It started like this: I thought maybe I wanted a dog and then not long after some family friends found two strays, puppies. Upon housebreaking them, they realized theirs was not a two-dog house so on social media requested help in rehoming one. At the time I lived with my sister. “I don’t want a dog,” she said, “but you should take her for two weeks and see how it goes.” I freelanced full-time back then and spent a lot of hours alone editing photos.
The vet estimated Darby to be somewhere between six and nine months when I picked her up. A wiry little mutt with an ever-lagging tongue and exuberant disposition. The point of no return came within the first week, I think. In early days she loved to run and needed to learn not to jump when she met new people. She got along with other dogs. She came in a little hot with kids but quickly matched their comfort level. While she would take off if she got out back then, she was never one to run away. She’d sprint out, sniff around, ever curious, and circle back. Waggy, always, is how I thought of her.
A dog provides a steady rhythm to every day life, and Darby’s existence meant my days came to include daily walks in addition to runs, planning my days around her meals and bathroom breaks. She had a naughty streak early on, chewing Meghan’s favorite shoes and destroying every toy and dog bed we put in the living room. Her stomach was never quite right, and years later we’d find out her pancreas didn’t quite function properly, but otherwise she was an easy housemate.
I have memories of snippets of stories: Darby hating fireworks, Darby meeting my nephew Bennett, Darby frolicking with Jax, my sister’s dog. My brother-in-law, a then-boyfriend once tried to get Darby to sleep in bed with him when I went out of town, something I’d never allowed, and she would have none of it. Her boundless energy awakened greater energy in me. I’d left a job that was toxic, though I didn’t realize it then, and I was in and out of a similarly dysfunctional relationship in the first years I had my dog. My sadness and depression and confusion during those periods didn’t stop her from having needs. In that way, Darby helped me keep moving as I processed, active recovery.
When I met Ty I had no idea that Darby won the dog lottery. He, of a family that is never without a dog, won her over from day one, our third date. I can picture the whole day perfectly. He came to my apartment and picked us up, and we went for a long hike along the Trinity River, not far from where I lived at the time in Dallas. She roamed off leash, and we walked for miles and miles, steady conversation with easy quiet, us becoming us without quite knowing it then. When we returned, we fed the dog, leashed her up and walked down the road to the taco stand where we’d share many, many tacos that year, a cheap date- under $10- that turned out to be a huge investment in the rest of our lives.
Darby loved him immediately. And soon I did too. Eventually we introduced her to his then nameless cat, and they were fast friends. When we met his family, my father-in-law fed her strips of bacon on repeat; she fell right in with their pack (a literal pack: there were five dogs at my in-laws’ back then).
We married and quickly found ourselves in often choppy waters. Cancer and mental health struggles compiled. Again, she kept having needs, and by then she seemed to understand also that her companionship mattered most on the hard days. She walked many miles with me when I could not run. She laid beside the couch on days one or both of us couldn’t quite manage to show up for life beyond Netflix and cereal, nudging her head under our hands, reminding us she craved our attention. Sometimes she’d sit beside me and put her paw in my hand, just wanting it to lay there. For the whole of her life she asked for affection when she needed it, a life skill I still sometimes lack.
With Ty came his family’s lake cabin, and it became Darby’s favorite place. We’d arrive, and she’d bound out of the car, running laps around the property. We literally never had to show her the boundary, and she never went beyond it unless we walked the dirt road and call for her to come. Often she opted out of walks at the lake. She had free rein and was generally worn out when we were there. She deemed otherwise ever-wanted walks unnecessary. Girl knew her boundaries. She did not prefer to swim.
When we moved to Connecticut my brother-in-law unexpectedly drove one of our cars up and brought Darby with him. Having never been to New York City, he decided to drive through, texting a photo of the dog with the skyline as he made his way. New England meant more distinct seasons, so she discovered snow to her utter delight. If we had taken her from her beloved lake at least it was to a place with multiple snowfalls a year. New England life with Darby centered around the mile and a half loop around the high school down the street.
In the summer of 2019 we started to notice a slowdown. Two long daily walks, her lifelong routine, became too much, so we did a long and a short one. She fell down our stairs that summer, and the vet noted that her hips were arthritic. We wondered how much time we’d have left with her. More than we thought, it turned out, but not nearly enough. By the time coronavirus became a life altering reality, Darby was down to two short walks a day, a little beyond the end of our street. She’d tremble when we put the leash on her, and we’d practically drag her the first few minutes. One day last April, Ty said he was done walking her. It had started to feel unkind.
Mostly, Darby seemed happy. She remained waggy when one of us returned home, though we weren’t going many places. When Sam died she resumed her practice of being close in dark times, ever next to me on the couch when I cried, always sleeping on my side of the bed. For most of the year she was eating and sleeping and moving okay. Until she wasn’t.
Around October she started to decline. Some nights she refused to follow us upstairs, barking at the bottom, asking Ty to carry her up. Ty handled most of her care at this point, and she depended on him not only for physical needs. He was like a security blanket. When he wasn’t home, she was anxious, but she settled as long as I stayed close. We knew her time was coming. “Please, please wait til after Thanksgiving,” we begged. Then “not before Christmas,” then New Years, Valentine’s Day, our anniversary. Her world, though, got smaller. She slept a lot. She lost her footing occasionally. She didn’t always eat. Mid-March she had a bad fall down the stairs, and I sobbed that morning, the knowing clear: her time was short.
I believe Darby’s life was prolonged by the pandemic, and I can’t imagine getting through it without her presence. A grace of 2020, our dog with us.
Still, how do you do right by a canine companion of eleven years when you’re watching her life shrink and shrink on the daily? We called the vet to get some answers about how it would go in the end. Ty slept on the couch in the living room her the whole of last week; she no longer tolerated being carried upstairs, and he didn’t want to leave her alone. On a Thursday he called the vet back and said it was time. They offered a Friday appointment. We asked for Monday. We weren’t quite ready.
Last weekend Ty blew up an air mattress, and I joined them in the saddest slumber party the last few nights. Her final days Darby was never alone. We laid on the deck in the sun and fed her popcorn and tried to pour an eternity’s worth of love into our girl. There was never going to be enough time. On Monday we said goodbye. The best dog in the world went peacefully, her head resting in my lap, her gaze set on Ty. It feels like too much of a loss to bear.
It ends like this: our house cavernous and too quiet. The cats illustrate the way we feel- a bit lost. We are grieving, the energy in our home, off.
And in the midst of that, these stacks of photographs (uneven, because I pulled from hard drives I had readily accessible and only horizontals because there were so many)… gosh, I’m grateful for them. What a gift, Darby. I miss her.
