I watched him fade.

Every day a little more of him slipped away. Life ebbed from that small, over-aged body until his back legs simply stopped working. Lifting them did nothing. He’d shove himself up on his front legs and drag himself as far as he could. The will was still there. The little fella just didn’t have the body left to match it.

Bubba was a white-and-black Jack-Rat—Jack Russell through and through. He’d been all fire once. Then age did what age does. Hearing went first. Then his eyes, until he was half-blind. Coordination followed; he’d sway when he walked. After that his mind started to slip. He’d freeze mid-step, and you could watch him trying to remember what came next.

We could have put him down earlier. I wouldn’t. Not while he still had that fight, that stubborn want to live. So he couldn’t see or hear the way he used to. Big deal. That happens to all of us. Would I want my kids to put me down just because I couldn’t walk as well, or see as well, or hear as well as I once did? Of course not. I wasn’t going to do that to him. I owed him that much. He was my shadow. My little buddy. He chose me. He’d sit in the studio with me long after everyone else had gone to bed.

Then the day came when he couldn’t walk. Period. Barely drag himself. We brought food and water to him and let him eat where he lay. Even then, every so often he’d perk up and you could see it—he still wanted to run, to zoom the way he used to. His body had betrayed him. Time had become the enemy, the way it does for all of us.

The last two days were harder on us than on him. He just lay on his pillow, struggling to move. We positioned him as best we could and knew it was time. That was the worst part: the knowing. Knowing you have to decide for a creature who, as far as he understood, was still living. We were the ones who knew it wasn’t life anymore.

Didn’t we?

I still ask myself that. After the deed is done I still don’t know if it sits right in my soul. I would do it again because I saw the struggle. But was it right? I can’t square it. I don’t talk about it out loud. I can only do it here, on the page. That’s how I deal with everything. I write it down.

Even when I try to stay positive, a heaviness sits around my heart. The doubt. I held him in my lap for a couple of hours before we took him on that last ride. I carried him in the car. His head would lift now and then, wondering where we were going. It had been so long since he’d been on a ride.

At the vet I held him while they gave him the sedative that would put him to sleep, knowing he wouldn’t wake up. I watched his eyes close and knew they would never see light again, never see the people who loved him and were supposed to take care of him. I fought the tears while Jenn let them come, fifteen years of grief pouring out of her. When they moved him to the table for the shot that would stop his heart, the grief got heavier. It felt like betrayal. Like I had given up on him. It still feels that way.

I watched the doctor check his vitals, listening as Bubba’s heartbeat slowed, beat by beat, until it didn’t beat at all. In that instant I felt judged.

It took me straight back to the night we turned off my mother’s oxygen. The same decision. The same question that still comes a few times a week since that night in 2020: Did we do the right thing? Could she have come back? Did we hasten it? Did we fail her?

All of it rushed in at once. Had I failed my little buddy? Was there more life left in him and we just ended a problem because it had gotten hard?

I know, as a man and as someone who loved him, that we made the right call in both cases. I also know grief makes you question everything. It makes you believe you failed the ones you were supposed to protect until the end. The trouble is we never want to see the end coming. We trick ourselves into thinking there’s more time, until there isn’t.

I believe we did the best thing for Bubba. I also know my grief, my love, and whatever humanity I have left make me miss him in the smallest, stupidest ways: the howls that used to yank me out of sleep, the way he’d be underfoot while I made dinner, the grumpy look he gave us when we put him in the kennel at night.

God gives us these animals to teach us how to love, how to grieve, how to make the impossible decision, and how to keep living after they’re gone.

For a while we will hurt. We will cry. We will be sad and curse the hole they leave. And we will remember the laughter, the joy, the ridiculous happiness. We will remember that they gave us the one thing we spend our whole lives chasing and still manage to overlook: unconditional love.