuckle phone interviews, tests meant to ensure super-human patience and compassion. For a $65 application fee, she was ours. Hands down the best $65 I’ve ever spent.
On the morning of Friday, May 6, 2011, Maggie’s foster parent teared up when I placed my bright new leash on her collar. I drove off with the old man waving behind me in the big Texas sun. I now understand how he must have felt, even at that seemingly minor loss. Maggie left an impression on anyone. Sometimes for her intelligence, sometimes for her youthful energy, and later for her adorably sweet senior demeanor. And occasionally—more times than I’d like to admit—she left her mark by eating your sandwich.
Almost exactly thirteen years later, she died unexpectedly. We never could have imagined that the curve of her decline would bend so sharply to zero. In the days and weeks following her death, emotion was all I had. Floods, torrents, tsunamis. Dump trucks and trains.
As days turned to weeks, I floated in a lazy river of grief. Despite all the hurt, I’ve strangely feared losing it. I’ve felt guilty about other thoughts. I felt guilty because we loved her like a child.
Dogs as Children
No single conversation informed our choice not to have children. When asked, I like to reminisce about a fantastic two-week period in September 2016. We traveled to the South of France, climbing bone-white limestone, drinking a lot of wine, and soaking up the legendary French side-eye. My wife stopped taking prenatal pills, both of us swept up in thoughts of travel and freedom that eclipsed any consideration of parenthood. We continued to travel abroad for years to come. Nevertheless, those were the thoughts, dreams, and expectations of our early 30s.
A dog commonly serves as a trial run for children. Young couples love and lavish attention until the real babies arrive, relegating these proto-children to life’s back burner. Attention turns toward the mostly hairless, non-shedding toddler. Dog walks taper and playtime all but ceases.
Without children, Maggie became and remained our child. We even received texts on Mother’s and Father’s Day—fewer than someone with a little wobbly Jacob, Oliver, Olivia, or Sophia, but a recognition that we loved deeply. And we did.
However, with Maggie increasingly serving a child-substitute role, our attachments grew, setting the stage for profound loss.
What We Expect from Our Pets
Despite popular opinion, a dog’s love is not unconditional. Dogs are animals, like you or I. When shrouded with kisses and goo-goo-ga-gas for two minutes in the morning and left in a cage for eleven hours each day, they will not flourish. If chained in a yard or otherwise made to look badass, they will not flourish. When neglected or abused, neither dog nor human loves easily. And they learn from us—anxious people have anxious dogs.
When the stars align between a dog and its owner, the connection feels almost cosmic, unlike any other bond. Maggie never awkwardly inquired of my lack of children, why I’d chosen to abandon my promising career, or if I’d sent my latest climbing project. She didn’t ask me to shave or insist on retiring my favorite pair of well-loved boxers.
Grateful for each day with us, she ran through forests, deserts, and alpine cirques. She relentlessly pursued anything that could be thrown, demolished countless squeaky toys, methodically degloved tennis balls of their fuzzy covering, and pried open hundreds of empty and frozen peanut butter jars with the skill of, well…you or me.
She swam in rivers, lakes, oceans, and sounds. As if from ancient mythology, she caught a bird mid-flight and waged war against other small mammals, consuming untold pesky, zucchini-eating urban squirrels.
We drove thousands of miles with her head out the window, tongue flapping in the breeze and her eyes drawn back against the interstate gusts like Kate Winslet on The Titanic. I estimate that I walked some 20,000 miles with her, across all terrain, weather, and time of day imaginable. We spent almost every day together for over thirteen years. We were a family, a pack.
Maggie Knew
Through it all she seemed to retain a knowledge, a deep intelligence, of importance. She seemed connected to the universe in a way I could sense but not understand. I joked, though I mostly believed, that her brainpower surpassed the intelligence of many people.
