20/05/2025
Before you meet the official hazard of our household… a small tale of grief and chaos…
Getting a new dog after losing your dog isn’t a warm, fuzzy montage with happy background music. It’s raw. It’s the feeling of walking barefoot through the ruins of something sacred, hoping maybe—just maybe—there’s still a light on somewhere.
Deciding to get a dog is already a wild emotional rollercoaster—do I? don’t I? what if I can’t?—but then having the dog? Living with the dog? Rewriting your life around this entirely new creature who doesn’t know your heartbreak, or your bedtime rituals, or how you used to whisper “good girl” like a prayer? That’s another level of insanity.
I didn’t fall in love right away. My heart was suspicious. It kept its distance, eyeing this new little being and whispering, “Are we really doing this again?”
And the truth is—it’s hard. All of it. The guilt of moving on. The frustration of starting over. The ache of reaching for a dog who isn’t there, especially the one I needed most to help raise this one—Samoa. She knew the rhythms. She would’ve helped. She would’ve understood.
The days feel long and clumsy. Sometimes I catch myself looking at this new dog and thinking, I’m not ready for you. I don’t even know if I chose you, or if I just let grief carry me forward like a wave I couldn’t stop. I miss my old life, Samoa, the quiet knowing between us. And now I’m here, with this brand-new heartbeat in the house, and I can’t lie—some days I wish I’d waited longer. Or maybe not done it at all.
But then, little cracks appear. A strange look that reminds me of her. A snort that makes me laugh when I absolutely don’t want to. I open my camera memory cards and, without thinking, there are photos again. Dozens. A face that doesn’t yet feel like mine—but maybe one day might.
There’s no clean way to do this. No tidy narrative arc. Just a dog, a lot of doubt, and the slow, uncertain rebuilding of something that once felt unbreakable.
So… do you want to meet the newest, slightly possessed, wildly inconvenient, probably-too-crazy addition to this chaos?
Maybe tomorrow.?
