I was twenty-four when we met, newly married. She was eight weeks old. Big eyes. Lots of hair. Floppy ears. And a tail that didn’t stop wagging. I had the whole litter to pick from and it was between her and her darker-haired sister, whom I called Minnie. But there was something about this one that drew me to her. She loved being held. She gave little licks to my cheek. She was playful and sweet all at once and, as I held her tiny self in my arms, it almost seemed like she loved me already.

She came home with us at ten weeks, a ragmuffin of fur that could fit into my cupped hands. That first night, she slept in her crate. Well, “slept” is a generous word. We put her in her crate in hopes that she would sleep, because that’s what the books said to do to begin potty training, but she yipped and yapped for hours.

I knew she was missing the comfort and familiarity of her doggie family and this new place, her new home, felt weird and maybe scary. Much like those days when, years later, I would sleep train my infant, I wanted to hold her and promise her that she was safe and that she would grow to love her new family, but I knew she needed to stay in her bed. That sleeping in there was the only way to teach her where the appropriate place to go potty was and that is was the safest place for her while we were also asleep. And so, sometime in the middle of the night as her yaps continued, even after we took her outside for a pee break, my husband and I pulled the blankets and pillows off of our bed and settled in beside her. I cracked the crate door open and put my hand inside to gently rest on top of her. Her little puppy barks stopped almost immediately and I got the first taste of what it is to be responsible for the life of someone else – finding ways to provide comfort when you’re painfully tired, finding ways to adapt that work for both of you. And so that’s how we slept for more than one night, a little family on the hard floor, finding their way through this new life together.

*  *  *

Puppies are a lot of work, in case you haven’t heard.  So. Much. Work. I knew that going into the gig. I’d read all the books. I’d researched crate training and the right food to buy and how to teach “sit” and “stay.” We’d found a vet and I knew the shots she needed to get and how to keep her safe and healthy and when to get her spayed. But are you ever really prepared for that thing which you’ve never actually experienced? Until you live through it, you can’t possibly know what labor is like, let alone what your labor is going to be like. You can’t know how hard nursing school is. You can’t quite grasp the sheer exhaustion of having a newborn baby in your home. And you can’t really understand how a puppy, who is the size of your fist and not even human, can somehow take over your lives and make everything seem harder.

It was maybe day ten or so when I began to regret our (ahem, my) decision to become a puppy parent. I loved her – or at least, that’s what I said aloud and what I told myself because I wasn’t a monster – but we had to get up with her every night still. And I had to ask my dad to come over and look after her while we were at work and school. And I had to follow her around constantly to make sure she didn’t pee on our apartment floor carpet or chew up things that mattered to us or might kill her. Our entire lives revolved around her and I wanted my old life back where I could just care about myself and maybe my husband (on a good day, haha) and sleep in and sit down and not constantly be thinking about her. (I mean, people say having a puppy isn’t the same as having a kid. But also…it kind of is?)

There were times, in those very early days, when I quietly entertained the idea of not keeping her. Now, it seems unfathomable. Woven into the fabric of our lives for the last seventeen years, I can’t imagine not having her be a part of all of those moments. But back then? Well, it seemed like it wouldn’t be that hard to give her away and go back to living our pre-puppy lives. Except  I had made a promise to her and to myself and to everyone that had met her already that she was ours now and she would be forever. In the end, we did keep that promise, but in the beginning, I didn’t know if we could. I didn’t know if I could survive those puppy days, or even if I wanted to. But also, how do you abandon the tiniest, fluffiest, sweetest soul when you can literally see the love they have for you in every tail wag and playful puppy bark? When you can feel it during that rare moment when they curl up next to you and fall asleep? When you know they have stopped whining at night because they finally feel safe and at home? You can’t.

And so instead, you just endure the endless days and the midnight walks and the toe nibbles and the kibble everywhere and you buckle up and hold on because when it’s hard, it’s very hard. But when it’s good… It’s so, so good.

