I’m starting to forget who I was 3 months ago, which means I’m forgetting him. If he were still here, the last 3 months would have been almost 4 years for him. I’ve been living in dog years. Maybe that’s why it’s so easy to forget that I used to walk 40 minutes one way for fun, but now that feels like a death sentence. I wasn’t healthy, by any stretch of the imagination, but I wasn’t slowly dying either. It’s been a long time since I remembered who I was 24 months ago. An entire toddler has aged before my eyes, and with her, my own brain has doubled down on all the ways in which I failed her over the past two years. And am now failing myself. Now that I’m home, I’m starting to remember what I was like 12 years ago. Still a child, at 22, thick in the throes of a fresh diagnosis, obsessively ruminating about how one day my dog, still a puppy, would die. And I wouldn’t know how to go on. His liver was full of blood. So we took him to his favorite place for two hours, and then brought him back home to die in one. There. On the rug he’d had accident after accident on over the past 3.75 dog years (3 months). Sometimes I wonder if his last 3 months (3.75 dog years) were total hell. He once peed in an Airbnb, which he never ever did, and the only reason I knew was because he’d had trouble getting back up and dragged it in a mopped line down the hallway from the closet where he’d tried to hide his wrongdoing. I wasn’t mad. All I felt was—this is it. This is what I’d been thinking about every day for the past four human years since he’d been diagnosed—the big one. A well meaning friend told me he needed to be rehomed nine months ago. But I refused. When we moved, that same girl I’d let down for two years kept insisting we should just leave him in Portland, with another family, to die. Our dog. My. Dog. Today, after 3.75 dog years, I stepped foot in our new storage locker for the first time since everything got filed away. Things I’d been missing to tears were found through tears. There were his toys I couldn’t bear to get rid of, right at the top of a box. The pillow he slept on each night read—Thankful. I guess I should be grateful for the time I had with him. That’s what people say about grief. Everyone tells me he’s grateful for the 68 years he had with me. But I can’t stop thinking about why no one is asking me about my dead dog. And I think it’s for the same reason it took me 3.75 dog years to find.