🐾 “The Dog Who Chose Me When I Needed Saving”
A recovery reflection for The66Voice
There’s a strange tenderness in watching a dog grow old. My girl is thirteen now. Her hearing is gone. Her eyesight is fading. Sometimes she just sits and stares at me, trying to place the world by the shape of my presence. And every time, it hits me in a place I don’t always know how to talk about.
But before she was an old dog… she was the dog who saved me.
I still remember the day I went to look at her. I walked in and stood there for a minute, trying to decide if I was ready for anything in my life to depend on me again. She was busy chasing a kitten — wild, goofy, full of life. Then she stopped, looked straight at me, and came running like she’d been waiting on me the whole time. She belled up on my feet like she belonged there.
And that was it. She chose me.
I picked her up, carried her to the car… and she puked in my hands on the ride home. That was her way of breaking me in. No warm-up. No easing into responsibility. Just, “Here you go — you’re my person now.”
I had just gotten sober. Both of my parents had died eight months apart. It was just me and her in a world that felt too quiet and too heavy. And somehow, this little dog — the one who threw up in my hands — became the reason I kept showing up. I had to feed her. I had to take care of her. I had to stay sober because she needed me alive.
People talk about recovery tools, and they matter. But sometimes God hands you something small and breathing to keep you tethered to life. Something that forces you to keep going when you don’t think you can.
Now she’s slowing down. Her senses are fading. And it breaks my heart… but it also humbles me. Because her aging means I’ve stayed sober long enough to watch her grow old under my care. That’s not a sign of me getting old — that’s a sign of grace.
She helped me survive my darkest chapter. Now I get to walk with her through her gentlest one.
And that, to me, is recovery — showing up, even when it hurts, because love taught you how.
