The Dog I Swore I Would Never Have

On grief, signs, and the love that finds you anyway.

By April | @IlluminatedPaths.org

I need to tell you about two dogs.

One who saved my life. And one who showed up just when I had decided my heart could not survive loving another one.

Natty

She came to me during one of the darkest periods of my life.

We had gone to the shelter looking for a cat. My son wanted one. We walked through, unimpressed, and drifted toward the dog kennels almost by accident. And then — all of us, at the exact same moment — pointed at the same dog.

A four-month-old puppy. Breathtakingly cute. The kind of cute that made strangers stop us on the street for years afterward to comment on it. She had just been transferred from another shelter where she had run out of time, which to this day I cannot wrap my mind around. How does a dog that adorable run out of time?

There was a problem. The place we were living in wanted a three-thousand-dollar pet deposit. It was more than we could spare. I was heartbroken in a way that felt disproportionate — like something important was slipping through my fingers.  Despite money being tight at the time, we found a way to bring her home anyway. We all knew something was special about this dog.

We were right.

Her name was Natty adapted from her adopted name “Natalie”.

And she was, without question, one of the great loves of my life.

She was pure devotion. She was never not by my side — following me from room to room, laying on me, tucked against me. She was skeptical of people at first, which I always suspected was my own anxiety imprinted on her nervous system, absorbed through all the years of living in mine. But once she decided you were safe?  She loved you with reckless abandon. No half measures. No conditions. Just all of her, offered completely.

She was with me through the hardest chapters and through the flourishing that came after. She witnessed the whole arc of my becoming. Thirteen years and eight months — the last two years,  which were hard, watching her grow fragile, watching her hurt. The kind of watching that breaks you slowly.

I always felt, in a way I cannot fully explain and will not try to defend, that she had been sent to me. A gift from something beyond what human eyes can see. Call it God, call it spirit, call it the universe — I do not know what name is right and I suspect no one else knows for sure either until they cross over themselves. But something sent her to me at exactly the right moment. I have always been sure of that.

The Turtle

When the time came to consider letting her go, I could not get there. She had pain episodes but would come out of them. I kept waiting. Hoping. Until one episode dragged longer than the others and she began losing her ability to walk, losing her dignity, and I knew something was shifting.

I did what I sometimes do when I am at the edge of what I can carry alone. I asked.

I asked the universe, God, my mother who passed in 2007, whoever is out there listening — I asked for a sign. And because I needed to be sure, I asked for something specific. Either a turtle out of context — not in a pond, not where turtles belong — or a feather longer than six inches.

Two days later I walked into work to begin a co-counseling session with my supervisor. Before we started, she turned to me with her hand open.

In her palm was a small gold turtle.

Tears started welling before I could stop them. I told her what I had asked for. We were all stunned — my supervisor, the client, me. I pulled myself together because it was the client's time and we did the session. Afterward I asked my supervisor if she collected turtles, if they meant something to her.

"Nope," she said. "It just caught my eye on TikTok and I bought it."

She had never collected turtles. She did not know why she bought it. She just felt compelled to.

I went home knowing what I needed to do. The next day Natty lost the use of her legs completely. The day after that, she became a real angel.

My partner, my son and I surrounded her, and she died in our arms surrounded by so much love. We honored every single one of her thirteen years and eight months. And then I tried to figure out how to breathe in a world where she was not in it.

The Swear I Made

Grief after losing a pet is real grief. It is not lesser grief because it is not a person. Anyone who has loved an animal the way I loved Natty knows that the size of the loss is exactly the size of the love — and the love was enormous.

I swore I would not do it again. The loving and the losing. I meant it completely. My heart had been through enough and I knew exactly where this road ended.

I think sometimes the universe listens to our swears and just quietly waits. What is that saying, we plan and God laughs. Exactly that.

Prince

Two months after Natty passed, a dear friend became ill and needed to go into the hospital. She needed someone to take care of her dog during her stay.

