Alexandra Paskhaver Column: When the dog days end

Published 8:30 am Tuesday, July 29, 2025

It’s hard to lose a dog.

My family adopted a golden retriever named Watson on Jan. 17, 2015. He was a silly-looking puppy, with red, floppy ears and a nose that seemed too big for his face.

He was one out of 11 puppies, the first one to walk toward my dad, who scooped him up and brought him home on that snowy winter’s day.

Watson and I grew up together. I was 11 when we got him, and I said goodbye when he was about 10 and a half years old.

In between, there was love and laughter. There were miles of walks and hundreds of hugs. There were a thousand funny stories to tell and repeat, over and over.

Once we threw a tennis ball for him indoors and he raced so fast after it that he turned a somersault.

Another time he stole a croissant right out of my mom’s hands.

Another time he chewed holes in one of my mom’s silk scarves (which she was upset over) and our downstairs rug (but then she told him he had good taste).

And there were birthdays when we fed him meatballs and sausages and doggy bones, days he was so happy to have a special dinner that he’d do a little dance, throwing his head side to side and bowing toward the carpet.

Somehow, I always thought that he would break the record for how old dogs could be, that we could keep him alive indefinitely through the sheer force of our love.

I knew, but didn’t want to acknowledge, that he couldn’t last forever.

His last illness started innocently enough. He started sitting down more often. We had just gotten him an annual physical, and the vet had given him a clean bill of health.

We didn’t think we would be going back to the vet several times over the next few weeks.

But the sitting turned into long spells of lying down, and one day he couldn’t get up at all.

That day, we rushed him to the vet, and she said he had cancer.

It was a common cancer, hemangiosarcoma, and an aggressive one. Fortunately, he didn’t seem to be in pain.

And all of a sudden, I found myself preparing to say goodbye.

Watson was still eating wet food and drinking, and sometimes he even managed a mile-long walk. He seemed to alternate between spells of illness and spells of near-normality.

Through it all loomed the dark thought of “when?”

When would he stop walking, stop eating, stop drinking? When would it be time for that last goodbye?

I tried to remember the exact way he ate his food or perked up for a walk or played with his toys, dreading that my current set of memories was too small, that I was forgetting him before he was even gone.

There was the way he whined in his sleep, the way he clambered onto sofas, the way he lapped up water, the way he walked, with his tummy swinging side to side.

Now that’s all I have left. Memories of a good dog.

I hope there are croissants for him in heaven.

Alexandra Paskhaver is a software engineer and writer. Both jobs require knowing where to stick semicolons, but she’s never quite; figured; it; out. For more information, check out her website at apaskhaver.github.io.