My wife and I always said Maggie knows. And she did know. If in the evenings I sat outside and pulled out my phone to get bogged down in some worthless internet rabbit hole, she was quick to nudge me with her wet snout and speak. However, If I was absorbed in a good book or otherwise at peace, she mostly left me alone. In the final month, stiff, terribly thin, and disoriented by a cognitive fog settling in like poison gas, she began to withdraw. Maggie knew.
Filling a Hole
It’s never been easier to replace the face-to-face, difficult, and often awkward experience of human connection with another night at home. We are prone to becoming islands, separate entities, not truly existing together or even honestly with ourselves. Pets partially fill this widening void, but not without cost.
In her last four years, we grew ever closer to Maggie. I left the corporate world in early 2020, convinced I’d finally found happiness. Amidst the pandemic, our pack lived on the road for six months, eventually settling in a new state where we knew virtually no one. Like so many, we started spending more time at home.
Maggie received the surplus attention. Our lives became intertwined. As the pandemic subsided and our friends and family left pets behind to jet across the globe again, we turned inward, vowing to stay with our girl until the end. And I’m grateful we did.
A 60-pound Labrador mix with a stately white beard became the sun in our universe around which we revolved. For over four years preceding her death, she spent every day with at least one of us. We traveled only by car and brought her everywhere. In the final year, my wife and I resolved to stay close to home. Three weeks before she died, we canceled our coastal California anniversary road trip. We knew it was coming, but we didn’t know what death would entail.
I wasn’t prepared for Maggie’s death because I wasn’t prepared for death.
On Death and Suffering
People in my life have died, but it always hit differently. I watched from afar as grandparents withered under the forces of time and biology. At seventeen, I wept alone in my room for thousands of strangers in the aftermath of 9/11, overwhelmed by the enormity and senselessness of it all. Friends, classmates, and coworkers–none of whom were close–died from accidents, overdoses, and suicide.
The difference is that I expect humans to suffer. Therapists don’t long to eliminate suffering, but to explore it. With some distance from death, grief was either transient or shallow. To watch a dog suffer, however, as I eventually did, felt so incredibly wrong.
Death was a distant concept until the winter and spring of 2024. Only in hindsight did I begin to understand the extent of the mind’s tricks, the ease at which we fall into patterns of denial. I thought I was prepared. But in today’s world, death is no longer familiar.
Novelist Cormac McCarthy reflected on themes of death in his work to Vanity Fair in 2005:
“Most people don’t ever see anyone die. It used to be if you grew up in a family you saw everybody die. They died in their bed at home with everyone gathered around. Death is the major issue in the world. For you, for me, for all of us. It just is. To not be able to talk about it is very odd.”
I wasn’t prepared for Maggie’s death because I wasn’t prepared for death.
Suffering is an inescapable part of the human condition. Or to put it more simply, as my grandfather told me the day following Maggie’s death: “No one gets out of this world without hurting a whole lot.” He would know.
A Dog’s Suffering
Nonetheless, Maggie’s steep decline felt unbelievably unfair. She couldn’t read Cormac McCarthy. Nor could she understand why veterinary technicians pinned her down, driving needles into her neck and drawing vials of blood. Or why she ping-ponged back and forth on endless medication, expensive and mostly futile attempts to treat pain, weakness, confusion, and increased drinking and urination—familiar experiences in today’s “Big Vet” era. Everything felt unsettling and unnatural, as strange as the distance between life and death. I looked away and continued to look away. But she knew. Maggie always knew.
That’s why, I now believe, Friday, May 24th was such a beautiful day. Energetic and happy in a way I hadn’t seen in weeks, she ran stiff-legged but playfully across the schoolyard lawn wet with morning dew. Later we enjoyed a carefree day of bouldering on Boulder’s Flagstaff Mountain with my wife, who rarely joined us. Maggie looked so happy. I took videos and photos, delighted with her newfound energy and naively hopeful that she’d turned a corner. We couldn’t have known that it would be the last full day. The last hurrah. The Swan Song, as they call it.