*  *  *

I remember the puppy kisses the most. There were actually many ways she showed us she loved us – the full body wag when her tail was going, leaping into our arms when we walked into the house, jumping all over us the minute we sat on the couch, curling up into a ball of fluff in our “bendy bend” when we slept on our side – but the kisses were constant and her sweet, gentle way of letting us know how much she adored us. That little soft, pink tongue that that would lick, lick, lick. Lick my ears and my cheeks. My dad’s bald head. Our noses. Our toes. Even my lips. I loved those little licks to my puckered lips.

One day, I remember my husband saying, “You know she licks her butt too, right?” And I did. And when she was little, I didn’t care. Even a poopy puppy butt was cute. But as she grew, so did I. I became a mother (eventually) and suddenly puppy kisses to my lips didn’t seem like the best, most maternal choice when these lips were also kissing my babies. And so, at some point, I stopped letting her kiss my mouth.

But that didn’t stop her from licking. She’d still kiss any bare skin that she could find. Cheeks and ears and fingers and arms and shins and ankles and toes as we walked by. Lick, lick, lick all day long. Nothing was safe if you stayed in place for more than a minute. Was it a habit? Was she self-soothing? Or was she just showing us how much we meant to her? Who can really know for sure? The only thing I do know is that she only gave kisses to those of us she loved who loved her right back.

In the last year, maybe two, of her life, she stopped her licking. She’d lost several teeth by that point and her mouth ached. She wouldn’t let anyone touch her muzzle and I think kisses just hurt too much. But as I held her in my arms the day before her last, rubbing her ears and telling her how much I love her and that it’s all going to stop hurting soon, she touched her nose to my jaw and I felt the quick flick of a tongue. It was barely noticeable, but it was enough to bring tears to my eyes. I knew what she was saying, a final message of love, one last I love you too.

*  *  *

When she was a year and a half old, she got sick. We went to Oregon to visit my grandfather for his 90^th birthday and left our sweet, energetic pup at a dog kennel for just a few short nights. And when we got home, she was happy to see us and everything seemed fine. Until it wasn’t.

I’m not exactly sure how it started, but I do recall vomit, and diarrhea, and blood. She wouldn’t eat or drink anything and she was lethargic. It came on fast and, by the nighttime, she could barely move and I, quite honestly, thought she might die. It was nearing midnight when we knew we needed help and so my husband called our vet to ask for advice. She was a mobile vet who did house calls and, thank goodness, she picked up the phone. She had only one piece of advice, but it was life-saving: Pedialyte. Pedialyte around the clock.

And so that’s what we did. After an emergency run to Walgreens, we spoon-fed (or was there a syringe involved?) Pedialyte to our very sick pup every hour. Two kids in their mid-twenties who barely knew how to take care of themselves were now doing everything they could to save the life of their puppy. We slept in the living room so that we were close to the back door, my husband on the couch (snoring softly), me on the floor next to the dog bed (not really sleeping at all, gently petting her limp body through the night).

It reminded me of those early days, when she was tiny and our home was new to her, and we had to sleep next to her on the floor. Strangely, it also reminded me of the baby we didn’t have. We’d been trying for almost a year. I longed for nothing more than to hold a precious bundle in my arms, to soothe him or her to sleep, to sing lullabies in the middle of the night. My body felt broken and my arms felt empty, and yet my heart was wide open and waiting.

I’ll never tell you that having a dog is like having a baby. It isn’t. But also, it kind of is? The way they can take over your lives. The way they can own your heart. And while I lay awake, nursing our young pup back to health, in some small way she gave me what I I was wanting the most. Someone to nurture. Someone to hold. Someone to love.

I won’t say that she saved me during those fifteen months of infertility. That’s too sweet, too simple and anyone who has found herself struggling to get pregnant knows it’s not that easy. But she did give me someone to focus on. She did make me feel loved and needed. And on some of my better days, she did make it possible for me to see a life with just the three of us – me, my husband, and our sweet doggie – and to think, It actually might be okay if there’s never anyone else.

