Dog Years

An incomplete and inadequate elegy for my great friend

I’m not wearing glasses in our first picture together.

I spent a fair amount of time over the last week deep in Google Photos, looking at some of the many thousands of pictures and videos I’d taken over the past twelve and a half years of Holly, my beloved Corgi. At one point, I scrolled back to the very beginning—March 6th, 2011, the day my then-girlfriend, now-wife and I picked up a six-pound, nine-week-old puppy whose litter name was “Charm”.

I took pause over the picture of me holding her.

You see, it’s easy, especially as you get older and busier, for the years to condense and collapse on themselves, for five or ten or twelve years to pass in the seeming blink of an eye. It’s easy to convince yourself that 2011 wasn’t that long ago, is what I’m saying.

The picture told me otherwise.

I’m standing in a McDonald’s parking lot somewhere between Akron and Brooklyn, wearing a ragged Cleveland Cavaliers hoodie that I still have and still wear. The picture quality is that of a dozen generations of iPhones ago, slightly-blurry and poorly-lit in the aesthetic of every picture I took or had taken of me back then. Holly—about an hour into her new life with us—cuddles against me, looking around curiously.

And I’m not wearing glasses.

I’ve worn glasses for more than a decade now. My kids—a first-grader and a third-grader—have never known me not to. Longtime friends, neighbors, coworkers have rarely seen me without glasses. But I’m not wearing them here, because I didn’t need them yet.

It hammered home just how long Holly has been a part of my life.

She was the first real adult decision we ever made. Sure, I’d been hired and fired from adult jobs by this point, signed a series of expensive leases on subpar apartments, and had serious relationships come and go. But getting this puppy—this living, breathing creature with actual needs who would be around and in our care for a good bit of time—she was the first decision that couldn’t be easily reversed or backed out of.

Over the next twelve and a half years, she would be the only constant in our lives.

It might sound silly to think that she’s responsible for everything that’s happened between then and now—the moves, the job changes, the kids, the ups and downs and wins and losses and joys and sorrows as we’ve gone from twentysomething kids unsure of our direction in life to fortysomething parents with actual roots. But it’s also ludicrous to deny that she had an impact on the trajectory of our lives.

She was there, and even if just as a proverbial butterfly flapping her wings, she’s part of the story.

For twelve and a half years, there’s no us without her.

I’ve been thinking for a long time about what I was going to have to say when the time came. Six months ago, I tried to put some of my thoughts down here in advance.

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That was, in part, an attempt to give her flowers while she was still around, but I also wrote it out of fear—fear that when her time came, I wouldn’t be able to get the right words out.

I’ve been speaking through her for a dozen years.

It started with my wife and I doing that thing that pet owners often do, creating a joke voice for our pet and narrating what we imagined her thoughts to be. We used that voice a lot. (Maybe too much, if we’re being honest? It might’ve gotten a little awkward.) We’re both funny people, and we developed a real good voice, in my opinion—a sardonic, weary-of-our-shit voice that was often mocking us.

Holly gave us a lot to work with—she had an incredibly expressive face that could project a range of emotions far more complex than the average dog.

(Also, she swore a lot.)

Eventually, I translated that voice to print.

I’d write about college football or whatever else in the ‘voice’ of Holly, an erudite-if-foul-mouthed curmudgeon who relished in insulting me. Sure, it was a character, but it really did seem like things she would say. It was cheap internet content, a shameless button-mashing play for attention, but it made people laugh and made them happy, so I kept doing it. That helped me build a following, and helped get people to pay attention to other things that I write.

It’s not a stretch to say that there’s no here [gestures around at halfway-decent writing career] without her, and anything bigger I might achieve as a writer in the future will still bear her paw prints.

I’ve been floored over the past 24 hours to realize just how many people truly loved this little dog. Even if they’d never met her, she’d touched their lives in some way, brought some bit of joy into their days. There was a time when I might have considered such connections frivolous—I certainly don’t now, and not only because of the great comfort I’ve received from your messages. I believe that the greatest thing we can aspire to is to make others happy. Holly made a lot of people happy.

I’ve had more than a few people tell me that they got dogs of their own specifically because of the happiness that Holly brought them. She had a coaching tree.

It has been incredibly hard for me to come to terms with the idea of saying goodbye.

I did the math the other day—this is just the way I am—and I realized that Holly’s been around for more than 30% of my life, a number that seems at once surprisingly big and far too small.

It’s been a while since she was the dog she once was, the bouncy, energetic and surprisingly-strong ball of indomitable energy that loved to wrestle the biggest dog she could find at the park or play backyard soccer with us.

(She was a remarkably adept defender, and popped a few balls in her enthusiasm.)

Her legs went nearly a year ago, and where she once chased squirrels and bunnies out of our yard with tyrannical fervor, she’d been reduced to sitting in one spot and barking at them instead. I could see that she was in pain—not just the physical pain for which she took multiple pills a day, but the pain of not feeling like she was in charge anymore.

After months of gentle-but-increasingly-urgent prodding from our veterinarian—who I can’t say enough good things about in this process, they truly were amazing—I acceded to reality.

We planned it for the day after the long holiday weekend, a chance to maximize our time with the old girl before saying goodbye. She got extra hugs and kisses—more than she wanted, probably, and I slipped in a few expletive-laced “okay, that’s enough” comments in her voice for old time’s sake. She loudly heckled a game of backyard wiffle-ball and downed several hot dogs and a bacon cheeseburger at a weekend cookout. She rode around the neighborhood in the kids’ old wagon, and she carried herself not like an old dog whose body had failed her but like a queen surveying her kingdom from a gilded chariot.

Like the royalty she’d always been.

She went peacefully in our arms, held just as we’d held that tiny puppy twelve and a half years ago. It went as well as these things can go, and I’ve cried more in the past week than I probably have in the decade prior.

An era in our lives is over, and those years will always be Holly’s years, a time where everything that happened happened with her by our sides.

I will be forever grateful for the time I got to spend with her, for the joy she brought into our lives as we formed a family around her, and for the voice she spoke to us with throughout all of it.

Everything that happens from here on, she’s still walking with us.

You were the best dog, Holly. I love you, and I will miss you.

—Scott Hines

For Holly (December 30, 2010 - September 5, 2023)