On this random Monday, my Mom and Dad have to say goodbye to Abbie.
She’s been part of their home, their routine, their days, and honestly part of our family for so long that calling her “the dog” never really fit. Around here, she’s my four-legged fur sister.
Her health has reached the point where keeping her here would be for us, not for her. And there is a particular kind of pain in loving something enough to let it go when every selfish part of you wants one more day.
My parents are devastated.
I understand why.
Years ago, I had a boss say something after I lost a pet that I’ve never forgotten:
“Just buy another one and you’ll get over the one that passed.”
I remember thinking then that it was one of the dumbest things I had ever heard.
I still do.
You don’t replace a dog.
You don’t replace a cat.
You don’t replace any animal that has spent years quietly weaving itself into your life.
You may bring another one home someday. You may love that one just as much. Maybe even more in a different way.
But replacement isn’t really how love works.
I still think about pets I lost years ago.
Not every day.
Not with the same hurt.
But they’re still there.
A certain look.
A strange habit.
The sound of paws crossing the floor.
Where they slept.
How they somehow knew when you weren’t having a good day.
The ridiculous things they did that irritated you at the time and eventually became the exact things you missed.
That’s the part people who have never really loved an animal sometimes don’t understand.
Pets don’t occupy one little corner of our lives.
They get into everything.
They are there when we come home from work.
They sit with us through illnesses and arguments and holidays and ordinary Tuesday nights.
They watch kids grow up.
They move houses with us.
They are there through divorces, marriages, new jobs, bad news, celebrations, and all the little changes we barely notice while they’re happening.
And they ask for remarkably little in return.
Food.
A comfortable spot.
Maybe a walk.
And us.
Mostly us.
Then one day, after years of being part of the background of our lives, they’re gone.
And the house sounds different.
That may be one of the hardest parts.
The silence where something used to be.
I think grief has a strange relationship with memory.
At first, almost every memory hurts because it points directly at what you’ve lost.
Eventually, most of them soften.
You stop remembering only the last bad day.
You remember the good years that came before it.
The stupid things.
The funny things.
The routines you never realized were routines.
You start telling the stories again.
And somewhere in that process, the animal you lost becomes less connected to the ending and more connected to the life that came before it.
That’s what I hope eventually happens with Abbie.
Monday is going to hurt.
There is no clever way around that.
My Mom and Dad are going to walk into that day with a member of our family and come home without her.
But they are also giving her one final gift.
They are making the hard decision so she doesn’t have to keep hurting simply because saying goodbye hurts them.
There is a lot of love in that.
Maybe some of the purest kind.
The rear view mirror eventually fills with faces.
Some human.
Some with four legs and a tail.
We lose grandparents and parents and friends and pets, and somehow the memories all take their places behind us.
We don’t replace them.
We carry them.
And if we’re lucky, eventually the memories make us smile more often than they make us hurt.
Abbie will leave an empty spot in my parent’s house on Monday.
But she won’t leave an empty spot in their lives.
She already filled too much of it for that.