Girl Loves Dog

A Tribute to my Best Friend

It’s 5:47am and Scottie Pippen is asleep in the crook of my arm. He’s been asleep here, more or less, for four thousand mornings, but today is the last morning we will ever spend together. I’m shattered.

He has always had some animal superpower for knowing when I needed him closest, and this morning his small, frail, very much warm and alive body is pressed against me as though he could crawl inside my skin if he just tried hard enough. Maybe he is trying.

I’m feeling his ribcage go up and down. I am trying to etch it somewhere permanent in my memory, the unique rhythm of him that has hypnotized us both to sleep so many nights. He has a heart murmur now, and I can feel it fluttering. I’m doing what I did the very first night I had him: lying awake in the dark of early morning, terrified, feeling him breathe like a new mother who can’t believe she is in charge of something this important and this small. What if it spontaneously disappears?

Right now the tip of his tongue is hanging slightly out of the front of his mouth because he only has about eight teeth left, and the front ones are mostly gone. The faint wheeze on his exhale hums like the sound of the fridge that you just stop noticing after a while because it’s just the sound of being home; but today I’m trying to memorize that too because I need to remember the sound for the rest of my life.

He has no idea what is going to happen today. Today, for him, is just another perfect day with me; another sunrise, another few minutes of breathing on my face until we get up for coffee and breakfast; another dog day of almost-summer without a care in the world. He’s happy, and warm, and here.

And I’m heartbroken.

I’m heartbroken because I know that in a few hours my best friend of over twelve years is going to die. Which makes me, as of this morning, a sort of genie in a bottle, granted the worst wish ever…the power to decide when a life ends. I’ve made the most impossible decision to end his too-short-for-my-comfort, precious little life; a life I’d give anything to keep.

And yet, here we are, laying together for one last morning. Tomorrow I’ll wake up without him. I’d give anything to shove the cork back in the genie bottle and it just wont go back in.

We talk about “quality of life” and “doing the humane thing” and “you’ll know when it’s time,” which are all true, but also just wildly insufficient ways of explaining what is happening today. He is going to die, and I can do everything to make that sound more palatable, but the reality is that I’m staring directly at the unbearable, looking it in the puppy-dog eyes and I know exactly what’s coming.

The unbearable is here anyway.

Choosing death for someone you love is a terrible kind of playing God. I know all the reasons it’s actually a mercy. I know his little body has been working so hard for so long just to stay here with me, which both the most heartbreaking thing and the most loving, and I cannot decide which it is more of. Maybe both. I think this kin of love is both.

---

Scottie is fifteen years old. I’m not entirely sure of his exact birthday, but my mom and I decided years ago that he shared one with my late Nana because she hated sharing her birthday with a dog, which made us all laugh, which was exactly the point.

His name is officially Lil Scottie Pippen. Mostly just “Scottie”.

Also: Scottie P, Scottie Pip, Pip, Pipsqueak, Scooter, Scoots, ScootieBoots, Bookie, Lil SP, Scott, Scotland, and roughly one thousand improvised renditions of the above, because naming him only once was never going to be enough for the gigantic personality inside his little potato body.

Despite being fifteen, he’s a Jack Russell Terrier, which means that for the better part of a decade he had the energy of a bouncy ball thrown hard at a tile floor: straight up, straight down, off every wall, never still for a second. His vertical jump, relative to his body height, was easily three times that of the actual Scottie Pippen which is factual data if you look it up on the interwebs.

On every hike we ever took, he ran at least three miles for my one, sprinting ahead and then doubling back to check on me, then sprinting ahead again, then doubling back, making absolutely sure his slow human hadn’t wandered off and gotten lost.

He came into my life when I was twenty-two. My mom found him at a horse farm, where he was living in the barn at six months old. She went to test-ride a horse and came home with The Dog Formerly Known as “Remmington”, the most absurd name for a dog who was clearly always supposed to be called Lil Scottie Pippen. She quickly determined he was a Tazmanian Devil in dog-form and spent the next three years trying to give him to literally anyone who would listen. Then I came to visit her, and the bond was quite literally immediate and absolute. I fell in love with him. He fell in love with me. A year later, once I’d gotten settled in Austin, he came to live with me. Everything after that is just… the rest of my life.

When I first got to Austin I had no job, no real prospects, not much money, and absolutely no business having a dog. So naturally, I got the dog. He has been here for my entire adult life; every version of me I’ve tried on and grown out of, every season of reinvention and wreckage and rebuilding, he was there. Happy to be included and in the crook of my arm each night.

He slept under my feet in cubicles (and sometimes on top of the desk), smuggled into more than one office because I couldn’t bear to leave him at home. He has seen me through more jobs than I can count and a few stretches of unemployment. He came on cross-country road trips and has, at this point, seen more of America than most Americans ever will. He met every man I ever brought home, most of them, in retrospect, deeply unworthy of the energy I spent on them, but he never once judged my taste. If I loved them, he loved them. As far as Scottie was concerned, the second I let someone in the door, we were a pack of three. He fell hard for some of them right along with me, and we grieved them together when they left.

