Hey Momo, I know we haven't much of chance to have a good conversation lately on account of your deafness so I'm going to be talking right up close to your ear and maybe you'll be able to at least feel the vibration of my voice if nothing else. I really hope you haven't thought that I'd stopped talking to you this past year because I haven't. Every morning, I still said good morning to you, every evening I said goodnight. I never stopped chatting with you throughout the day even after I was pretty sure you couldn't hear me at all. And I'm talking to you now just before we say goodbye.

I took so many pictures of you. I should've taken more. I took so many videos of you and I should've taken more. I should've captured from all the different angles all the ways that made you. I don't know what I will miss most about you. Once there are enough years in a relationship, it sometimes gets difficult to discern between love and habit.

Every morning, your routine made me smile. You'd take a step off your bed and go into a long full stretch, then sneeze, then scratch and then you'd finally trot over to me, swaying your head side to side and wagging your tail at the same time. When you were younger, you'd wake me up at this point. When you got older, you'd wait until I stood at the top of the stairs, waving your harness at you, before you'd start your routine.

You always danced before eating. You always flopped into your spot at the end of the blue sofa then sighed as you curled into it. You always gently mooched for snuggles when I hadn't paid you any attention in a while. You always stayed by my side when I was home. With these simple things you were content in life, and thus I felt better about mine because contentment is contagious when it comes from a dog.

You always danced before eating, right up to the day before the stroke took you.

Your old body has put up with a lot in this life and sometimes it weighed on you, and on me as well but the weight of you is not something I ever begrudged. If love were too light, what impression would it make? It would just float away.

But now I think your body is saying, Enough already, and who am I to keep it from its rest?

I'm not going to wash your harness just yet or put away your bedding just yet. I still need to have around me a while longer some essence of you in this home, a home which we moved into together many years ago and from which you will now leave me behind.

The vet is doing her work.

I don't want to let you go though I must let you go. I hang onto you like I hang onto a precious thing in a dream hoping to pull it into reality.

She tells me it will be gentle.

I put my hand on your chest and feel your last breaths. I watch your eyes as the anxiety leaves them; they relax though remain open. You shed your tired body. I whisper in your ear as you go, hoping the vibrations reach you.

Carry on my sweet Simone, once again light and unencumbered.

- October 21, 2020