Blog No. 19 - These Quiet, Borrowed Days

There’s a quiet kind of heartbreak that comes with loving something you cannot save. It doesn’t arrive all at once, like the moments we see in movies. Instead, it settles in slowly between daily routines, in the pauses, in the knowing. It asks you to keep showing up, even when part of you wants to disappear.

It is very normal for me to hide during a period of crisis like this. To sit alone in a room and wallow in the grief that comes with having a pet that you cannot heal.  I could spend thousands of dollars but there is nothing that will help him come out the other side. This knowledge makes me want to pull the covers over my head and shut the world out, perhaps in the hope that it will turn out to be one of my night terrors.

But the fact is that it is not a nightmare, so I get up and make sure that I am remaining present in each day and not burying my feelings.  I sit with them each day.  Then Jinx and I sit in the sun and watch the lake and we walk around the yard.  He plays in the water and I just watch him, snapping photos and videos that I’ll mourn over later.  This is what the last few weeks have looked like for us in between meds several times per day and making meals that I coax him into eating.

Jinx naps on my lap in the sun on Easter Sunday 2026

And during all of this living and mourning, people have been showing up in little ways to ask what we need.  My requests have been simple.  All I’ve asked for is prayers. No one can give me what I most desire.  No one can promise me the added 5 years with our pup that I was sure we’d get.

Yet there are people who break through the quiet and show up with acts of love.

The texts asking, “How are you holding up?”

The flower arrangement that shows up offering a moment of sunshine on an otherwise cloudy day.

The snap of a perfectly framed picture of him playing in the water and sent to our phones.

The offer of dinner in with conversation and understanding, since we won’t leave him for more than a short time.

Or the giant IKEA bag filled with no less than 100 sheets of tissue paper and hidden toys that he literally dove into like the puppy he used to be.  Watching him unwrap that was the 20 minutes of sheer joy that we had no idea we needed, but someone absolutely knew we did.

And maybe that’s what I’m learning to hold onto in all of this—that even when there is no fixing what’s broken, there is still so much love to be given and received.

I cannot change what is coming. I cannot bargain for more time. But I can be here, fully, for every moment we have left.

And somehow, in the middle of the grief, that has to be enough.

Jinx enjoys Pewaukee Lake as the ice leaves - March 19th, 2026