The Life We Build Around Caring for a Pet.
A Very Small Dog, A Very Large Life
My parents recently lost their dog, Winnie.
She weighed just under four pounds. When she first came into rescue, she was so fragile that the organization didn't put her on its website for adoption. They weren't convinced she would survive.
She did.
My mother was enormously proud of winnie and what she called her "moxie." Winnie was tiny but remarkably determined, and over the years she became such a fixture in my parent's lives that it was difficult to imagine one without the other.
She slept at the foot of their bed, traveled with them, and ate beside them. Winnie spent summers at the family cabin and time at the beach. She enjoyed Christmas in Oregon and traveled the coastline to visit family and attend grandchildren's graduations. In San Francisco, where my parents live, she rode the bus, the F car, and BART. She attended Mass, dinner parties, weddings, and movies. Even the staff at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art knew her.
My father had a particularly flexible interpretation of the words "no dogs."
One of my favorite images is of the impeccably trained doorman at San Francisco's Palace Hotel grandly opening the doors for my father and his nearly four-pound companion so the two of them could go inside for their weekly coffee.
Winnie caught people's attention. They wanted to meet her and hear her story. Neighbors asked about her. Friends expected the latest Winnie update. Over time, her veterinarians, groomers, and other people involved in her care became part of my parents' world.
An entire ecosystem grew around this very small dog.
The Life We Build Through Caring
There was another side to caring for Winnie, of course. She was fragile. As she aged, she required increasing attention. There were veterinary appointments, lots of decisions, accommodations, and the persistent awareness that this little animal depended upon them.
Responsibility is rarely only a burden.
What Caregiving Gives Back
Connection and community
Purpose and meaningful routine
Unexpected joy and companionship
A deeper understanding of resilience
A renewed sense of identity and personal growth
We talk a great deal about what caregiving takes from people: time, energy, money, flexibility, and sleep. We talk less often about what can quietly grow alongside those demands.
Winnie got my parents out walking. She created conversations with strangers and relationships with people they might otherwise never have known. She gave them stories to tell. She gave my father someone to advocate for and protect. When he faced frightening hospital stays, Winnie was sometimes there with him, making an unfamiliar room feel a little more comfortable.
During the years when my parents were adjusting to retirement and the changes that came with it, there was also this small creature whose needs remained wonderfully concrete. She needed to be fed. She needed a walk. She needed warmth, attention, and care.
There is something important in being needed.
People sometimes say that my parents saved Winnie, and there is certainly truth in that. They took in an animal whose survival wasn't assured and gave her an extraordinarily full life. But watching them together over the years made the word "rescue" seem almost too simple for what happens when we invest ourselves in caring for another living being.
Responsibility changes us.
We develop routines around it. We acquire knowledge we never expected to need. Our calendars change. Our relationships expand. We become advocates, observers, decision-makers, and protectors. What began as something we do gradually becomes woven into who we are.
This is something I often notice in people who have spent long periods responsible for someone they love. From the outside, it is easy to see the work involved. What is harder to see is the life that has formed around the work.
That may be one reason its ending can be so disorienting.
After a medically fragile animal dies, there may suddenly be no medication to give, no appointment to make, no special meal to prepare, and no reason to listen for movement during the night. The calendar becomes less complicated. The practical demands disappear.
We might reasonably expect that to feel like relief.
Sometimes it does.
But relief can coexist with an unexpected emptiness. The responsibilities that consumed time and energy may also have provided structure, connection, purpose, and a deeply familiar role. When they disappear, we aren't simply grieving the one we loved. We may also be trying to understand who we are in a life that no longer requires us in quite the same way.
Perhaps this is one reason the death of an animal we've cared for can feel so disorienting. We aren't only learning to live without someone we loved. We are learning what remains when all the small acts of responsibility that accompanied that love are no longer required of us.
Winnie weighed barely four pounds. At night, she slept at the foot of my parents' bed.
It was a remarkably small space for a dog who had somehow managed to occupy so much of their lives.
— Brooke Galster-Boston
Reflection: Can you think of a time when you received more than you gave?
About the author: Brooke Galster-Boston is the founder of Cypress Coaching Services and a certified coach, former therapist and certified grief educator.
