From Chapter 10

I did not tell you Charlie’s story to make you sad. I told it because I believe you have a story like it.

Maybe your dog died this morning and you are still in shock, sitting in a house that has no idea yet. Maybe it has been a month and you are pushing the tears back at work and wondering if something is wrong with you. Maybe it has been six months later and people have stopped asking how you are, and you are still crying on an ordinary Tuesday when a song comes on and your chest caves in.

Maybe you are at the one-year mark and the grief hit harder than you expected, and you thought by now it would be different.

Maybe it has been two years. Maybe five. Maybe you still wear their collar or carry their ashes or sleep with something that smells like them, and you are not sure if that is okay, but you cannot stop the grief.

Maybe the hardest part is happening inside your own home. Someone you love wants the bowls and the bed and the leash put away, and every time they bring it up, it feels like being asked to let go before you are ready. Being told to move on by the people closest to you can feel lonelier than grieving alone. You are not wrong for not being ready. Their timeline was never yours, even under the same roof.

Maybe you are the person who is still fighting. Still filling the pill chart, still counting good days against bad ones, loving your dog so hard it terrifies you because you already know how this ends. You are exhausted and more in love than you have ever been, and the weight of carrying both of those things at once is enormous.

Maybe you made the decision and the guilt is eating you alive. The “what if” questions arrive at 2:00 am and they do not leave. Did I wait too long? Did I let them go too soon? Did they know I was there? Did they know how much I loved them? You replay it and you cannot find a place to put it down.

Maybe what you saw in those last moments stays with you too, and you have never told anyone because you do not know how. That is okay. It does not mean you did anything wrong. It means you stayed, and staying was the bravest kind of love you could give them.

Maybe you are the person who is not okay but has to go back to work Monday and put on a face that says you are fine, because the world has already moved on and you have not figured out how to tell them you are not ready to.

Maybe you looked at a picture of a puppy and felt something, and then immediately felt like a traitor.

Maybe you are somewhere in all of this at once.

Grief like this does not follow a schedule. It does not peak at two weeks and resolve by six months and leave you fully intact by the end of the year. It moves on its own timeline, which is to say it moves on your timeline, which is different from everyone else’s. The people around you may not understand why you are still undone by your loss. They may say things that make you feel like you are grieving wrong, or too long, or too hard.

You are grieving the loss of someone who changed the rhythm of your days. Someone who knew your worst mornings and stayed anyway. Someone whose entire life was organized around being with you, and whose absence leaves a shape in the room that no one else can see but you feel every time you walk through it.

That is not a small loss. It has never been a small loss. Society is only beginning to understand that, and it is not catching up fast enough for the people who are in it right now.

So let me say it plainly: the size of your grief is the size of your love. Those two things have always been exactly equal. They always will be.

From Why Losing a Heart Dog Is So Hard: A Story About Love, Guilt, and Saying Goodbye by Paige Cummings