On those days, I felt sure that I would one day get to be happy again.

*  *  *

Eventually, I did get pregnant. We were still living in Idaho at the time, in our two-story apartment where it all began, and my husband was in Seattle looking for a job when I found out. He got the job and I started experiencing all-day “morning” sickness right around the same time. For two months or so, I would alternate packing up all of our belongings into boxes with laying on the couch, either because I was nauseous or because I was tired in a way that I didn’t even know was possible before pregnancy. And every time I’d lay down, our sweet snuggle puppy would curl up in my bendy bend, drawn to me magnetically, like a moth to a flame.

When it was finally time to have our first baby, I had a scheduled induction planned because of some complications. We knew it could be a long process., that we could possibly be at the hospital for days before the baby even arrived, and we weren’t sure what to do with our pup. My mom would be with us at the hospital the whole time. And by then, we were in western Washington and pretty much knew no one. There was nobody to ask if they might look after her and so, though it hurt my heart to do so, we boarded her at a doggie daycare for small dogs. After our last terrible experience with putting her in a kennel back in Idaho, I was terrified to send her off again. She had been to this doggie daycare once before, when we took a cruise from Seattle just shortly after her first birthday, and she had loved it. She had even made a doggie friend named Fudgems back then and had lived her best life of puppy fun and treats every day. But she was a little older now and hadn’t been away from us in months and I was scared to let her go, even though it felt like we had no other choice.

While I was in labor, I had my husband call to check on her. I was dilating, and contracting, and moaning my way through each wave, but I needed to know that she was okay. Dan came back and reported that she was fine, happy, doing well. It was only some time later, after our baby was here and our pooch was safely back with us, that I learned she was, in fact, not as good as I’d been told. She was healthy. She was okay.  But happy? No. She wouldn’t eat much. She wasn’t playing. She seemed scared of the other dogs. She wanted to go home. She wanted to be with her people. And so, soon after we got back from the hospital, though the roads were an icy mess and we had no power, my husband drove two hours to pick her up. And that was the very last time we ever left her at a doggie daycare.

I am happy to report, though, that she loved the new baby. You never know how a dog is going to respond to a new family member. But ours seemed to understand this tiny little person was just part of the pack. One of us. We called her the Mother Hen because, when the baby cried, she would run to check on her, pressing her wet nose against the baby’s cheek or hand. And often, we would find her curled up next to the bassinet or on the blanket where the baby was laying too. I’m glad we’d had her spayed, but it made me think she would have been a good mommy if she’d ever had puppies. Love and gentleness came naturally to her. She’d nurtured me through years of infertility and grief and fear and now, she somehow just knew how to nurture my babies too.

*  *  *

In the beginning, we didn’t let her sleep in our bed. I’m not sure why. Maybe I’d read something about how we shouldn’t. Because it confused dogs about who was in charge. Or because it would bring too much dirt and germs into the bed. Or because it disrupted everyone’s sleep. I don’t know, but it lasted for a while. After the first few nights (when we ALL slept on the floor), my husband and I slept cuddled in our warm, cozy, queen-sized bed and she slept next to the bed, at first in her crate and eventually in her plush dog bed. She never really seemed to realize being in the big bed was even an option and it worked well for all of us.

And then, maybe two years into our marriage and dog-parenting adventure, my husband went away for a few nights. I can’t be sure, but I think it was maybe that time when he went to Seattle job-hunting and I stayed at home, with a dog and a positive pregnancy test. And if that positive test wasn’t enough to explain why I needed the emotional regulation of having a dog in my bed, let me also say that, though I was twenty-six years old at the time, I was a bona fide scaredy cat. And there was no faster way to convince me that a serial killer was watching me through the living room window than to leave me alone in a quiet apartment for a whole damn night.

