A couple of weeks ago, I woke up feeling awful. I was just off. I thought it must just be exhaustion, however when I tried to sleep that night I couldn’t. My body felt tense and I just could not relax enough to sleep. The next morning I felt even worse. I could not figure out why I was feeling so terrible. That was until good old social media decided to show me what my “memory” was from the year before. It was the day we said goodbye to Arrow.

This still is one of the hardest days of my life. At times, my mind tries to blur the memories and guilt tries to creep in. It tries to make me feel like I didn’t do enough. I didn’t try enough. But I remember the way he slumped his body into mine that morning. As if to tell me he was ready. In that moment, I could tell we were both done fighting. Nine months of new medications, hospitalizations, and slowly losing the dog I once knew.

I couldn’t believe that my body knew what day it was before my memory could catch up. The restlessness, the aches and pains, the exhaustion; these were all signs that I needed to slow down and remember my best friend. I knew the anniversary had to be coming up, but I wanted to just keep pressing on with life and not focus on the past. But my whole system screamed at me to slow down.

We took some time to remember our special little guy. We reminisced about healthy Arrow, goofy Arrow, and even Arrow when he was sick. We sat in our grief. I cried. I laughed. I wished he was still with us. I was grateful for the time that he was.

My journey with grief has been an interesting one. We make efforts to remember Arrow everyday. He is still up on our walls and I look up at him constantly. Each time we walk by his favourite spot in his favourite forest, we place our hands on the log and say “hello”. Sometimes his new brother Bernard stops by too. We continue to heal. And we continue to grow.