On eleven years of love, the passing of childhood, and the places where memories remain.
My mother gave me Riley for my birthday when I was twelve years old.
After travel volleyball practice one afternoon, she told me we were going to look at cars. I believed her, though I can’t imagine what interest a twelve-year-old would have had in car shopping. In reality, she was taking me to meet a two-year-old Labrador Retriever who would spend the next eleven years being one of the strangest and most wonderful creatures I would ever know.
Riley had been a show dog until an overbite ended her career in the ring. I doubt she was particularly disappointed. Even then, she seemed to have very little interest in doing anything that required effort. I remember watching one of her sisters chase a ball while Riley lay nearby, observing the whole affair with complete indifference. At one point, the ball rolled directly past her. She didn’t so much as lift a paw.
For a Labrador Retriever, she had a remarkable lack of interest in retrieving.
After she was spayed, my mother and grandmother arranged to bring her home. They told me there were groceries in the car that I needed to help carry inside, but when I opened the door, Riley was waiting for me.
My mother missed my reaction. A family friend had stopped by while campaigning for an election, and she’d gotten caught up talking to him. I remember how disappointed she was that she hadn’t seen my face.
I think about that afternoon often now. I wish she had seen it, but more than anything, I wish I could see hers. I wish I could return to that doorway, to a time when my mother was alive and the greatest surprise imaginable was finding a dog waiting for me. I was too young to understand how much of life would eventually be spent longing for moments I had once considered ordinary.
At twelve, I thought I was getting a dog. I had no idea I was being given one of the last things that would connect me to my childhood.
Riley was an unusual Labrador, and anyone who knew her would agree. She hated swimming, despite belonging to a breed practically designed for it. She would wade into the water, perhaps indulge in getting her feet wet, but swimming was apparently beneath her. Walks were equally unappealing. She preferred wandering around our yard at her own pace, eventually settling beneath the apple tree in the corner of the yard where she could enjoy the shade. On warmer afternoons, she would stretch herself out in the sunshine, looking thoroughly exhausted by a day in which she had accomplished almost nothing.
She was a couch potato in the truest sense, although she could become surprisingly indignant if someone occupied her favorite spot.
She also had a personality that revealed itself in the most ridiculous ways. If you asked, “Riley, did you eat?” she would shake her head no and do a little dance, regardless of whether she’d been fed five minutes earlier. When she was especially excited, she would make these funny little chomping motions at the air, a habit so peculiar that I have never quite known how to describe it.
I also called her Thumper. Riley had this ridiculous habit of going through the motions of scratching herself without ever actually making contact. Her back leg would thump away as though she were tending to some terrible itch, except she wasn’t scratching anything at all. I never understood what she thought she was accomplishing, but it made me laugh every time.
There was something wonderfully endearing about a dog who seemed so entirely uninterested in being what a dog was supposed to be. She didn’t need long walks or elaborate adventures. She was content with a comfortable place to sleep, a yard to wander, and the occasional opportunity to convince someone she was starving.
I will never have another dog quite like Riley, and I think that is what I find so difficult to accept. It isn’t simply the companionship I miss, but the thousands of tiny, peculiar things that made her herself. I miss the shake of her head, her little dance, the ridiculous air chomps, and the way her back leg would thump away without ever scratching a thing.
There is no replacing those things. They belonged to her alone.
For eleven years, Riley lived alongside nearly every version of myself. She knew me as a little girl, watched me become a teenager, and remained as I grew into a young woman whose life looked very different from the one I had imagined. She was there for birthdays and graduations, for the ordinary afternoons that seemed to stretch endlessly ahead of us, and for the years when our family still felt whole.
Then my mother became sick, and eventually, she died.
I have written about losing my mother before, but there are parts of that grief I am still discovering. One of them is the attachment you develop to anything that belonged to the life you had before. A photograph, a familiar piece of furniture, an old birthday card. Things that once seemed insignificant become precious simply because they existed when the person you loved was still alive.
Riley was one of those connections, except she was living and breathing, wandering the same yard and sleeping in the same places she always had.
She had known my mother. She had heard her voice and lived in our home when it was still filled with the ordinary sounds of her being alive. She belonged to a time before hospital visits and funerals, before I understood that a house could remain standing while everything that made it feel like home changed.
After my mother died, Riley continued being Riley. She still slept beneath the apple tree, still claimed her place on the couch, and still insisted she hadn’t eaten. There was something comforting about her indifference to the enormous changes that had taken place around us. While I struggled to recognize my own life, she remained wonderfully familiar.
I hadn’t realized how much comfort I found in that familiarity until I was faced with losing her, too.
