On the particular maths of a dog's life.

 

You do the maths at some point. Usually earlier than you would like to. You look at the dog asleep in the corner and you work out how old they will be when you are forty, when the kids finish school, when you retire. The numbers are never quite enough and you already knew that before you started counting.

A dog's life sits inside yours in a way that is unlike most other relationships. You will almost certainly outlive them. You know this from the beginning and you sign up anyway because the alternative is not having one and that is worse. So you make an agreement with yourself about the terms and you mostly do not think about it and then sometimes you do.

Thirteen years is a long time. It is also not long enough. It is the length of a childhood, more or less. The span between one version of your life and another. A dog who arrives when you are twenty-eight and leaves when you are forty-one has witnessed a significant portion of who you became. They were there for the moves and the relationships and the jobs and the mornings when things felt impossible. They did not know any of that was significant. They were just there.

The grief that follows is specific. It does not behave like other grief. It arrives in the morning when the routine that existed for years simply does not happen. The bowl is still there. The lead is still by the door. The shape of the day has a gap in it that is exactly dog-shaped and nothing else will fit.

What helps, eventually, is the same thing that helped before. Paying attention to what was good about it. The particular way they slept. The sound they made when they were happy. The small daily things that seemed unremarkable at the time and turned out to be everything.

Thirteen years. Fourteen. Eight. However long it was. It was not wasted time. Not a single day of it.