There’s a line from Joan Didion’s memoir The Year of Magical Thinking I quoted repeatedly in an essay I wrote on this website about my father’s death:

Life changes fast
Life changes in the instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

Didion was being literal about dinner. She sat down for dinner, and then her husband dropped dead right there at the table. But in the essay about my father, dinner was a metaphor for all the normal things you might be doing when life as you know it ends. Like for me back then, when my father died suddenly, I was sitting on the floor doing my geometry homework.

I don’t mean to equate the gravity of what happened then to what’s happening now, but I can’t stop thinking about this line. Because this time, in 2024, when life changed in the instant, we had, in fact, just sat down to dinner.

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Lucy called? My girlfriend Gretchen says. Why would Lucy call? Do you think everything’s okay? Should we call her back?

I say we should.

I am setting the table. Tomorrow morning, we’re flying to Philadelphia to spend a week visiting with Gretchen’s family. It’ll be my first multi-day break from work since my friend’s February wedding in Florida. As a pre-trip treat, I’ve forgone cooking for takeout.

What I’ve forgotten is that I listed my friend Lucy as my emergency contact on the dog-sitting app Rover when I created my account four years ago. A few hours before dinner, I’d left my 9-year-old chihuahua, Carol, with a Rover sitter. Let’s call the sitter “Irene.”

Gretchen calls Lucy, and she’s got her phone to her ear, but I can still hear Lucy, a bit. A few words, here and there, I mean — I can hear enough. But more than that I can see, and what I can see is Gretchen’s entire face collapsing. All her features scrunching up and then cracking open into so many tears.

I’ve known Gretchen for six years and many of those years have been very difficult ones, but I’ve never seen her cry like this.

She’s gone, Gretchen manages. Carol’s gone.

No. I scoot backwards, press my spine against the wall. No I don’t think so. I don’t think that’s true, it can’t be, no.

Irene had called Lucy. Not Irene herself actually, but Irene’s boyfriend, I’ll call him Roger, had called Lucy. Because Irene is too distraught to talk to Lucy. Or to text me, or to call me. In the moment, I’m infuriated by Irene’s avoidance. But, in retrospect, if someone was going to tell me that my dog was dead I am really glad it was my wonderful friend Lucy and not Irene or her boyfriend Roger.

When I’d dropped Carol off with Irene, I’d scratched the sides of her tiny body, told her she’d make so many new friends this week and I’d be back so soon. I told her I’d miss her the whole time. Carol explored Irene’s apartment thoroughly and even put her paws on Irene’s lap, angling her head towards Irene’s face.

She’s so sweet, Irene had said.

It will be another twenty minutes after we talk to Lucy before Roger calls me to explain what happened. The story Roger tells is something like this:

Irene took Carol for a walk. She ran into friends in the neighborhood who had dogs. Irene picked Carol up to chat with these friends because I’d told her that Carol often reacted with pointless aggression towards other dogs. A dog across the street was barking. Carol was struggling to get away, to bark back at the dog. At this part of the story, Roger loops back, repeating: “Carol was trying to get away, Irene was trying to hold her,” a few times, like there was some grand struggle between Irene and Carol spread out across multiple acts.

Carol got out of Irene’s arms. Carol got out of her no-escape harness. Carol ran away, ran five blocks before jetting into traffic, where she was hit by a car.

Life changes in the instant, in the ordinary instant, you sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

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In February of 2018, I decided for the first time in my relatively long life to get a dog, a whim partially informed by the enthusiasm of my then-partner Casey and my roommate Erin, both of whom responded with delight and anticipation when I floated the idea.

The shelter in North Los Angeles was overcrowded, undergoing renovations, and entirely occupied by chihuahuas and pitbulls. There were seven other chihuahuas in the cell with ‘Snowball,’ and all of these tiny, yippy animals jostled for my and Casey’s attention, hoping their barks would overwhelm competing, adjacent barks; hoping their cuteness would edge out the nearly identical levels of cuteness possessed by all the dogs in their immediate vicinity.

They were hopeful and eager and desperate to be loved, and I was scared and guarded and terrified to be loved or to love. Before moving to Los Angeles from Michigan in December, I’d been in trauma therapy while extricating myself from the extensive logistical fallout of a toxic relationship I’d once thought was the grand love of my life.