I was reluctant. I want to be honest about that. I was not ready. But she needed help and I wanted to help her, so I said yes.

The dog's name was Prince.

The first thing I noticed was how much he looked like Natty. Same size, same energy, so similar that our neighbors genuinely thought he was the same dog. The universe, apparently, has a sense of humor.

The second thing I noticed was that Prince needed to catch up on the basics of pet care. Not because of cruelty or neglect of the heart, but because his person had been fighting their own health struggles and simply did not have enough left to give. Sometimes life asks more of us than we have. I understood that completely and have been there myself a time or two. I just wanted to help him catch up.

As I began to care for him — tending to what had been missed, learning his rhythms, figuring out who he was — I noticed something else beginning to shift quietly inside me. I started to worry about him. About what his life might look like if circumstances did not change. About whether he would be okay.

And then I noticed the third thing.

Prince loves everyone. Immediately. Unconditionally. Without skepticism or caution or needing to assess   your safety first. If someone broke into our home, he would be delighted to see them. He just loves — openly, easily, with his whole self from the very first moment.

It is a different kind of love from what I shared with Natty. Natty's love was earned, tested, hard won and therefore precious in a particular way. Prince's love is immediate and boundless and asks nothing.

Both are everything.

The hospital stay turned into longer. Longer turned into permanent. And somewhere in the tending —the baths, the walks and the snuggling and the learning each other — I stopped asking when he was going home.

One day I looked at him and said out loud: "Buddy. You lost your mom and I lost my girl. Now we have each other."

He gave me a look I can only describe as knowing. And snuggled in closer.

The Scare

About a month ago after Prince had been with us for about 2 months, he started screaming in pain. Sudden, terrible, frightening pain. I took him to an urgent care place and they could not find the issue.  I was scared.

I will be honest — my first thought was not again. My nervous system remembered what this road looked like and braced for it. I thought: surely the universe is not this cruel.

It was a tooth. An abscessed tooth, badly infected, and he needed six extractions. It was serious and it was painful and it was completely, blessedly fixable.

After the extractions, he is a brand-new dog now. Happy, healthy, thriving. Running around like he forgot he ever hurt at all.

I stood there watching him be carefree, happy and felt something I can only describe as grace.

The Wildflowers

This morning I took Prince for a walk. There were wildflowers everywhere — the kind that turn an ordinary field into something worth stopping for.

We got in the middle of them and took some photos together. They are not great photos. We kept taking turns closing our eyes. But standing there with him in the wildflowers, I thought about Natty. About the turtle. About my friend who needed help and the dog who needed a home and the way I had sworn — completely meant that I was done having pets.

I thought about how grief tells us it is protecting us when it builds walls. And how sometimes the most healing thing that can happen is that someone shows up needing something only we can give, and in the giving we discover that our hearts were not as finished as we thought.

Prince will never replace Natty. That is not how love works. He does not need to. He is his own irreplaceable, ridiculous, wide open-hearted self. He lost his mom. I lost my girl. And we are exactly what the other needed.

I keep his first mom updated on how he is doing. I imagine it is bittersweet for her — knowing he is loved, knowing he is thriving, knowing she cannot be the one doing it. I try to honor that. Love does not disappear just because circumstances change. It just finds new places to live.

I started Illuminated Paths because I believe healing happens in connection. That we are wired for belonging. That the walls we build after loss, however necessary they felt, were never meant to be permanent.

Natty taught me that love can show up when you are in your darkest place and save your life.

Prince taught me that love can show up after your darkest loss and quietly, persistently, remind you that your heart still works.

And a small gold turtle on my supervisor's palm taught me that whatever is out there beyond what human eyes can see — it is paying attention.

I believe that with everything I have.

With love and wildflowers,
April

This post is dedicated to Natty — March 2009 to November 26, 2024. The day before Thanksgiving. Thirteen years and eight months of pure love. And to Prince, who lost his mom and found his way home.

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