Our dog, Gabby, died on a Thursday in April. It’s been over a year. The day was unusually cool, filled with brilliant sunshine, and kissed by a gentle breeze. She was fourteen and a half years old.

She was just eight weeks old when we got her for our youngest son as a Christmas present in 2006. He’d been asking for a dog for a long time. Begging, actually. He had a teacher once who told us he should be a lawyer because of his ability to argue his case. I don’t know about that, but he certainly could wear a person down.

The idea of bringing a dog to live inside the house was foreign to me. When I was a kid, our pets lived in the yard as all good pets should. My dad’s hunting dogs were the only dogs I remembered from my childhood. I thought of them as dirty.

Reluctantly and with reservation, I gave in to the idea of getting our son a dog for Christmas. We scoured ads in the paper and looked at several dogs but none of them felt “right”. We even went through with adopting a Chihuahua-mix from the Humane Society. Her name was Maui, and she died while being spayed before we ever got to bring her home. I wondered if it was a sign that we shouldn’t get a dog.

Finally, we found out about a lady in Waverly Hall who had a litter of Boston Terrier puppies for sale. My husband and I met her in the parking lot of a grocery store on a Sunday afternoon. In a laundry basket in the back of her van were three puppies. It only took one look to know which one was ours.

If you’d ever told me I’d one day kiss a dog’s head and let her sleep in my bed, I wouldn’t have believed you. But it wasn’t hard to love her. She was funny and smart with an innocence and purity that wiggled its way into the tender part of your heart before you had a chance to raise your defenses.

By the time our son was old enough to leave home, my husband and I had claimed her as ours and told him he’d have to get his own dog. We simply couldn’t part with her. Plus, I was worried he’d forget to feed her and let her out.

Playmate, snuggle buddy, sounding board, she filled a myriad of roles. She gave me someone to mother when the boys didn’t need me anymore. When they left home, having her around eased the ache. After the world shut down due to the pandemic and I began to work from home full-time, she gave me someone to talk to which helped me feel less isolated.

When I got the word that we would return to the office in June of last year, I began to worry. Gabby had been having seizures for several months. I didn’t want that to happen while she was alone. We never had to cross that bridge.

Gabby taught me to see the world in a different way. Literally. Taking her out was the first thing I did in the mornings and the last thing at night. There was something about standing on the edge of the patio in the stillness. Being serenaded by the rooster’s crow or the owl’s hoot or the bull frog’s croak, stilled me. No matter the worries or burdens I carried out there with me, I could look up into the star-studded sky and remember there’s a God in heaven who is greater than the weight I carry.

Gabby must have known it too based on the number of times she wanted to go out. It was either that or the treat she’d get when she came back in.

A friend of mine recently said one thing her dog taught her was to look up. Gabby taught me that too. For a while after she died, I’d step outside just before bed and look up at the sky. I don’t do it anymore, but I try to remember the lesson I learned.

Looking back on the fourteen plus years we had her, I can honestly say our decision to bring Gabby into our home was one of the best we’ve ever made. She brought out the best in all of us. I like to think she left us better than she found us.

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Remembering Gabby