I should have seen it coming.

But I didn’t.

Years ago, sitting at a banquet table at a work retreat, I asked my co-worker who’d just lost her dog what it was really like. I was worried about how my husband was going to take it, I told her (I thought I’d be fine). He was the one I was worried about. He was the one who seemed so attached to Stanley. He was the one who still couldn’t talk about the betta fish we had for a few months.

Me? I was independent. I liked the quiet apartment when Stanley was at the groomer. I never got too attached to anyone.

And I was the one who was adamant that Stanley didn’t sleep in the bed. I was the one who got mad when I came home from a work retreat and my husband told me he’d started letting Stanley sleep in the bed while I was gone.

I was the one who spent months trying to get Stanley to sleep on the floor again.

I finally relented when one night a thought came to me: This won’t last forever.

I didn’t know then how soon he wouldn’t be there, or how one day I wouldn’t be able to sleep without him, how I’d have to buy a weighted plush just to get through the night.

When he started drinking too much water in April, I hoped it was a UTI.

When the doctors said it was cancer in May, I hoped it was treatable.

When the doctors said he had six months to live in June, I hoped to make it a great six months.

But at a work conference in June I got a call that he was failing fast.

I ran out of the conference hall and booked the next flight out and cried in the Boise airport and on the whole flight home.

My plane touched down in time to spend one last night with him.

When I got home and opened the door, it was the first time in a decade I didn’t have a dog run up to greet me. I didn’t know until that stopped happening how much I’d come to rely on it—how Stanley made me feel like my being somewhere mattered.

He was fine when I’d left for the conference two days ago. But when I came back, he couldn’t walk. He couldn’t move. He was on the couch with my husband and our next-door neighbors who’d come over to help.

All Stanley could do was look up at me.

I hugged him.

He hadn’t been eating or taking the pain meds he’d been prescribed. But when I got there, he ate from my hands.

That night, my husband and I brought out blankets and slept next to him on the living room floor. He woke up every hour needing water, but he couldn’t move, so every hour I lifted his bowl and he drank feverishly.

The next morning we were told we could give him something delicious to eat, so he ate prosciutto and half a roast chicken. He seemed happy.

We even got to hear him bark one last time when a delivery person knocked on our door to deliver flowers. An orchid. Sent by a friend who knew about Stanley’s cancer, but who had no idea then that this was the morning we had to say goodbye.

Stanley was a big dog and couldn’t walk, so our tall neighbor came over again and carried him down the three flights of stairs to the car for us. He offered to come to the vet with us to carry him in. He held Stanley like a baby, and we were brought to a room with a small pallet and blanket on the floor. The blanket was pink and had hearts all over it.

For some reason I don’t remember, I brought Stanley’s gray stuffed kitty with us, too.

We laid him down and laid the kitty next to him and covered him with the blanket.

The staff explained what was going to happen next. First we had to sign a bunch of paperwork. Then they gave us as much time as we wanted to say goodbye. They also gave him a cup of whipped cream, which he wouldn’t eat.

Then the doctor came in. It was a Saturday. He didn’t work weekends. But he told us that on Friday he saw Stanley’s name on the list for today and decided he had to come in. He loved Stanley too. He cried with us.

I knew Stanley would be in good hands. I knew we didn’t have to go through what was coming next. I’d called a few weeks ago to ask what this would be like (I wanted to know, wanted to be prepared, wanted to understand). We had options. We could leave now if we wanted to.

But I couldn’t get it out of my head that I wanted him to feel like he was with me until he fell asleep. I wanted him to feel safe and comforted. I wanted his last moments to feel as good as they possibly could for him.

My original plan was to be with him until he fell asleep, because that’s what happens first, I was told, and then to leave the room before he was really gone. I didn’t want to witness his death. I didn’t want to see him there and not there. It sounded like one of the worst things I could possibly imagine.

But it turned out there wasn’t much time between when he fell asleep and when he was gone. I’m sure I could have asked for it to be different. I’m sure I could have left when I’d originally planned. But the truth is it all happened so fast, and while I couldn’t bear to stay, I also couldn’t seem to leave.

My husband and neighbor gave him big hugs and said nice things and then sat against the walls. I held Stanley’s head in my hands the whole time, talking to him, soothing him, telling him he was such a good boy and that everything was going to be okay.

I didn’t cry.

When he was gone, I asked the doctor if we could leave the gray kitty with him under the blanket.

He said we could.

We walked out.

Without the kitty.

Without Stanley.

Once the door to the room shut behind me and I was outside, my knees gave out and I fell against the red brick wall and wept.

“I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.”

That was all I could say.

To my husband.

To my neighbor.

To the sky.

I sat on the concrete for as long as I needed. My husband and neighbor comforted me and helped me up and walked me to the car.

We drove home in silence.

My husband and I cleaned the apartment from the mess the cancer caused those final twenty-four hours.

We cleaned out his bowls.

We sobbed.

We went to Publix because we didn’t know what else to do.

While inside Publix I felt like I might die.

I bought yellow flowers there and said to no one, “I’m choosing yellow because he was the sunshine of my life.”

I wept when we got home and no one cared.

I posted on Instagram to let everyone know he was gone.

The worst day of my life was also the day I got more Instagram messages than I’ve ever received.

For the next few weeks, every time I came back home I was greeted by the smell of fresh flowers that now filled our kitchen. Sent by so many people who cared.

It’s been eight months since we lost Stanley.

This weekend, upon hearing the line from the new Mumford & Sons song “Rubber Band Man” that says, “Get back in the car,” I had a mini breakdown remembering how I would say, “Get back in the car,” to Stanley after our morning dog park trips during the last month of his life.

The lyrics:

“When I said, ‘Forever’
You said, ‘Get back in the car’
Nothing lasts forever, babe
You know it breaks my heart.”

I knew dogs didn’t last forever.

But that knowledge didn’t save me from falling apart.

What put me back together, if you can even call it that, was a million tiny things, most from dear friends and family.

Long, tight hugs. D&D cookbooks. Pints of Salt & Straw covered in dry ice. Fresh flowers. Handwritten cards. Gold necklaces with pawprints and pictures. Hand-sewn pillows. DMs asking how I was.

And then, of course, there were the memories: the way grief slowly, achingly, evolves into gratitude.

Not for the loss.

Not for the pain.

But for the gift of ever having what was lost.

For the breathtaking experience of getting to live alongside something that could add so much comfort and joy to life in a very broken, wearisome place.