He was also the only one in the room for the worst nights. The breakups. The seasons so dark I genuinely did not know how I would get to morning. Or night. Or morning yet again. He would lay his whole tiny body across my chest like a weighted blanket. That sixth sense of knowing when I needed him closest, his heartbeat fluttery like a butterfly right next to mine. He never, not once, cared that I was using him as a tissue for my snot and my tears.

In my twenties, when I was being what my friend Kimberly calls “a dirty stay-out,” leaving him home while I went and did regrettable things until two (or five) in the morning, he never held it against me. His grudges expired with the first snuggle. He always forgave me before I’d even finished apologizing. I think about that sometimes, what it would be like to move through the world with that kind of radical forgiveness. To let go of the score that fast. He made it look effortless, which I suspect it actually was, for him.

He forgave me for things I have still not forgiven myself for.

---

In a few hours, a team of two vets will come to the front porch of the Farnhouse, where the wildflowers are starting to open in the field, the sun still low in the morning sky. Scottie will have been in my arms for the better part of 24 hours by then, rocking, gently singing, and crying into his fur.

We have spent something like four thousand days curled into each other on couches and in beds. We have logged well over ten thousand miles on sidewalks and trails, busy streets and city parks. He has humped, conservatively, several hundred large male dogs, and chased several thousand squirrels; catching exactly zero. A perfect record; undefeated in failure.

He has barked his head off at countless mailmen and has even more personally and viciously tried to eat more than one FedEx guy and Man in Brown. He has, against all veterinary odds, consumed roughly ten times the amount of chocolate that should be lethal for a dog his size, and lived, every time, out of what I can only assume was pure, magnificent spite. I spent the last few years genuinely unsure whether his heart disease or my own cute aggression would take him first, me, holding his little head in my hands announcing to the empty room: Oh my GOD, I could squeeze you until your head pops off.

It never did pop.

In the end, he lost almost all his teeth. This did not stop him. With what few he had left, he somehow managed to chew his own paws nearly clean off, and I will go to my grave not understanding the physics of it; a fifteen-year-old dog with maybe eight teeth, still finding a way to be an absolute menace. That was Scottie. His body kept failing but his spirit was alive and well. That was Scottie. Right up until the end, he was Scottie.

He came into my life at twenty-two, when I had nothing. He is leaving it at thirty-four, and because of him I have everything that matters. I know unconditional love like never before and perhaps never again. A girl never finds her first best-friend twice. The love we shared was beyond what words here can capture.

By every external metric, this is a deeply inconvenient time to have my heart broken into small pieces — a precarious year, tight on money, physically and emotionally in the middle of a long and difficult healing process. Losing him is the toothpick through a shit sandwich, and I say that with full awareness of how insufficient the metaphor is. There would never have been a good time. That was always going to be I’mpossible.

But I guess that’s the point of it all. Dogs aren’t meant to live forever, (though I’d like to file an appeal with the Big Man upstairs on that one), they are meant to come into our lives and be radiant balls of endless love and affection to teach us what it is like to be happy. I’ve spend my happiest hours, days, and years with this little creature, and I would happily change hundreds more doggie diapers if it meant I could have just one more day with him.

He has been my life’s greatest teacher, and today he has raeched the point of having taught me everything he needed to teach me. I loved him so hard right up until the end that he knows it’s okay to leave. Despite my current life situation, he knows that I’ll be okay without him. He knows because he has taught me to love unconditionally, to get outside everyday no matter the weather, and to smell as many flowers as you want, no matter how long it makes the walk. He taught me to love deeply, forgive quickly, snuggle hard, become wide-eyed at the glorious world in front of you, especially if that whole world is one person.

This little dog - this 15lb., gummy-mouthed, chocolate-immune, mom-obsessed lunatic taught me how to love another living being with the entire contents of my heart. All of it. Enough that losing him is going to break me in a way I’m not sure I’ll ever fully recover from, and somehow that is the proof of our love. You don’t get the kind of grief that levels you without first having had the kind of love that builds you. He gave me both. The entire curriculum of his teaching was: love like this. Forgive like this. Come back to the person you love over and over and over, all the way to the end of the trail.

So this morning, I’ll be the genie. I’ll hold the terrible wish in my hands and I’ll use it to spare him from, any more pain, even though it guts me. I’ll lay my body across his this time. I’ll let him feel my heartbeat for once. And I will not care, not even a little, about the snot or the tears.

Thank you, Scottie P. For the four thousand days. For the ten thousand miles. For loving every unworthy man and forgiving every dirty stay-out. For never catching the squirrel, because the joy was always in the chase. For teaching me that a heart is only ever as breakable as it is capable of loving, and that this kind of love is a deal worth making every single time.

Go get the squirrel, buddy. Run three times as far as you need to. I’ll catch up.

Thank you for four thousand sunrises and
four thousand sunsets.
For ten thousand miles,
and a hundred thousand kisses.
I love you entirely, immeasurably, and endlessly.

April 2011 to April 23, 2026