All bets were off, basically. What did I know, then, about love? Less than I thought I did, even. And I knew nothing about dogs, that’s for sure.

But I did know that all my choices thus far hadn’t gotten me any closer to my big-picture goals, so maybe it was time to make different choices. Since my mid-twenties, I’d been delusional with certainty that my dream of starting a family would begin any minute now, that next year could be the year I’d have a baby, which to me meant that none of these years would be the right year to adopt a dog. I was deeply married to my work, and already failing at balancing work and my relationship — how would I do that and have a baby and have a dog? By early 2018, this had started to seem ridiculous — I was leaving a room open for someone with no immediate plans to move in. Still, I wasn’t sure that I was inherently a “dog person.”

Dogs love anybody who feeds them, don’t they? I thought I’d be foolish to rely on the attention of an animal whose affection for me was so essentially mercenary. I thought their love was too easily given, and therefore less valuable.

Here’s what I know now: I was at my most dysfunctional when I walked into that shelter, although the cracks wouldn’t be clear to me for some time afterwards. I was a fool to think of love as a type of validation. I didn’t know how conditional so much of the love in my life was. Now I know that unconditional love is where the real power is. It refuses to allow us to cope with insecurity and failure by removing ourselves from the people who hurt or exposed us. Instead it is there, at your feet, wagging its tail, challenging you to be worthy of it.

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I’d grown up allergic to dogs in a home without any, associating them with red eyes, a scratchy throat, a runny nose, and the reason I had to leave the sleepover early. I’ve always been adept at stifling desires I can’t satisfy, and because dogs were off-limits, I avoided liking them. My Mom was allergic, too, even worse than me. But my Dad had grown up on a farm, and a picture hung in the hallway of him with his two sisters and their dog, Sam. He explained to me that one day Sam had gotten hit by a car and died. I’d seen Lassie and Old Yeller, too. This did not seem like the life for me.

My subsequent experiences with dogs were limited, including a college boyfriend who thought he could house-train a miniature dachshund puppy in a two-bedroom, 700-square-foot condo we shared with another couple who had just adopted a boxer puppy, despite all of us being full-time students with full-time jobs. The aforementioned heart-shattering relationship involved, at my ex’s behest, temporarily fostering two special needs dogs for an overwhelmed dog fosterer. Those stories are long, another type of essay altogether. The best dog-related experience I’d had thus far in my life was the year before, when Erin lived with me in Michigan for a few months after my ex left, along with her chocolate lab, Cooper, an absolute sweetheart, who died late in the summer of 2017. I admired their relationship like I would a relationship between two human soulmates.

But when my ex had first started talking to me about wanting a dog, the conversations that eventually led to those fostering situations, I’d really thrown myself into trying to understand the whole “dog” thing.

I needed to understand: why did so many people take an animal into their home at great financial expense, prepared to perform all the dog’s personal care-taking duties themselves forever? Why do so when the dog is guaranteed to shed all over the house, smell bad, pee on the bathmat, step on your jigsaw puzzle when you leave the room, and try to eat the food off your plate, even if that food will poison or kill them?

But most of all: Why would so many people do this knowing the dog will almost definitely die before they do? You bring a creature into your home who you already know will leave you! This terrified me.

In books before, I often skimmed the chapter or the essay about a dog. How interesting could a dog be? I began my attempt to understand dog ownership by returning to those chapters, those essays, those poems.

One story specifically stuck with me: in The Odyssey, Odysseus returns from his famously lengthy journey in disguise, and comes upon a dog, old and dirty, abandoned outside the front gates of the palace, covered in ticks. No humans recognize Odysseus, but the dog does. He is Argos, the dog Odysseus had raised from a puppy. He wags his tail, unable to summon the strength to approach Odysseus, but they lock eyes, briefly. Odysseus and Eumaeus pass into the palace and Argos, who had waited 20 years to look his owner in the eye again, promptly dies.

And just then death came and darkened the eyes of Argos, who had seen Odysseus again after twenty years.

Maybe dog-love was actually the greatest love of all.