And so that doggie became like the stuffed animals I used to clutch as a child while imagining the werewolves that were waiting for me in the shadows of our backyard. She didn’t make me less scared – after all, she was just eight pounds; what exactly would she do to save me if there was indeed a serial killer? – but she made me less lonely. She made it feel like it was me and her against the bad guys and boogie men of the world.

So we slept like that, her curled against my body, the whole week that my husband was gone. And, as they say, the rest was history.

After that, there was no going back. Our bed was her bed. We couldn’t keep her off of it if we tried. And we did try, briefly and half-heartedly. But eventually, we just shrugged our shoulders and made room for her, accepting that our bed now belonged to three of us.

And so she slept in my bendy-bend for years, every night, moving to the foot of the bed only if I tossed and turned too much. She tore apart the tissues that were next to our bed. Occasionally, she’d drink from the water glass on our nightstands. She’d lick faces when we let her and, a couple times she even peed in our bed. She really made it her own.

And always at bedtime, as we brushed our teeth, she’d jump into the bed and roll in the spots where we normally slept. Roll, twist, dig, sometimes even bark a little as she tried to cover every square inch of her body in the scent of us. That’s how much she loved us. She wanted to smell like us.

Unfortunately, you never know when a last is happening until it’s over. I don’t remember the last time she curled up against me. I don’t know when she last slept in our bed. She stopped doing both in the last year or two, but I didn’t know it was the last until she was gone.  I didn’t know I would miss it until I did. All I do know is that, right now, I wish I could have one more midnight snuggle with a puppy who felt most as home next to us and who wanted nothing more than to smell like the people she loved.

*  *  *

As more babies came, there was less time and attention for her. Less walks. Less cuddle sessions. More chaos. More noise. More crumbs falling from the table to the floor, so it wasn’t all bad. She let the kids pat her and kiss her and sometimes adorn her with hats and hair clips.  She’d give them puppy licks even though, five minutes before, they had pushed her off the couch. She was always close by.

I was overworked and overwhelmed and didn’t always have the bandwidth to love her in the ways I once had. She wanted snuggles and I wanted space. She wanted treats and I just wanted someone who didn’t need anything from me. But she adjusted as our family grew and changed. She accepted the little ear rubs when we’d give them. She’d wait by the door until we noticed that she wanted outside. She’d lick our toes while we watched TV. She’d still bring us toys to throw in the hopes of playing fetch (and, almost always, we would abide because that cute little face and her persistence were irresistible). She would travel with us most summers and run on the beach with the kids. And sometimes, she’d go to Grammy’s for a month or two in Idaho, where she would get endless amounts of attention and love.

Often, I would sit down and she would curl up next to me and I’d say, “I need you to move. I can’t snuggle right now. I just need some room.” I was touched out, and desperate to be alone. But she, my ever faithful friend, would just quietly inch closer until, once again, she was glued to my side and my fingers would absentmindedly find their way into the shaggy fur on her head. She was there. She was always there, even when I didn’t want it. Even when I didn’t know I needed it.

She was underfoot and by my side, always. While I was grieving miscarriages and more negative pregnancy tests. While I wrote an essay for the friend to whom I had to say goodbye. While I unwrapped Christmas gifts and sipped my coffee.  While my husband was away on yet another business trip and I still felt nervous about the monsters in the dark. While I rushed to get kids out the door for school. While  children yelled at me and said they hated me. While I watched terrible stories on the morning news program. While we all battled the stomach flu for the third time in one winter. While I crocheted yet another baby hat. She was there through every bit of it. In a world of chaos and change and growth and evolution and noise and sometimes unimaginable joy and sometimes unfathomable horror, she was the constant. She was there.

And it didn’t matter if I hadn’t been my best that day or given her the same love she’d given to me because all she ever gave me was love.

She was still always there.

