I have always said, about myself, that I am as loyal and faithful as a German Shepherd. Which is to say I have chosen a dog as the standard. It is a high bar. The dogs in my life set it. Sherlock, the Irish Wolfhound — a giant afraid of the stairs and of the cold, but who once put himself between a charging dog and the stroller, my baby inside. Teddy, the other gentle giant: a Golden Pyrenees who guarded the chickens from any fox or raccoon that ventured onto the property. And Mia, the Portuguese Water dog we brought home when Teddy was four — perfect from the start, the rare one who never needed training, who simply knew.
Those three are gone now. Dogs do not live as long as their humans. And I am writing this very phrase with Nanouk — my northern husky mutt — on her cushion, not far from me. She has been beside me since the pandemic. Through everything it carried — and the good and the bad and everything that has come since.
Animals have been in my life forever. Minette Chérie La Framboise came to me when I was four — a light grey and cream tabby, and a name that only a very imaginative four-year-old could land on. She was with me for eighteen years, my first great furry love. I was an only child until I was almost eight, living with my single mother, and Minette was the company I had. She was there when I came home from school. She slept in my bed. She was, for those years, the reason certain kinds of loneliness never quite reached me.
But a cat was not a dog. I had always wanted a dog too. When I was six, I sat in my grandparents' basement — where the old, heavy typewriter lived. The air smelled of furnace oil and the light was dim. But the task was more important than the discomfort. I typed a formal request to my mother. I chose the typewriter because a request that important needed a machine and a page. My mother said no. I remember the letter — and the no — more clearly than most things that happened that year.
Nanouk came from a northern community where too many dogs need help and too few resources exist to give it. She was airlifted here, a puppy. She has been mine ever since. Two other puppies were rescued that summer. Two other families made richer.
What an animal gives, over years, is transparent. She cannot pretend. She cannot perform affection she does not feel. What she asks for in return is simple — care, food, shelter, and to be loved back. That is the whole exchange. There is no ledger underneath, no unspoken tally, no version of the relationship that she is secretly keeping score of. That is the bar. And it is why it hurts the way it does when they go.
A friend of mine lost her longtime cat companion recently. He had been a stray as a baby — arrived at her door and stayed. She wrote about him publicly, a long post, and the grief in it was real. Sixteen years of a specific being beside her, gone. She was mourning openly, and I read what she wrote, and I recognized every word of it.
That is what makes the loss so specific. It is not that a friend has died. It is that the daily presence has ended. The culture that treats this kind of grief as smaller is wrong. Sixteen years of daily company, gone, is sixteen years of daily company, gone. It does not matter that the being was covered in fur.
Nanouk is still beside me. She has moved once, closer, in the time I have been writing this. One day she will be one of the gone ones too. I know that. But today, she is here. By my side. That is what she does.
— Catherine