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So, while I understand why I no longer felt like a person opposed to dog ownership, I’m not sure what specifically drove me to want to adopt a dog when I did. Sometimes a choice changes you so fundamentally that it’s hard to remember what this previous version of you wanted, and why. As aforementioned, I was riding a wave of proximal enthusiasm. I probably imagined — without discussing it with Casey — that any adopted dog would also be Casey’s, in a way, as I’d anticipated our relationship continuing and eventually resulting in co-habitation that fall, despite how I’d failed in every conceivable way to fully show up for it. (We broke up that April.)

When I dove into my google search history to write this essay, though, it appears that the week before deciding to adopt a chihuahua, I spent several hours reading articles about Los Angeles’s chihuahua overpopulation problem, an issue so severe the state had begun shipping them out to other states. I looked up how often chihuahuas were killed in shelters, which shelters killed the most chihuahuas, why so many chihuahuas were abandoned. Maybe I didn’t yet understand entirely the appeal of owning a dog, in general, but I certainly understood the appeal of adopting a dog to save it from getting killed.

So, then Casey and I were at the shelter, a gaggle of chihuahuas facing allegedly long lives or potential death all jostling for our attention. Except one: a dog they called ‘Snowball.’ She was curled up into a little ball in the corner of the cell, unbothered and resigned to her dismal fate, like me at a party.

“That’s her,” I said. “That’s my dog.”

The shelter worker met us in a side room. ‘Snowball’ was shaking. The trainer said she was scared because she’d been singled out and thought she was in trouble. I held Snowball’s quivering body and knew deep in my bones that she was the one. Her eyes were dark and sad, her ears enormous, her body frail.

I loved her.

We were told she was a stray, three years old, rescued a few weeks earlier, hadn’t been socializing well. We paid for her surgery and, a few days later, I scooped her up, her head encircled by a surgical cone. We named her Carol.

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Erin carried Carol’s bed around the two-bedroom West Hollywood apartment we shared, giving Carol a tour. Casey got her tags and her collar and bought her ten outfits: a red hoodie, an Adidog sweatsuit, a grey jacket with a plaid collar. For the first few days, Carol didn’t pee or poop or eat or even make a noise. When she finally began peeing, it was usually inside. I worried I’d made a mistake, taken on something I couldn’t handle. I felt like the only person in the world who hadn’t grown up with a dog, fundamentally unsuited for the task.

My google history reveals that a few days post-adoption, I was panic-reading webpages and watching videos on topics including “how to stop dog from peeing in crate,” “how to make your dog drink water,” “rescue dog won’t pee in front of us” and “dog obedience classes.”

Eventually she came to life, got comfortable, and began executing her bodily functions in the proper locations.

Ten days post-adoption, I was reading websites on topics including “why do dogs love humans so much” and “why do pets unconditionally love their owners.”

It just seemed hard to believe, I guess. We’d only just met.

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A month after adopting Carol, I took her to Joshua Tree, where I’d planned a solo writing trip. We drove out to the desert together, just me and my girl in the passenger seat. The rental had cement floors and old furniture, a stiff bed, a tiny fridge. But behind it was endless, endless desert, parched and dotted with dried plants the same color as Carol.

I let her off-leash outdoors for the first time. She didn’t take off or run away. She bounded through the air, she dashed madly about, but never too far. She was so happy.

I’d never be alone again.

My little dog, wrote Edith Wharton, a heartbeat at my feet. 

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Carol was small, just nine pounds once she got healthy, with short, wheat-colored hair and nails that always got too long. She was missing some teeth and had terrible breath. Her hobbies included vibrating, barking violently at other dogs who could destroy her with a single blow, sleeping, trying to be tall, finding a patch of sunlight, hopping from one foot to the other, writing articles for Autostraddle, jumping onto the bed and pretending like she couldn’t possibly jump onto the bed but needs to be on the bed and thus desperately requires your assistance getting there.

Her favorite game was lying on her back with her mouth open, swatting at my hands with her paws. She was motivated by affection, not food, but her favorite food was, without question, chicken nuggets from Wendy’s.

She was always so happy to see me when I returned from being away from her, even just a little bit. She went wild, running in circles, trying to stand up, swatting her arms in the air.

