It may seem odd to start off the new year with a blog post about an end, when everyone is focusing more on beginnings, but it’s taken me this long to feel ready to write about it, and the timing just is what it is. We had to say goodbye to our beloved dog a week ago today. I had written awhile back about the fact that we were coming close to this point, but I have to admit I wasn’t prepared for this point to come along as quickly as it did. Actually, I probably never would have been ready – but Beauty was. Everyone I had spoken to about such situations told me that the animal lets you know when it’s time, and it’s true.

Carrying on without her has been harder than I expected. She and I were both survivors; we’d both escaped the clutches of my mother’s toxicity and found a good and peaceful life, together. In losing this dog, I lost someone who knows what I’ve come from, what I’ve gone through to get to where I am now. Sure, she was a dog. But she knew, in a way hardly anyone else does. When I rescued her from my parents’ house, all I wanted to do was give her a safe and loving home where she could live freely as just a dog. No expectations of providing support or therapy, no demands that she be anything more to me than her best self, for herself, because she deserved that.

This might sound stupid to some people, because, of course she would be a dog, what else would she be? But to be raised by my mother is to adjust yourself to fit her mold, whether you are her biological daughter or her canine one. Whenever my mother couldn’t manipulate me into being her shoulder to cry on, Beauty bore that burden instead. A relationship with my mother has strings attached at all times. My endgame for Beauty was to cut those strings for her, as I had for myself, and to keep them that way. If I’d screwed things up at all in the nearly six years I had her in my custody, of this much I can be certain: I gave Beauty as comforting and carefree a life as possible while she was with me, I know I did. And in her way – with a deliberate lean across the vet tech to kiss my face one last time, as if to say goodbye, and thank you, and it was okay to let her go – I’m sure beyond any doubt that she loved me, and that she knew. A week after saying goodbye, it feels very much like she’s still with me; maybe I’ll get lucky, and I’ll always feel like that, and with time, that will bring less pain and more comfort.

2022 was a year bookended by loss for me; one of my best friends passed away unexpectedly last January, and Beauty crossed the rainbow bridge in the last week of December. Last year was a hard year, full of challenges. However, that’s true of every year. What matters most is finding the good in each day, and finding the good in each other. It doesn’t necessarily make things less hard, but it will see us through, and even though endings are inevitable, beginnings are right there too, just waiting to be picked up when we’re ready.