The life you thought you’d have with your dog

The life you thought you'd have with your dog
and the reality of the one you're living

If you've lost someone, you'll know what grief is. The raw emotion. The disbelief that they could be here one day and gone the next, that you'll never see or hear or touch them again. The anger. The sheer injustice of it. Grief can be all-encompassing, and it doesn't give a shit whether you've got work in the morning or a list of things to do. When it hits, you know about it.

So to call the feelings you're having over the life you aren't having with your dog "grief" might feel indulgent, like you haven't earned the word, after all, nobody's died.

And maybe you did everything 'right'. You did the research. You picked the breed that was meant to be the easy one, the one everyone said was good with kids, good in the home, a 'safe bet'. You pictured it. The walks, the pub, the dog asleep by the fire while you got on with your life.

And then the dog turned up, and it's been nothing like that. Harder. Some days you've caught yourself not liking him very much, and then felt awful for thinking it.

That's a loss. It doesn't feel like one, because he's right there, alive, wanting his tea. But you've lost something. You've lost the idea of what life was going to look like with your dog. You'll be feeling all sorts. And I'd bet grief is mixed up in there somewhere.

Grief is like nothing else. You can't push it down, and you can't think your way around it. When you're that full of emotion, the part of your brain that solves problems and makes plans just isn't available to you. It's busy. That's not a character flaw or a lack of willpower on your part, it's how you're built. Which is why "just focus on what you can do!" lands so badly when someone's in it; you can't reframe a loss you haven't let yourself feel.

I'm not saying this from the outside. I've had to grieve a picture I had of life with my own dog. Not skip past it, not slap a positive spin on it. Actually sit in the fact that the thing I imagined and looked forward to, isn't the thing I've got.

I'm guessing that a lot of what you're feeling is anger. Not sadness, anger. This isn't what you signed up for. You planned for this, and it isn't fair. That's allowed. Feeling wronged doesn't make you a bad owner. It makes you someone whose careful plan didn't come true.

The only thing I'd say about the anger is this. It tends to point at the dog. Why won't he just? Why does she always? And the dog is the one part of this that hasn't done anything wrong.

Because none of it was ever his. The obedience, the coming back every time, the walking past every other dog without a glance. The being good. Those are things you wanted, things you were told a good dog does. He has no understanding of any of them, and no desire to be them. You've handed him a set of qualities and he can't feel the weight of a single one.

Yours isn't a perfect dog. There's no such thing. But he's a perfect him. He's been himself the whole time, while you've been grieving the one that was only ever in your head. The anger's real and it's fair. It's just pointed the wrong way.

Without letting yourself feel the anger, sadness, disappointment, there's always something lingering underneath, holding you and your dog back from the question that actually helps. What can we do? What does life need to look like now? What is possible?

Letting yourself call it grief is what frees you up to see the dog in front of you, instead of the one in your head. Because that's the one that matters. Not the other cockers or labradors that you see out and about. Yours. The perfect him. The one who's been here all along, underneath everything you wanted him to be.