Because of the dog’s joyfulness, our own is increased, writes Mary Oliver.

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At doggy day care, she hid under a doggy bridge. When I took her to the dog park, she stayed glued to my side. I worried I was projecting my own self-loathing over my own social anxiety onto her, throwing her into social situations that terrified her, like so many adults had done to me.

Eventually, I’d learn she was chill and happy around older, less energetic dogs, but mostly preferred solitude or people.

I suspected there was a little old man inside her body, and I loved him, too.

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After Casey and I broke up, my success at crate-training Carol to sleep in her own bed and not mine was subverted by Ayesha, who cradled Carol like a baby, declared her a cat, loved her little attitude and invited her to bed because Carol was better at cuddling than me. When I woke up, they’d be curled into each other, sweet and soft and animal.

We wrapped Carol up in a blanket. We took her to the beach. We took her on long walks down Melrose before the stores opened. We took her to the hair salon. She was charmed by Ayesha’s arrival and would get into her suitcase whenever she packed to leave, hoping we might change our plans. I took her to Portland, and she sat at the bar in her Bavarian sweater, happy to be out with the gals. I took her to Big Bear. Erin took her to the gay camp my company ran, where she popped out of a tote bag to watch me at the reading, hopped from one gay lap to another. At home, Carol always thrilled at the arrival of a friend or a podcast guest.

2018 was a very good year, but maybe I didn’t really understand how precious Carol was to me until years came that were not so good. Like in the summer of 2019 when I was clutching her to my chest in the middle of a mental breakdown. My friend Liz wrote “playing with Carol” on a list she’d drawn up of “things Riese can do to feel happy.” I didn’t know playing with Carol counted as an activity. But Liz had made it so. And of course it always was.

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Carol was small, so it was easy to take her everywhere and not uncommon in Los Angeles. At first, it was largely practical: not wanting to leave her at home for too long, wanting friends to meet my new dog. Sometimes it was psychological: Her existence soothed my social anxiety and gave me a way to connect with other people, a kind of intermediary between me and the rest of the world.

But then it became something else entirely — something that had nothing to do with me at all. Carol was a socialite. I took her to parties, brunches, dinners, picnics. She made people happy. She loved to occupy a lap, or to sit primly beside a stranger, her side leaning against their thigh. Friends delighted to be the surface Carol had chosen to sit on that day.

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Carol was the best of me. She filled the gap between who I was and who I wanted to be: an animal unafraid to make the first move, loose and generous with her attachments, eager to make new friends, open-hearted.

We had similarities, too. We’re both nervous and particular and moody and easily thrown off. We shift quickly from distrust to complete acceptance. We are introverts who become extroverts when we’re comfortable. We’re both incredibly forgiving.

But we are so different in the most important way: I’m a depressive and she is so happy. I’d walk her down empty streets in the thick of the pandemic, those months when she was the only living creature I had physical contact with, and the grass was just as green as it had ever been to Carol.

Eileen Myles writes of her dog, Rosie: I had already imagined the summer that loomed as a gaping hole and now I had a friend to walk around its perimeter with.

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I started dating Gretchen in mid-2021. By that point, she had a dog of her own — Penny, an absolute maniac of a pug/bully mix — largely due to my endorsement of dog ownership as a way to ensure that no matter what, someone is always thrilled to see you come home. I’d moved into my own apartment during the pandemic’s second wave, a second-floor unit in Hollywood next to a Comfort Inn. When I opened my windows, the scent of Burger King wafted through and Carol would perch on the ledge, hoping for a bite. 

We spent weekends at Gretchen’s house in Santa Monica, where the walks were peaceful and long and the air was distinctly “ocean.” On Sunday mornings we’d walk to the bagel place and in line, I’d squat on the floor with Carol, feeding her treats, practicing sit commands. She’d befriend teenagers in giant pants, overconfident tech guys in baseball hats, small children.

Gretchen and I had been friends since 2018. The first time Gretchen met Carol, we were both staying overnight at a friend’s house to help with her moving-out garage sale the next day, and when I called Carol to come downstairs with me to the guest room, she ignored me, resolutely glued to Gretchen’s side. It was perplexing and uncharacteristic — Carol never wanted to be with anyone more than she wanted to be with me. But now we see it clearly: she picked you for me.

