We speak thousands of words to our dogs throughout their lives, yet when they leave us, the silence reveals all we left unsaid. Standing at her empty bed, these are the conversations I wish we’d had.
I should have explained about time—how your life moved at seven times the speed of mine. While I experienced you as chapters in my story, I was your entire universe from beginning to end. Had you understood this cosmic unfairness, perhaps you wouldn’t have waited so patiently each day by the window, thinking my eight-hour absence was eternal. I wish you’d known I always rushed home to you.
Those bath times you endured with stoic resignation weren’t punishment. The way you’d look at me with betrayed eyes as I scrubbed mud from your paws broke my heart every time. I wish I’d found a way to explain that sometimes the things that made you temporarily uncomfortable were acts of deepest care.
The vet wasn’t your enemy. I saw how you trembled in the examination room, how your eyes searched mine for rescue. You never understood that the person who caused you momentary discomfort was fighting to keep you by my side longer. Those needle pricks and prodding hands were extensions of my love for you, not exceptions to it.
I’m sorry I ever raised my voice when you destroyed something precious. The chewed shoes, the shredded mail, the excavated garden—none of it mattered. What I wouldn’t give now to come home to new evidence of your mischief, to have something freshly destroyed by your still-present joy.
I wish I’d told you why I sometimes cried while holding you. You always sensed my sadness, pressing your warm body against mine, offering comfort without understanding that my tears often came from the devastating mathematics of loving something with a ticking clock. You thought you were being comforted; you never knew you were the source of both my deepest joy and most profound heartache.
When your legs began to fail and embarrassment clouded your eyes as I carried you outside, I should have told you dignity isn’t found in perfect bodies but in being perfectly loved despite imperfection. You apologized with your eyes for becoming a burden, never realizing you could never be one.
Most of all, I wish I’d told you that you fulfilled your purpose completely. You may have worried, in those final days, that you were failing your most important job of protecting me. I wish you could have understood that your greatest accomplishment wasn’t in being my guardian but in being my teacher—showing me how to love without reservation, forgive without hesitation, and embrace each day with inexplicable joy regardless of circumstance.
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Perhaps the greatest kindness of dogs is that they leave before we can explain these things, allowing us to discover these truths for ourselves in their absence.
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