“The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not get over the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it.” ~Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
WhatsApp profile picture of my friend Diana hugging her dog Zibby.
Every time his name comes up on my phone, there they are. The two of them in a tiny square. I’ve seen this picture so many times that I’ve stopped watching.
Until recently.
Zibby wasn’t just a dog. He was a part of the whole rhythm of their lives, the mornings and evenings and the hours in between, which no one thinks to endure until they are gone.
How Zibby came to be
Diana’s husband spent his career in oil and gas. The work took them far away, first to China and then to Thailand, the kind of life where you are always inventing a new city, a new grocery store, a new normal. They got Zibby while they were in China, although it didn’t happen nearly as well as it did.
Nicole, their daughter, fell in love with a golden doodle. He knew exactly what he wanted. Then they went to the shelter and he saw this little beagle and that ended the golden doodle conversation. It was Zibby. Ready.
It was a handful. She’s sneaky and spoiled and doesn’t care at all about being told what to do. He got into food that he had no business with. He destroyed the sports paper. He walked into rooms he shouldn’t have been in and stared at you like you were in the wrong place. Diana kept fixing it. Zibby completely ignored him each time, without any apparent guilt.
I got to know Zibby the way you get to know your neighbor’s dog – little by little over time. Diana and I live in the same subdivision and we run into each other for walks. There was Zibby, nose down, drawn to any smell that caught his attention, ears flapping, completely engrossed in his own agenda. He could smile without trying.
My daughter and I babysat her a few times when Diana and her husband took day trips to the next town to visit Nicole at college. We would go over, fill his bowl, take him out, and stay company for a while. A small favor. The kind you don’t think twice about. I didn’t know then how much I would think about those afternoons later.
When Diana’s family moved back to the States for good, Zibby came with them and immediately got down to business, as if he had always known this was where they would end up. He’s aged. A little slower. Still as stubborn as ever. He would still find you when he wanted something, right in the middle of what you were doing.
You don’t think you’ll miss the little things. The nails on the floor. The way he sat down next to you. The peculiar chaos of being around him. Then the house goes quiet and you understand that this was it all.
When the loss accumulates
Diana lost her father about a year before Zibby died.
Two completely different losses. And grief doesn’t settle things nicely. It just accumulates. One loss sits next to another, and suddenly you’re carrying more than you thought, more than you’ve ever let anyone know.
Zibby was a regular that year. The walks had to happen. Feeding, vet visits, the daily grind of caring for a dog that needed you. This kind of routine is underrated when you’re grieving. That got me up. That brings it out. It prevents the sun from collapsing into itself. Then Zibby left and all of this went with him.
One morning not long after, we were walking together. Our subdivision was quiet, the air still cool, that strange silence before everyone else’s day begins. We talked for a while and then we didn’t.
He stopped walking.
His eyes filled.
“People we love have passed away,” he said. “We are sad. But what can we do? Life goes on. That is the nature of life.”
He didn’t sweep it. He didn’t pretend to be fine. He said the way he says something that he’s reversed so many times, it went smoothly. Like a stone you’ve carried long enough that it no longer has a sharp edge.
I didn’t say much. There was nothing to add.
What I Already Knew
I lost my own father a few years ago.
I’m not one to visibly fall apart or talk about difficult things easily. But I think about it every day. Honestly, every day. Sometimes it’s a memory. Sometimes it’s just a feeling. It’s often a phrase I hear myself say and then recognize as his, something I’ve absorbed for fifty-odd years without realizing it was happening.
That’s the thing about grief that catches you off guard. It doesn’t really end. It’s just getting quieter. It ceases to be the only thing in the room and becomes something you carry in your pocket. Sometimes you forget it’s there. And then something small happens, a song, a smell, a dog on a morning walk, and there it is again.
By the time you’re in your fifties, you’ve learned that loss doesn’t happen all at once. It accumulates. A parent. A friend. A pet. A version of your life that you couldn’t properly say goodbye to. You stop waiting to feel ready because the readiness doesn’t show up. You just move on and at some point you realize you’ve been controlling it all along without anyone acknowledging it.
Most people have no idea what the person walking next to them is keeping quiet.
As things return
Life settled down gradually and without any announcement after Zibby.
Nicole finished school, came home, found a job nearby. In the house, which had become so quiet, there were people again. Diana’s husband retired. The two of them fell back into the small rhythms of everyday life, cooking, cleaning, and unnecessary things, which turn out to be the essence of things. None of them were about the dog. And somehow everything was connected.
Grief doesn’t go away. What it does is shift. It starts to feel less like an absence and more like a presence. You’re out on your morning walk and someone’s dog walks by and for just a moment Zibby is there with his nose, completely in his own world. He still holds it. But it also means something. Love doesn’t disappear when someone does. Just changing the address.
When Diana talks about Zibby now, she goes back to everything, to China, to Thailand, to years of building a life in places far from home, this little beagle is at the center of everything, no matter what country they were in. Its absence is not proof that something is lost. This is a real proof of something. Something that mattered enough to leave a mark.
What I know now
If you’re in it right now, grieving a person or an animal or a chapter in your life that ended without warning, here’s what I learned going through it.
Don’t try to get to the other side faster than you can.
Grief does not respond to pressure. It appears whenever it wants, in a photo on your phone, as usual, that you didn’t even know you borrowed, on an ordinary Tuesday, for no particular reason. You can’t miss it. You can also let it come.
Say the names. Tell the stories.
This isn’t bullshit. That’s just what love does when it has nowhere else to go. Keeping stories alive keeps people alive, at least in the ways that still matter.
Pay attention to the small details, not the memories of the headline.
The specific ridiculous things. As Zibby treated the rules as purely theoretical. Just the way my dad laughed at something he genuinely thought was funny. These small details fill the void. They remind me that this was a real life, not just a loss.
Let the routine hold you together.
If you don’t feel like doing anything, the small everyday things, a walk, a meal, the regular form of an ordinary day, will take you further than you expect. Not because they fix anything. Because they keep you functional while you find your feet again.
And trust that life will return.
Different than it was, yes. But not smaller. There is room for grief as well as good things. This is true even if it doesn’t seem remotely possible.
Which doesn’t change
Diana’s WhatsApp photo remains the same.
Every message from him brings Zibby back for a moment. Those ears. That face. The absolute refusal to be anything other than exactly yourself. I’m glad I still have the photo. Time moves on regardless, but the people and animals we love live on in the stories we keep telling, the names we say out loud, the little things we carry forward without even realizing it.
Grief begins as a lack. Somewhere along the way, the handrail will take shape.
We continue because we do. Because life, as Diana said that quiet morning in our neighborhood, just goes on. And when we carry everyone we’ve loved and lost, without realizing it, we become a little more of who we really are.
What loss do you still carry that the world passed by too quickly?
**Names have been changed to protect privacy.
