“‘You were worth it, old friend, and a thousand times over.’” - Wilson Rawls, Where the Red Fern Grows

I can’t sleep. The house is too quiet without the click clack click clack of my shadow. It’s been a month and every night is quieter without you.

On these restless anxious nights, you would follow me to the other side of the house, jump up to me and snuggle close, your oversized ears tickling my nose.

The first time those ears tickled my nose was fourteen years ago, when you were handed over to me with a blue ribbon tied around his neck. A gift that keeps on giving is a line, until you receive one that gives you love, comfort, and joy every day.

And there were so many types of days, months, years. Through love, marriage, heartbreak, and divorce. Across six homes crisscrossing back and forth between three states chasing careers, dreams, and love. You were my constant in a decade and a half of learning that everything, even what I believed with all my heart was most enduring, was in the end lost. Still, I had the click-clacking of your steps following me through every end and every new beginning.

Is that why this grief runs deeper, and manifests in anger and withdrawal? Is it because you were the final thread woven through all those memories, the last living testament of all we’ve endured and overcame? That on the other side of your life, the place you occupied is now space to accept that everything has changed? The cornerstones of my life I had in place for love, home, family, and friends on the day you became mine are all gone. And even though they’ve been replaced by ones more solid and true, your passing caused the weight of this to push down when I was most weak.

For the first time in fourteen years, I know what the last bite of a sandwich tastes like. If we all had the same passion and determination in our life’s work as you had for food, the world would be a different place. More so if we all had your unconditional love. That’s a type of love that, as I get older, I begin to doubt it exists between two people. But you reminded me everyday it’s undying between a person and a dog, between you and me.

Thank you for being the only one excited enough upon seeing me after my first deployment to pee all over my uniform, and so happy after my second you needed to lay on my face for an hour.

Thank you for sitting on my lap for every paper I wrote for my English degree. I’m not sure you shared my enthusiasm for Virginia Woolf or Ernest Hemingway. But you stayed up with me, while I clicked the keyboard late into those nights.

Thank you for always being excited to go for a walk with me, regardless of the season or weather. You and I have made it through the figurative and literal storms together.

Thank you for tolerating me randomly lifting you up to the heavens like baby Simba while singing “The Circle of Life.”

Thank you most of all Copper, for on anxious nights such as this one, when you knew I needed you to be there, and you always were. You taught me one of the measures of friendship is to be willing to lose any amount of sleep when the other needs you.

When us boys moved in with my girlfriend and her daughter, you began reserving all his kisses for the girls. It was a joke among us that you didn’t have any more kisses for me. But in our final moments together, you gave me one last wet one on the nose.

After feeling for your heartbeat one last time, the vet whispered the truth in the most comforting way she could.

“He’s gone.”

Fortunately, I know that truth was a white lie necessary for that moment, because we’re from the generation that knows All Dogs Go to Heaven. And tonight you’re in my heart, and you’re on my mind. In the end you’re never lost. Click clack, click clack…