Long after Carol had stopped wanting to sleep in my bed at home, she desperately clamored to do so on Saturday nights in Santa Monica. Despite her proven ability to leap onto the bed unassisted, she was patently unable to do so between the hours of 2am and 9am, and thus would clatter across the floor, campaigning for a lift into the bed by desperately scratching at the comforter’s overhang, first on one side of the bed, then the other and then the other, around and around until one of us woke up and brought her in.

So when I woke up on Sunday mornings Gretchen would already be awake, and so would Carol, tucked under her arm, happy to be the queen, temporarily satisfied that Penny, safe in her crate, was no longer an issue.

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On Sunday afternoons, we’d take Carol to the park for lesbian kickball, eager as I’d be to drop off a human child at play practice.

We’re gonna see all your fans and frienders at the park, I’d tell her, curled up in my lap. You’re gonna have the best day ever.

And oh, she did! Her panic when I was actually out on the field notwithstanding, she was the belle of the ball at kickball. She wandered from blanket to blanket, embedding herself amongst players from rival teams who’d feed her small pieces of turkey sandwiches or potato chips, taking selfies. Strangers would ask me where she was, if I didn’t bring her.

Her easy sweetness, a universal balm. My little light, my tiniest friend, my sweetest angel.

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Carol was not the kind of dog to comfort me when I was sad, but she still comforted me when I was sad. Or mad, or lost, or felt like my whole world was falling apart. When it felt impossible that anybody could ever love me, she somehow still did. It was an honor to be of service to this tiny creature. To rise to the occasion of her love. We have a psychic connection with these animals. It’s a spiritual merge. She completed me? Is that melodramatic. Is that okay? She left a door open to the wild, flung out of space. We kept each other alive.

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Irene and Roger have routed Carol’s remains to a 24-hour vet hospital, and the fifteen minutes it takes to drive there are excruciating, empty, endless. I don’t know what to do with this hopelessness. I text my group chat, to tell them.

I can’t believe this is happening again, life changing in the ordinary instant. I thought I’d get a warning this time. It wouldn’t be sudden. Average chihuahua lifespans range from 12-18 years old. I thought we had more time.

I text Irene: i’m not mad at you.

I am, of course, mad at her. But it’s pointless, this anger. It won’t bring Carol back. It won’t change what happened. Irene will already be haunted by this for the rest of her life.

Irene is in the lobby of the hospital in a sweatsuit, her eyes and face puffy with tears. I think she smells like alcohol, but I can’t be sure of anything. Roger is taking charge, talking too much.

I’m so sorry, Irene says, sobbing. I feel terrible, I’m so so so sorry.

I put my hand on her shoulder. I forgive you, I say. I look into her eyes. I say it again, and I sit on the floor. This is what Carol would want me to do, I think. This is why we love the dogs we set ourselves up to lose, isn’t it? Because they are loyal and loving and forgiving? Isn’t that what all the poets were trying to say?

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In April of 2024, Gretchen and I moved in together, into a house with a yard and a little more space for the family we want to start. But already the merging of our lives and pets felt like its own little family, powered on all fronts by unconditional love.

We created new routines. Carol found new pieces of furniture to favor. Every evening, once the day had cooled off and before I started dinner, we’d walk Penny and Carol together around the neighborhood, deconstructing the day, passing neighbors with their better-behaved dogs, boys on scooters with tzitzits hanging beneath their untucked shirts, young parents with strollers. I felt whole, the four of us. 

I showed Carol the lawn first, after we signed the lease. I chanted Car-ol, Car-ol, Car-ol until she began leaping, her bounding, ecstatic run. Like she did that time in Joshua Tree, when we were first falling in love. Unleashed.

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We somehow manage to board a plane the morning after Carol’s death, because it’s too expensive to change our tickets and it seems unwise to leave me alone in Los Angeles to spiral. We cry all the way to our layover in Atlanta, and then again on the flight to Philadelphia.

