I have had my Instagram account for about six and a half years. If we're being accurate, it isn't really my account. It's Zeke and Zella's. I'm just the gal who holds the phone, writes the captions, and occasionally shows up in the background of a photo looking like five miles of bad road.
So, it's Dog Instagram. Pups with their tongues hanging out. Senior pups in sweaters. Deafies, the rescues learning to trust people one hour at a time. I know their names. I know their weird habits. The ones slowly recovering from TPLO surgery, the family who's waiting for tumor biopsy results. I know which one hates the mailman, and which one sleeps flat on her back like someone unplugged her.
I have watched these dogs grow up. I have cheered for their surgeries and their Gotcha Days and their first snow.
And now, six and a half years in, it feels like every single time I open the app, another one is gone.
Not once in a while. Nearly. Every. Damn. Time. As of late, when I open the app to look at one cute thing before bed, there it is. THE POST. The "we said goodbye today." The caption someone clearly typed with shaking hands. And I am on my couch sobbing over a dog I have never touched, whose person I have never met, in a state I have never been to.
What it feels like in my body
When I see that post, my body knows before my brain does. Something drops in my chest. Not a thought. A weight. Like someone set a wet sandbag right on my sternum and walked away. My throat gets tight. My stomach goes cold. My whole nervous system starts humming at a frequency only dogs and I can hear.
It isn't sadness the way people mean sadness. Sadness has edges. You can point to it. This is bigger and blurrier than that. It's sorrow that lives in my skin long before it ever reaches my mouth. I can feel every inch of it, and I cannot find one single word for it. I've opened my mouth to explain it to people and all that came out was, "It's just... a lot."
So, here's the closest I can get. It feels like the world lost a small, warm light, and I noticed it went out. Most keep walking. And I stand there with my hand on my chest, holding the spot where it used to glow.
That's the feeling. If you know it, you know it.
The two looks I always get
When I try to explain this, I usually get one of two looks.
The first look says, "Ew. That's a little weird, Patty."
The second look comes with words. "Well, of course they're going to pass away. Did you expect them to live forever? Why can't you just be happy they had a good eight years? Or twelve? Or fourteen?"
I understand the math. I have been doing the math on dog lifespans since I was old enough to count. Knowing they won't live forever has never once made it hurt less. It just means I love them anyway, with the ending already in view.
Square peg, round hole, whole life
I have been told my entire life that I'm too sensitive. Too soft. Too much. I have spent five decades as a square peg getting shoved at round holes by people who were very sure I'd fit if I would just stop feeling everything so loudly.
I never fit. Dogs are the only ones who never asked me to.
So, when you are a highly sensitive, feel-everything kind of person, and you spend six years watching dogs live their whole lives on your phone, you don't get to love them a little bit. You get attached. That's the deal. You don't get the goofy zoomies video without also getting the day the account goes quiet.
What I've decided
I have decided this with my whole chest.
I am going to love the way I love.
I am going to grieve the way I grieve.
I am going to respond the way my heart responds.
I'm not going to shrink any of that so someone else can feel more comfortable watching me feel it. I tried that for a lot of years. It didn't make me less sad. It just made me sad and lonely at the SAME time, which I do not recommend.
If that makes me weird, fine. I've been weird for the rest of the years I'm on this planet. At least now I'm weird on authentically.
If this is you
If you have ever cried in a parking lot over a dog you only knew through a screen, I want you to hear this. That grief is real. That dog mattered. The love you sent from far away was still love, and it gets to hurt when it ends.
You are not too much. You are not dramatic. Don't wait five decades to be exactly who you are.
Patty (and Zeke and Zella, who are leaning on me while I type this)