I wrote 66 blog posts at the beginning last year and then stopped mid-May. Maybe you are wondering why. I didn’t mean to check out for so long but I looked at the date of my last post and knew why immediately.

This is Brin. Plott hound/Lab mix. My long-legged supermodel. My brindle of joy. She was 100% momma’s girl. This dog loved me with a single-minded devotion I have never seen before and may never see again.

Brin was a rescue dog, about six months old when we adopted her. She had THE ugliest puppy photo on PetFinder, seriously, it was bad. Brin had the dog version of the awkward adolescent photo. But I was looking for a dog that was good with cats and she was the dog that I could find. We met her foster mother in the Costco parking lot for a meet and greet. Yes, I joked that I got my dog at Costco. She was such a quiet dog. But cute, pretty brindle coat, sweet face. So we took her home and we learned a hell of a lot about being dog parents.

Brin found her bark on day two and was never a quiet dog after that. House training took much longer than it needed to because we stupidly thought she would go to the back door when she wanted to go outside. That’s not how she did it. When we finally realized what her “tell” was, it was like understanding a foreign language for the first time. She had been trying to tell us what she needed all along. *We* had to be trained!

It turned out that Brin was an extremely fearful dog at first. She was afraid of people, dogs, basketballs, skateboards, bikes, tile floors, the garage and many other weird things. We crate trained her, and she slept in her crate, but she still managed to pull things in her crate and destroy them. She chewed through several collars and leashes. She chewed the corner of our nicest wool rug. After an ill-considered decision to leave her in an X-pen when we went out, she ate our couch. We learned that she had serious separation anxiety and she had it all her life. We just learned to deal with it. After the couch incident, we decided she needed more exercise so we took her for walks. Or tried to. It was more like taking her for a drag. She started out scared of the world. It took several tries to get past our driveway and then several tries to get down the block and many weeks before we could get past the scary barky dogs at the end of the street.

Finally, we went to a dog training class. Brin wouldn’t jump in the car so I had to lift her. At class she was so afraid, the trainer put up a screen with a sheet so she couldn’t see the other people and their dogs. After one exhausting class with just her and I (doggy daddy was out of town), we came home and collapsed in a heap on the couch falling fast asleep wrapped up together. That night she slept with me in bed and that, as they say, was that. No more sleeping in the crate. She slept touching me every night for the rest of her days. We had to get bed frames with footboards, also known as a Brin backstop, or she would hog the bed.

Brin grew about 6 inches straight up in that first year. She became a willowy long-legged dog built for speed.

Oh, she really did not know a thing about cats. Much later we realized that she was a hunting dog mix with a high prey drive. She wanted to chase the cats. So that was another thing that we had to work on. She eventually learned that the cats were in charge.

Finally, we took her to daycare and that was a game changer for Brin. And we adopted Hopi, the black English lab with her own incredible story. Brin learned to enjoy the company of other dogs. Eventually, she became confident and social. She still needed reassurance from the staff but she thrived and blossomed. She no longer flattened herself to the ground at the sight of basketballs and barking dogs. She was the “good dog” at daycare, the one that the staff could put with new dogs. She really was darn near perfect. When we got our youngest dog, Buddy, Brin taught our clueless former stray how to play, how to act around other dogs–basically how to be a dog.

In mid-May last year Brin got sick. It was nothing major, more of a nagging thing. She was 12 years old and had always been a healthy solid dog. At her checkup the year before, the vet commented that she had the health of a much younger dog.

She had slowed down ever so slightly but she could still tear around the yard at top speed chasing her pipsqueak brother. But we went to the vet and a fecal test revealed giardia. Giardia is common in wet environments like the one we live in. We got meds and went home. She seemed better but not completely. And then she got fussy about eating, the dog who had inhaled her food for 12 years. An appetite stimulant helped and then it didn’t. At this point, a month of going back and forth to the vet had gone by. The vet finally suggested an ultrasound. She had the ultrasound on a Monday and the results came Tuesday. All of her organs looked wrong, cancer probably. On Wednesday she slipped away.

My heart felt like it had been transported outside of my body and trampled on the ground beside me. Brin was a dog that never let me out of her sight for more than a minute. I had the habit of getting up early and going into the living room to read and write on the couch. Brin was always about 30 seconds behind me, climbing up on the couch beside me, regarding me thoughtfully and then going back to sleep with her trademark dramatic sigh.

After she was gone, I went out into the living room and realized I was all alone for the first time in over a decade. I actually can’t do it anymore, read in the living room, it’s too hard. The emptiness is more than I can bear. A similar thing happened with my office, her bed by my desk lay empty. It was hard to work there for a long time. So the writing suffered. I suffered.

I felt guilty for a long time, thinking that there was something I could have, should have done to save her. But finally, I remembered that life isn’t like that. Sometimes those that we love get sick and die. No one lives forever. Dogs and cats are wonderful companions in life but their time here is short.

After Brin passed away, I spent more deliberate time with our other fur kids. I take more pictures. I stop and enjoy their cuteness. I let the cat take over my lap every morning even when I am trying to drink my coffee. Brin’s parting gift to me was a reminder that our time here is precious. We need to make the most of it every single day.

It’s been almost eight months. We can talk about Brin without crying. Mostly. We found slow feeder bowls for the dogs and talk about how it would have been so great for Brin. I bought brindle dog art from artists on ETSY. I think about how she smelled like Chex Mix. Her concerned look when she thought I was upset. How she beamed love at me. How she would remind me to stop working when I stayed up too late.

So here’s the post I just couldn’t write for a long, long time. The post about Brin. I cried several times but mostly it felt good to think about her and write about her. She was momma’s best girl and I loved her with all my heart.