Why Losing A Dog Hurts So Damn Much

And Moving On Is Much Harder Than We Think

We named him Arnie after Arnold Palmer, who had died five months before Arnie’s birth to a papered, purebred dam at a Northern California breeder. She had picked him out of the litter specifically for us. We wanted the mellowest Airedale of the bunch. Our research told us that the “King of Terriers” could be headstrong, independent, mercurial in temperament, often protective, but in a deeply loving way–a cheerful and wily challenge.

Kind of like Arnold Palmer himself.

We knew the name fit the moment we laid eyes on the little guy staggering toward us through the tall early spring Sacramento Valley grass. Even as a barely weaned pup he had that charisma and focus and tender power that Arnie the golfer had. Plus, the name continued a family tradition of naming dogs for my favorite golfers. We’d had a black lab named Tiger (hit by a car on a cold January morning before he’d reached maturity, after I’d mistakenly left our backyard gate ajar), and a white lab named Jack (who lived to the limping old age of 15). So, Arnie the Airedale he was.

We took turns driving home, stopping at Donner Pass to let Arnie sniff and pee among the stacked snowbanks. He curled up on our laps as puppies do, sleeping most of the way to Reno while wriggling this way straight into our hearts. As a little kid I’d always wanted an Airedale, never quite knowing why, so when Emelie brought up the possibility of getting one, expressing her own attraction to the breed, I was thrilled. Just something about that long, broad snout, the soft, kinky, black and tan coat with the little white chest patch, the broad chest itself, the long legs, the muscled and tapered body, the alert and ready carriage, and, damn it to hell, those eyes: the soft and deep and curious and love-without-reserve eyes.

We’d had some fine dogs over the years, but this guy was special. We just knew it.

The moment Arnie stepped in our house, he was at home. He found easy accord with Romeo, our ancient West Highland Terrier, and even managed to establish quick detente with Spock, our daughter’s Russian blue cat. He was house trained in days. A couple months at puppy school, bouncing off other youngsters in a furry frenzy and following our halting commands in his lovable half-assed way, only put us further in his thrall.

The earliest of hundreds (thousands?) of walks around our neighborhood found Arnie right there with every dog we or anyone has ever owned: In his leash-straining, smiling, panting, leaf-sniffing, squirrel-chasing, bush-watering glory, first on the streets around our neighborhood, then further afield. In downtown Reno’s river district on a bright and breezy late spring day he established his bona fides as a friend to all who came near, parlaying his preternatural cuteness into extended pets and the repeated query that I heard Arnold Palmer himself utter between holes at a PGA senior tour event many years ago: “What kind of dog is that?” “An Airedale,” we’d proudly reply, drawing, more often than not and for years to come, something along the lines of “I had one of those when I was a kid,” or “My grandma had Airedales, they’re great dogs,” or “I haven’t seen one of those in years!”

Well, hell, we knew for certain they’d never seen THIS Airedale, because, of course, Arnie was one of a kind. He wasn’t just a dog. His love and loyalty never flagged, even when we left him with one daughter for a two-week soiree to France when he was a year old (full disclosure, she has two dogs of her own and I don’t think he missed us a bit), and with another daughter when we set out for Scotland and Ireland for our 16-day 25th wedding anniversary trip.

Arnie was also our lifeline to sanity through fraught and frightening times and life passages. He helped shepherd us through the early and acute stages of empty nest syndrome. He obliviously wagged and wailed and danced as we staggered through those disorienting first months of the Covid-19 shutdown, tempering with goofy and unrelenting joy our day-to-day dalliances with fear and anger that, without him, could and most certainly would have wilted into despair. Our walks held more meaning and precious promise than ever. Somewhere in his first three years with us he developed the greatest dog hug ever experienced by man, in which he’d back firmly into my leg (usually the left), push his muscled rump on top of my foot, push back even harder, then look back and up at my face with an expression and I can only describe as “unfiltered affection.” Arnie developed variations on that heart-melting theme whenever he joined us on the sofa or–most crucially for our brittle mental health as each day began–when he jumped on the bed after his first morning jaunt outside, one paw up in salute and submission, placed just so on a knee or shoulder, then that look, then a circle or two to find just the right spot, then the cuddle as we downed our first cup of coffee and scanned our phones.

