At some point earlier this year, I was going to write a post called "A Blog Post About My Dog Before She Dies". I was going to write about how cool she is, pretty much. This assumed that by the time I was ready to write and publish it, she would still be alive.
I dragged along with my process of making Figment Area posts, and my dog ran out of vital efficiency roughly situated on that month.
Her name is Shadow, and she was in declining health for a few weeks before dying on March 19.
Those of you who are refined dog enthusiasts will be even more sad when you realize that Shadow is a beautiful blue heeler, a sterling member of the world's greatest dog breed.
Blue heelers are an inherently likeable and eye-lighting dog breed, but Shadow was an extreme individual. She was beautiful on a ridiculous whole new level. "Cute" alone doesn't cut it. Shadow was among the stars. She was also a lot smaller than she could have been, probably half the volume of your more common blue heeler doggies.
I don't know if her size had something to do with how insane to look at she was, but now that I've had her for about 13 years, I think "small enough to fit on a couch four times" was the right size. And fuck did she look good on a couch.
Personally I wouldn't want to own a dog that was not allowed to be on a couch. If I have a dog, I want it to be indoor-accessible and cuddly. Shadow absolutely was.
Shadow was a creature I often used to think of as having "hundreds of faces". A lot of the time there was normal Shadow, who looked fairly good. This was what most people who knew us would have seen of Shadow. I was gifted with the position of actually co-owning Shadow, or at least owning her enough to have the ability to look at her at all times of the day. When she wasn't walking around or running after something, she'd look different, lying down on some comfortable surface and being decorated impeccably.
Here's another one of her many faces that in all time may have come out only once.
A while ago, Shadow got what is called a "Silver Whiskers Assessment", a health checkup for old pets that has a really cute name and sounded to me like exactly what she needed. Test results came back plainly saying "she has a heart condition". I thought she would be fine. More weeks passed, and her health declined, we couldn't find out exactly how, and her life ended.
It really feels like a curse that a dog can be so integral to your reality and form so strong a bond with you, and then turn that all into emotional damage with the fact that she's gone forever. One month you have a handy love quad who is always around, and the next month you find that water freezes at 25° Celsius. It was like a law of physics broke down.
This was made worse by the fact that my cat already died in 2022, meaning that as of March 19 I have no pets.
I may have forgotten to add something that I really wanted to say here. There's a lot about Shadow that you can say.
But there's no need for writing now. I will show you how precious Shadow was with pictures.
