Soul Dog Life Lesson

You know the look. Not the one where your dog glances over to see if you dropped a potential snack. The other one — where they hold your gaze for seconds that make time feel like it stopped, like they’re checking on something deeper.

That’s your soul dog.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. A few friends have lost their dogs recently — cancer, old age, quickly, slowly. All of it hard in its own way. And when I’ve sat with them in those first raw days, not one of them talked about what their dog looked like or what breed they were or whether they were perfectly trained.

What they said — every single one of them, and I said it too when I lost Tedie — was some version of the same thing:
I can’t believe he’s gone. I wish I had more photographs of the two of us together.

Not professional headshots. Not posed portraits with everyone sitting still. Just real pictures — of the hikes, the beach days, the ordinary Tuesday afternoons that turned out to be anything but ordinary. Images that prove the life they shared together was exactly as good as it felt.