Yep, mornings were best, but it was all great, all critical to our sanity in the moment and in memory. All Arnie the Airedale, week after week and year after year–even during a span of days in the spring of 2021 when we feared we’d lost him to a tiny bit of bone lodged in his gut, between the small and large intestine, which took us to the emergency vet in the middle of the night and led to surgery that saved his life at age 4. “OK, buddy,” we said after picking him up, his abdomen shaved and stapled shut. “You put a scare into us, but now you’ve got to stick around until 10 or 11, minimum. Deal?” He shook on it. Deal.

The deal stayed in force for two and a half years.

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(Note: It’s taken me two months to pick up the story from here.)

The evening before Halloween 2023, a couple hours after our regular afternoon stroll, Arnie was suddenly not Arnie. He wouldn’t eat, giving his bowl a listless sniff and nothing more. Perhaps he’d gotten into something in the backyard. When he came inside, he stood statue-like in the middle of the floor, like he had when he had the bowel obstruction, which only buttressed my thought that it was a gut issue. He labored as he took his spot on the sofa, and labored even more when he tried to step down to the floor. No grunts or whines, but we knew he was in some kind of low-level discomfort. I let him outside to do his thing before bed, and he just stood there, frozen to the concrete. He peeked back at me with sullen, seeking eyes. Still warm and brown, but not Arnie eyes. Not good.

Still, we were in the “perhaps it will get better overnight mode,” and pointed him down the hallway to bed.

When we woke the next morning, Arnie had made his way back out to the sofa. Still listless, no appetite, no sign of our morning wake-up master.

“Gotta go the vet,” we agreed, and I’d be the one to do it, as Emelie was starting her new job at a local bookstore that same day. “I’ll keep you posted,” I said. “Hope it’s nothing serious.”

We got on the vet’s walk-in waiting list and hung out in the parking lot for a couple hours, going for a couple quick walks around the premises. Finally the text came. As an assistant took Arnie’s vitals, he showed no signs of acute pain. When the doctor came in I gave her the lowdown on the past 18 hours. “We’d like to keep him to take some blood and do some tests,” she said. “You can go home and I’ll give you an update in a couple hours.”

She called barely an hour later. “I’d like you to come back as soon as you can,” she said. “We have some ultrasound results and and I’d like to discuss the options with you in person.”

My heart took a tumble toward my toes. In person. Never good.

The vet’s initial X-rays prompted some concerns, so they did an ultrasound, which the showed at least one tumor on Arnie’s liver. That, of course, was bad enough, but it was the presence of a large, gray, mass of fluid next to it that made the bad much worse. “The tumor has ruptured and it’s bleeding internally,” she said in practiced, knowing, sober tone through layers of Halloween makeup. “I’m so sorry.”

I had braced for such news, knowing before I walked in the door that it was not what we’d hoped hear–something they could treat with drugs and perhaps minor surgery. I just stood there, stunned.

“Though I couldn’t see them in the ultrasound, I’m sure there are other tumors behind the one I could see,” the doctor continued. “We can send him to the hospital and surgery center in Davis [California, home to a world-class University of California veterinary school], but I’d be shirking my responsibility if I didn’t let you know that I don’t think it would help. It would be very costly and put him through a lot of pain. Unfortunately, euthanasia is the best option, with his internal bleeding. I’d recommend making the decision as soon as you can because he will be in great discomfort if we wait too long.”

I gave Arnie a hug and headed immediately to Emelie’s brand new workplace a mile or so away. She was behind the counter, learning the first ropes of the bookselling business, when I walked in. She knew by the look on my face what level of pet-lover hell we’d just entered. Her boss knew, too, sending Emelie home with me as we dug into one of the worst days of our recent lives. We drove our separate cars to our house, and she found me bawling behind the wheel.