Maggie’s Last Day
Saturday, May 25, 2024, was a beautiful spring Colorado morning: crisp blue skies and warm, golden light. I’d slept wonderfully, a rarity. Rolling off the mattress—we’d been sleeping downstairs on the living room floor for over a month—I rose to find her splayed across her favorite handmade bed, her hind end on the bed and her torso and head bent onto the hardwood floor. This wasn’t yet unusual. An hour later, everything changed: she lay with a look of resignation in a dark pool of her own urine. With my wife away at a yoga class, I panicked and grabbed my phone. Maggie would never get up again.
I paced around our living room, making several calls to emergency clinics and more calls to my parents. Faced with the daunting reality, I made a tearful call to a mobile euthanasia service I’d spoken with six weeks prior, knowing we wanted Maggie to pass at home. The doctor wouldn’t be able to arrive until 1:00 pm. It was 9:48 am.
The Long Wait
The next several hours were the longest and most painful of my life. We transferred Maggie’s limp body to a clean bed under her favorite shade tree in our backyard. Over nearly three agonizing hours, we watched helplessly as her chest heaved and her cheeks puffed, limbs jerking occasionally from some unknown mortal crisis. In time, her tongue lolled into the grass and I descended into a state of shock. We kept telling her it was okay even when it wasn’t. Wind chimes hung from a tree limb above us as we consoled her, clanging gently in the breeze. It was such a beautiful and terrible day.
Just as the doctor arrived at 12:40, Maggie raised her head and contracted her whole being, her tongue curled in her mouth. She collapsed as the doctor rushed to her side. The young, gentle doctor carried on with the perhaps needless procedure as we held our old girl, lost in every way.
I cursed myself for feeling this way about a dog.
This Was Our Experience of Death
With Maggie loaded and gone in the veterinarian’s car, I stood in the yard staring at her empty bed. The shape of her body was still imprinted on the memory foam, framed by two vacant camp chairs. I realized it was raining but I stood nonetheless. The often-cited adjectives of senior dog euthanasia—tender, special, peaceful—didn’t hold for us, because fairness is but a dream.
I spent the following days and weeks in a fevered state of disbelief, worming down endless rabbit holes to try and explain the unexplainable, to alleviate the guilt. We scrutinized pivotal moments where we might have erred or acted too selfishly. I cursed myself for feeling this way about a dog. I wanted a sort of see-you-on-the-other-side country music sing-song remembrance of her life, but I wasn’t there. I’m not there. I may never be there.
In the end, it just is. Death follows life, and it all begins again. She died on a large circular bed we’d years ago jokingly named The Circle of Life. It was indeed.
The Aftermath
Each day brings a slight easing of the pain, yet it also fuels a persistent sense of guilt and an overwhelming fear of losing her memory.
I still open the backdoor out of habit and speak to her in the morning sun on the long walks we once shared. I miss laying with her at night, waiting as her tired old body softened under the weight of my hand, sharing our unspoken understanding. It was these moments that she would truly relax as, we suspect, cancer ravaged her brain.
But she’s been here. I felt her in the strange and beautiful tranquility of the first morning alone in the schoolyard and the bizarrely serene lightning storm on the night of her cremation. She appeared in the flurry of moths that flew from my truck’s opened door. I hear her in the backyard wind chimes beneath that tree. I have channeled her strength as I’ve returned to the world around me, more capable of empathy, depth, and most importantly, love. More me.
I’ll be unpacking the lessons of this gift for years to come. Hold your babies close, whatever they are.
I just finished reading this beautiful post on the loss of Maggie. I feel your pain. Bill and I lost our Murphy nearly 14 months ago now and the tears still flow thinking about him. Like your Maggie, he was a rescue and he quickly became our kid. And like you and Maggie, I’ve never had such a special and deep relationship with a pup as I did with Murph. He also crossed his finish line here at home with a very kind vet. A peaceful and planned passing. But the pain that followed after, phew! Indescribable. Still hurts.
Your words are beautiful here; you’re a very gifted writer! Thank you for sharing your journey with Maggie.
Hugs for you both…
Judy Nelson