Saying goodbye to my best writing buddy the only way I know how
I've never known an adult life without Lady Byng, my mornings will never be the same. And I'm so thankful for what she gave us.
For the past 15 years my day has started with a jab to the gut and soon after a quick, sharp “woof,” if the physical message wasn’t enough to wake me up.
Sometimes that wake-up call would be much earlier than I wanted, many times in fact, but the day has always started that way, consistently, with a “good morning” from Lady Byng, our brownish-chocolate cockapoo with the most expressive eyes I’ve ever seen on a dog, telling me it was time to wake up, get her breakfast and get ready for the day, often by watching her run around our backyard.
The running stopped about six months ago, turning into more of a meander about the yard until eventually I had to carry her outside, where for the past couple months we would just stand watch the sun come up together, like we did this morning.
Tomorrow morning I’m not going to get that wake-up call. My body will probably naturally wake-up at that time, like it does when I travel, but Lady Byng is going to be gone, and I have no idea how I’m going to deal with it.
I’ve written thousands of stories and pages in my life, many of them with Byng by my feet or sitting next to me on the couch. From the time we adopted her at animal shelter back in 2012, the week after Christina and I got married, she’s been the biggest constant in my life outside of my wife.
She moved with us eight times, for both our children, some of the first pictures we have of them, outside of with us at the hospitcal, is Byng and our other dog, Vezina, greeting them when brought them home with a soft nuzzle.
She’s gone now, I’m heartbroken. It’s the type of heartbreak you can prepare for, allegedly, and I’ve been trying for the past couple weeks as this became inevitable. But you’re never truly ready for it, and the grief, I’m sure is going to come in waves, hard and crashing down at first, but smoother as times goes on, hopefully.
While this is being published after she’s gone, I wrote most of it, like I’ve written so much over the past 15 years. Sitting beside’s Byng and occasionally petting her as I hit a stopping point in my thought process.
She was more than a dog to us. She was the start of our family, Christina and I got married in February of 2012 at a court house in Kerrville, Texas. Within a week, we went to the Kerr County Animal shelter and fell in love with a brown cockapoo they called, “Angel” in the shelter, who at the time walked with a limp because she needed a proper bath.
No one really knew her proper backstory or how she ended up there. We were told something about how someone had rescued her from a different shelter, a kill shelter, and had her for a couple days before he was able to bring her to the Kerr County Animal shelter, a non-kill shelter.
They didn’t know how old she was officially or where she really came form, and we have no idea who the person was that rescued her initially before, but because our apartment complex required dogs to be at least one-year old, the shelter declared she had recently celebrated her first birthday so we could adopt her.
She made it to either her 15th or 16th birthday, we don’t know officially, but it was a life that, for me and Christina, meant everything and eventually meant everything to both of our children, who for the first time in their lives are dealing with the real concept of death.
It’s easy to keep circling back to the start and end of a story, memories work that way, with nice little capstones to store everything. But when you go deeper, like I’ve tried to the past week or so, you remember vivid moments from the in between, the parts that aren’t marked with important dates or milestones.
I’ve stopped and thought this past week about trips to the dog park, where the first 10 years of her life, she would run and sprint and loved to go through obstacles, she particularly loved jumping through hoops or tunnels if they had them. Before we had kids, in both Kerrville and Austin, she went everywhere with us, I have many memories of sitting on patios with her and Christina, and this past week I’ve thought about some old friends, who she loved to greet with a hug.
She was also the greatest thief I’ve ever known. For as good of a dog she was, her greatest weakness or strength, was her desire to pull off food heists. She would wait for the proper moment to steal something from the table or counter, slowly sneaking away with her prize. One vivid memory will always be the time Christina made a bunch of cookies for the press box at a Texas Stars game, they were Star Wars themed, and Byng stole and ate all the C-3POs.
I have jars of peanut butter, that I might not be able to throw away, because they are evidence of her brilliance. She would use her front tooth to pierce a hole in the lid of the peanut butter jar, and then had the dexterity to twist it open and steal directly from the jar itself.
It was awfully annoying in the moment, but I would give anything right now to find an empty jar of peanut butter on the couch.
This doesn’t do her life justice, how do you capture 15 years of memories properly? How do you handle the heartbreak that you always knew would come, but could never truly be ready for?
For now, I’ll remember writing this with her by my side, softly petting her while fighting back tears and thanking her for the life she gave our family. Tomorrow morning is gonna hurt, but that hurt, as much as it’s gonna wreck me, will have been more than worth it for everything else that came before.
For full transparency, as you can image, the past week has been a bit difficult here, it’s been hard to keep it together, honestly. Originally I wasn’t going to share this publicly, but in the past, readers have responded well to the human side of my writing, and this about as human as I can be.
My summer break is basically over, I have a flight to Edmonton tomorrow, and we will have a heavy dose of hockey coverage on the way. But for now, thank you for reading, and letting me share in this space.
-Sean