*  *  *

As she aged and as we started trying for our sixth and final addition to the family, there was one thing I knew for certain: I wanted her to meet all of my babies. The harder it was and the longer it took to get pregnant, the more desperate that wish became. I couldn’t explain it. I didn’t understand it. I only knew that, after she was gone, I needed to know that she and every one of my babies had existed at the same time. I wanted memories of them together. I wanted to know they had each been loved by her.

Eventually I did get pregnant, right around the time we moved into a new house, the last home our sweet old lady would ever know. It was a house with a better backyard for her. Easy access. No stairs. Plenty of grass. I hated it in the beginning, but it was good for her.

The pregnancy was not easy. I spotted. I worried myself sick for the entire nine months. I have memories and photos of my canine companion next to my belly, next to my bed, always nearby through that tumultuous time. I was busy with unpacking and unsettled with anxiety and she couldn’t make the hard less hard, but she did always make it known: I was not alone. And that knowing, her presence, was the greatest gift to me.

About a month before my due date, she got sick. We really thought we might lose her, just like that one time years and years before. This time, we think she got it from the groomer where she was held hostage (another vignette for another day) because it was the only place she went that wasn’t home. And she was sicker than ever. There was vomiting, diarrhea, lethargy, a cough, and we believe a couple seizures and these symptoms went on for days. I remember saying to her, “Please don’t leave yet. We’re so close. The baby is almost here. Please stay.” And she did.

In fact, she stayed with us almost two full years after that. She, indeed, met our last baby. She laid in her bouncer when the baby was in our arms. She pressed her cold nose to the baby’s cheek. She slept right beside her on the couch. And though she was wary of grabby hands and bear hugs as our little one grew, she tolerated them as well. She was as gentle as she’d ever been.

 I have memories of our littlest, toddling babe leaning over as she tried to kiss her puppy friend on the mouth. She loved to pet her friend, and follow her friend, and offer her snacks that she had found in the seat of her highchair. The day before the Final Day, there was one time when our pup was just standing there in the middle of the sun room and the baby walked up to her and wrapped her arms around that skinny, furry body. She hugged her fiercely and her canine friend, possibly for the first time ever, just stood there and accepted that purest, sweetest of hugs. They embraced for what felt like a long time.

And I will never stop being thankful that I have that memories of them together.

*  *  *

When it came time to say goodbye, I knew that all I wanted for her was peace. A gentle, peaceful exit, feeling safe and feeling  loved.

I held her a lot that final morning. I told her all of her aches, and discomfort, and challenges would soon be over. I scratched her ear in her favorite spot and gave her peanut butter and tucked her under my arm, in the same way I had always held her.

The vet came and the air in our house felt heavy. He spoke with kindness and compassion to us and so tenderly to her. He knew how hard this was and he gave us the time we needed with her.

In her final moments, I did not bring out my camera or my phone. There is no official record of what was said or how hard we cried, but I do remember our angel doctor, Dr. David, saying these words to her before he administered her final IV, “It’s time to go, my friend. You’ve done well. You’ve done your job. You’ve loved your family. You took care of them for seventeen years and now it’s time for us to take care of you.”

And no truer words could there ever be.

She’d done her job.

She’d loved us well.

And so the only thing for me to say as she took her last breaths were “Thank you” and “I love you, I love you, I love you” until the end.

And still weeks later, when I think of her, I think of those last minutes. I remember how calm she was. I remember the feel of her fur and how my tears fell hard and fast. I remember how deeply I felt both sadness and love. I remember her heartbeat against my fingertips, and then I remember the absence of it. But I also recall all the years before that, the puppy kisses and chewed up rubber octopuses, the walks on the beach and the barks from the window, chasing her through our yard because she didn’t come when called, tripping over her in the kitchen, the times when I was pregnant and she slept in my bendy bend even though there was hardly any room. I remember all the hard and all the good that she saw us through, forever beside us, never wavering in her devotion or love.

And every time I’m missing her and just need to whisper to her in the night, there’s only one thing to say, the thing that says it all:

Thank you, my faithful friend.

I love you.

I love you.

I love you.