Two hours later, Arnie was gone. “Take all the time you need,” the assistant said after we stumbled back to the vet’s office, propping each other up in a haze of shock, then settling in with our boy in the same little exam room where I’d gotten the news. We sat on the floor with him, sharing hugs and gentle words between sobs and strange spurts of memory-driven laughter. Our Arnie was still there, sniffing and curious, and clueless, of course. Blessedly, mercifully clueless. We knew we were doing the right thing, but goddamn, did it hurt, down to our bones and through our souls. Arnie jumped onto the room’s little sofa, just as he had on our own couch at home countless times, but this time very gingerly. The doctor arrived, the two vials of drugs were administered, we petted his beautiful, wiry coat and said our words, and I leaned my head into his broad chest, which ceased its rise and fall as I prayed him over the bridge.

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For the first time in nearly 30 years of marriage, we were dogless, and at this moment, four months after Arnie’s death, we still are. Sometime around Thanksgiving the vet called to let me know his remains were ready for pickup; I let the tears come again as I pulled up into that parking lot, then got it together long enough to walk inside, collect the little cedar box containing his ashes, along with ink paw prints and a lovely card from the veterinary staff, some of whom had been there long enough to look after our other pets over the years. We placed Arnie on the mantle above one of our two fireplaces, the one in our family room, where we spent so many hours together on our designated areas of the couch. Where Arnie would prop his head on the armrest and actually watch TV now and again, his ears perking up and that big ol’ Airedale head tilting whenever a barking dog would show up on the Samsung. Where he burrowed deeper into our hearts every day for those six and a half years. Where I wish he still was, and always will, even when we finally take the leap and get another dog.

Discussions are underway. We still check in on several Airedale pages on Facebook, and manage to laugh at the exploits of these incredible, smart, loving, giving beasts. Maybe a rescue dog in the short term and another ’Dale later, or maybe we pick up the ’Dale string without detour. We don’t know just yet. But I do know that I’m still in an acute mourning mode. I owe it to Arnie for this grief to play out, at least to the point where I don’t break down while writing about him, as I did just a couple paragraphs ago.

I know, I know. I can hear the chorus from non-pet-owners or fellow owners who manage to maintain more emotional distance than we sorry sops have: It’s just a dog.

No, no, it’s not. It’s family.

OK, so we aren’t as off the rails as some of the folks described in a recent Atlantic piece on pet “parenthood.” We didn’t spend thousands of dollars we don’t have to try to save Arnie’s life, nor did we go beyond certain boundaries of care while he was with us–shelling out big shekels for designer dog food, for instance, or upending our lives in any outrageous way to accommodate his needs. But make no mistake: For us and millions of pet people, he was central to our family life, and you’ll get no apologies from us for sharing so much of our emotional capital with and for him. We most certainly did love him like a child, to a point. We did discipline him when necessary, and yes, we did get angry with him, in hot and quick flashes that dissipated with a flew flicks of his tail or a sorry glance from his loving eyes, without need for discussion or bargaining–those measures, of course, were and are reserved our human kids.

But we loved Arnie unconditionally. It runs in ours and many thousands of families. I come to my dog love naturally, through many generations of dog owners, especially, though a few cats do sneak in there (and we have one, too, a pure black named Rhiannon, who misses Arnie in her own way, too, we can tell). We’ve always had dogs around. They’ve always been integral to how we make our way through the world. They’ve never failed to reflect our best selves back at us, without asking for recompense beyond a warm bed, a vigorous pet, a raucous toss of the ball or rope toy, a daily walk among all the other dogs and their kept owners. They’ve never been any more or less than a willing, open vessel to collect our failings and fears, chew on them a bit, then pant them back out at us and into the ether, reducing them to a shrugging shadow of their former selves. I cling without apology to his glowing memory. I’m doing my best to push past the depression I yet battle in his absence.

Arnie wasn’t just a dog. He was one of us, with a deadly and delightful tail, a winning and winsome grin, a gait to beat the band and chase the squirrel, and now, out there somewhere, a heart still a-pumpin’ with innocent need, guileless glee and pure love.