My dog died this past weekend. His name was Indiana. He was the best. 

This post is part of my grieving process. Just giving fair warning. 

We got Indiana in the summer of 2008 from an animal shelter in Gainesville, Florida. My husband and I weren’t yet engaged and had just moved in together. We decided we wanted a pet and actually thought we wanted to get a cat first because we had reasoned that it would be easier to add a dog after the cat was situated than the alternative. Who knows if that’s true. We looked at the cats in the overcrowded cat room, got overwhelmed by the smell and sheer quantity of cats and couldn’t make a decision. 

We decided to look at the dogs before we left and entered a loud room full of separately crated, barking dogs. They were all going nuts – all except one, a sweet little black lab who was curled up and seemed utterly immune to the chaos around him. I put my hand in his crate, and he started licking it. He licked and licked, and I tried to pet him, but the crate door bars didn’t allow me to fit my hand in, so naturally, we asked the shelter employee to open the door so we could pet him. This dog was named Bentley. We took him out to the yard and threw a rag bone with him for a few minutes as we all fell deeply in love with each other. We were not intending to adopt a dog that day. 

While we were playing, the guy from the shelter told us that Bentley was about a year old and had been adopted originally by a family with little kids but that he had been afraid of the kids and was soon returned to the shelter. The dog had then been adopted again by people who weren’t able to pay the pet fee at their apartment complex and was once again returned to the shelter. He had been in and out of the shelter his whole life up to that point. He had abandonment issues, understandably, which would later turn into separation anxiety. We went home, secured the form and paid the fee at our apartment complex, and picked up Bentley, whom we renamed Indiana (after our home state and for Indiana Jones, who named himself that after his dog, if you recall from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade), the next day, July 5th, 2008. 

I had never owned a dog before, and this one spoiled me for life. He was somehow already house trained and never once – I am not exaggerating – not one time had an accident in the house, up until he got sick a few months ago. He seemed like he could understand what we were saying. Part of my brain was always expecting him to learn how to talk, like a toddler. He knew when we were sad and comforted us instinctively. He learned his name within a day and wasn’t afraid of storms, which happened often in Florida. He was happy, loyal, smart, and loving. 

Things he loved: getting the squeakers out of toys, chewing bones, eating all types of food even if it made him have stinky farts, running around the yard, being with us.

Things he hated: baths, getting his nails trimmed, us leaving him even for a second, people walking past our house, the generator. 

This past year, he got what he always wanted, which was to be with us all the time. He was also sick, obviously much sicker than we realized. He began to show symptoms of illness over the summer, and when the vet told us that he had a tumor in his pancreas that was causing an influx of insulin, my brain somehow did not make the connection that tumor = cancer. I could not process that our dog, who had been with us since two years before our wedding, through moves from Florida to Virginia to Illinois and 6 different dwellings, on countless car rides because we always drove home from Florida and Virginia for holidays so we could bring him with us… this dog was going to die. 

Dogs don’t live as long as humans. I knew this going in. What I did not know going in was that this dog was never going to just be a pet. We never owned him. He was with us. We were us with him. It’s true that he was not a child, and to say that having a dog is practice for having a child doesn’t quite line up for me, but having this dog be part of our lives taught us all so much about love, patience, care, and generosity of spirit. He loved the sh*t out of us, and we him. 

I am changed because of this dog, and his passing is changing me still, which I think is the true mark of love. We love him always. We will miss him always, though its sting may fade. We will remember him always, Indiana, the most special dog.