Miss Maggie
For as long as I can remember, I’ve dreamt of having a dog in my life. One night, after a work Christmas party in 2015, Melanie surprised me with Maggie, a chubby, sleepy little puppy who could nap through anything, even our bowling league after-parties, as if the noise didn’t even exist. Then, when she was around six months old, a switch flipped, and she became a nonstop blur of energy for almost ten years, right up until her last days with us. That’s a big part of why this loss feels so shocking, and why the grief is hitting us so hard. A tumor we didn’t even know existed ruptured, and everything changed in an instant. Maggie had an incredible run, but it feels like it ended too soon.
She wasn’t the cuddliest dog. She was more like a wrecking ball made of fur and love. She was wild, stubborn, hilarious, and full of life. She would dive-bomb onto you for attention, scoot her butt up to you for scratches, and make sure her needs were known, barking to be let in, let out, to play, or to remind you that dinner was coming (usually starting around 2:30). The house is quieter now, and that silence is crushing.
She was an absolute menace at my in-laws’, falling into window wells, shattering their oven door, and turning every pool day into a full-contact sport. She’d knock drinks into the water, drop her ball on unsuspecting swimmers, and shake her coat off on the driest victim, repeating this cycle for hours until we were genuinely concerned she’d collapse in exhaustion.
Deep down, I think I knew her time was coming sooner rather than later. I could see it in the way her hips and ribs started to become palpable, and I’d been thinking about this day for a while, convincing myself it was a responsible thought experiment, that it was probably still a handful of years away.
I thought I’d be stronger, that I’d cry in private and be the steady one. But I wasn’t. I can’t stop looking at pictures of her. I crumble when I see my wife cry. I panic when nobody’s trying to steal food from the kids. Now my daughter walks around the house telling us to take a deep breath and calm down, a subtle reminder that maybe we should approach her seemingly trivial meltdowns differently, because as crazy as it sounds, I’m not ready to part with these feelings just yet. Maybe regulating our emotions should be secondary to experiencing them.
Maggie was the first addition to our family, and as it grew, I learned that love is not some finite resource you ration out. It multiplies, and your heart expands to hold enough love for each new soul.
The loss of Maggie has shown me the other side of that truth. The vessel doesn’t shrink. Love can’t be divided. Now there’s all this overflowing love with nowhere to go. I think that’s exactly what grief is, all this love still searching for the one it was meant for.
I’m going to miss the heck out of being stepped on, barked at, shoved around, and covered in white hairs. It’s going to take a long time to adjust to life without her, but we were so lucky to have had her in ours. Maggie was one of a kind.