I don’t know what to do with this. How to think, how life will be when we return. How do I tell people? During a layover, I post about it on Instagram. I don’t expect the rush of love and grief that ensues in the comments, in my DMs, in my texts. It’s been a minute since I posted anything at all on instagram, and I’ve never used it to post anything deeply personal. 

At first I can’t read the comments. I’ll see just one line  — Carol was such a special dog and you gave her the best life — and start sobbing immediately. I keep trying, every few hours, but it takes a full 24 before I really can, before I lie in the guest room in Gwynedd Valley Pennsylvania and attempt to comprehend all the lives she touched, everybody who saw and loved her, who knew she was special.

These comments, these humans, fill a void, they do something I didn’t expect. A kind of memorial, maybe? So many know her through my work here, through the newsletter, the podcast, Carolstraddle. Some saw her daily or weekly or monthly for years, some just met her a few times. For at least half of the names in that comment section, their comment immediately conjures a memory of Carol on their lap, Carol beside them on the couch, Carol in their arms.

Every morning for the next two weeks, I read all the comments again, thick in the memory of her small, wild, precious life, a way of still feeling her with me.

I can’t do this, how do we do this, how did I let myself love something like this, I miss her so much

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I feel a stab of relief every time I consider getting really angry at Irene. It would be a nice distraction, a way to give the inertia of grief some kind of velocity. But to what end?

There have been so many times in my life I’ve hoped for mercy and received the opposite, and mercy is all I have to offer anyone, here. It took so much therapy to accept that I am more than my worst moments. I think she is, too.

Of course, I have questions. Why did you stop to talk to friends with dogs on your first walk with a dog who hated other dogs? If she was agitated by a dog barking across the street, why didn’t you walk away? Why hadn’t you secured her harness? 

I don’t know what to do with those questions, or if they even matter. So I don’t ask them. I don’t reach out. I don’t know what I want from her, or what she could give me, because the only thing I have ever wanted, it feels like in this moment, is Carol.

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Some people wish they’d said it more, Gretchen says to me in bed in the dark, and she’s talking about love and appreciation and devotion, the things people wish they’d given more of to a creature who is one day there and the next day gone. But one thing is for sure you never let a minute pass without telling Carol you loved her.

Over and over, every day, I held her and told her you are a perfect angel, I love you with my whole heart, I am so lucky to have you in my life. Before bed, I told her you are my best friend, you are the best dog in the world, you are the cutest dog to ever live, I am so blessed. In the morning, I held her and told her I love you more than the moon and the stars in the sky.

Carol took me away from myself and down to the marrow of what life really had to offer, all its love and all its legs and all its laps. Bounding through the desert. Crawling under the covers.

The love between dog and man is idyllic, writes Milan Kundera. It knows no conflicts, no hair-raising scenes; it knows no development.

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It’s been three weeks, now, since she was killed. I still look for her, I still listen for the sound of her claws on the floor. I expect to see her in the corner, on the chair beside me, outside the bathroom door.

Her stretching out her neck to look like a baby llama. Hiding under the bed or the coffee table. Walking around the jigsaw puzzle on the floor to not disturb its many pieces.

I know exactly how she felt against my thumb, my thigh, my heart, my life.

I feel like I’m missing a limb. It seems unbelievable to me that I am here, living and breathing, without her. Like I had an organ removed. Like I am only an organ.

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Once, in my Hollywood apartment, I was working after taking Carol on a walk and realized, maybe 20 minutes after returning from said walk, that I hadn’t heard or seen Carol in a minute. I called for her, scanned my limited premises, looked under the bed, the sofa. Where was she? I called for her again. My heartbeat quickened. Where could she possibly be?

I opened the apartment door, and there she was, right outside, hopping from one foot to the other. Just waiting for me. Somehow, I’d closed the door before she made it in behind me without realizing it.

She hadn’t barked or scratched. She’d just stood there, hopping, waiting for me. I felt terrible. I felt grateful — that she’d waited, that she was patently uninterested in ever running away, ever looking for a life beyond the one we shared. Hopping from one foot to the other, again and again. She was just right out there on the other side of the door, not wanting to be a bother, waiting for me to notice she was gone.

It’s the only thing I ever notice, now.