My mother had given me Riley as a birthday present, never imagining that one day her gift would become one of the last living reminders of the world we had shared. For years after my mother’s death, I could still look outside and see the same dog who had been there when I was twelve. I could still remember the afternoon we brought her home and know that some small part of that day had survived.
Now even that has changed.
Riley was thirteen when her body began to fail her. She had always had trouble with her hips, but over the course of a single weekend, her condition deteriorated so suddenly that I could hardly comprehend it. The dog who had spent her entire life choosing not to move very much could no longer move at all.
We tried medication, hoping it was something temporary. I kept imagining that perhaps she had pulled a muscle, that another day of rest would make a difference, that we might wake up and find her standing again. She was still eating and drinking, still looking at us with those familiar eyes, and I clung to those things as evidence that she might recover.
But Riley was in pain. She would try to stand and cry when her legs failed her, growing increasingly frustrated by a body she no longer seemed to understand. Watching her struggle was unbearable. I wanted to explain what was happening, to reassure her that we knew she was trying and that we would have done anything to help her.
There is a terrible helplessness in loving an animal who cannot tell you what hurts. You spend years learning their habits and understanding their smallest gestures, only to find yourself completely unable to answer the one question that matters most: how do I make this better?
I knew Riley was old. I understood that thirteen years was a long life for a Labrador, but I had somehow convinced myself that knowing this would make the inevitable easier to bear. It didn’t. I was still the little girl who had opened the door and found her waiting, and some part of me believed that if I loved her enough, I could keep her.
The decision to let her go was one I desperately wanted someone else to make. I kept searching for a reason to wait, another possibility we might have overlooked. Yet every time Riley tried to stand, I was reminded that my hope for more time was not the same as her having a good life.
I wanted her to stay, but I could no longer ask her to stay for me.
I wish I could say that understanding this brought me peace. Instead, I felt an overwhelming sadness that seemed to reach into places I had already spent years trying to heal. I had lost my mother, and now I was losing the dog she had given me. Two entirely different losses, yet somehow bound together by the same memories of home.
The house has felt terribly empty since Riley died. She was never a particularly noisy dog, but her presence had become so woven into our daily lives that I hadn’t realized how much space she occupied. I still find myself looking toward the places she used to sleep, expecting to see her stretched out on the couch or resting somewhere in the yard.
The apple tree is perhaps the hardest.
For years, it was simply where Riley liked to spend her afternoons. I never thought much about it. I would glance outside, see her lying in the shade, and continue with whatever I was doing. There was nothing remarkable about the sight, nothing that suggested it would someday become a memory I would ache to revisit.
Now I look at that same patch of ground and understand how much comfort there was in knowing she was there.
I miss the ordinary things more than I ever imagined I would. I miss asking whether she’d eaten and watching her shake her head no. I miss the ridiculous little dance that followed, her air chomps when she was excited, the way she earned her nickname Thumper without ever successfully scratching herself, and the sight of her sunbathing as though she hadn’t a care in the world. I even miss the way she would look at us when someone had taken her spot on the couch.
I would give anything to experience one of those afternoons again, without knowing it was something I would eventually lose.
Grief has a way of changing the meaning of ordinary things. A doorway becomes the place where you last saw someone standing. A chair becomes a reminder of who used to sit there. A patch of shade beneath an apple tree becomes almost unbearable to look at.
And perhaps the cruelest part is that the world continues as though nothing has happened. The sun still reaches the yard in the afternoon. The tree still casts its shadow across the grass. Everything remains exactly where it was, except for the one thing you keep expecting to find there.
I have thought a great deal about my childhood since losing Riley. At twenty-four, I am beginning to understand that growing older is not simply a matter of becoming someone new. It is also the slow disappearance of the world that first made you who you are.
The people who raised you grow older. The places you remember change. The familiar voices become memories, and eventually, even the animals who shared your childhood reach the end of their lives.
Riley had been with me through so much of that change. She was there when my mother was alive, and she stayed when my mother was gone. She belonged to both versions of my life, connecting them in a way I hadn’t fully appreciated.
Losing her feels like another door closing on a part of my life I can never return to.
I don’t mean that I have forgotten my childhood or that the memories have become any less real. I remember them vividly. I remember the volleyball practice, the ridiculous story about looking at cars, and the ball rolling past Riley while she watched with complete disinterest. I remember opening the door and finding her waiting, and how my mother wished she had seen my reaction.
What hurts is knowing that the people and animals who shared those memories with me are no longer here to remember them, too.
There is a loneliness in being left to carry a history that once belonged to more than one person.
Sometimes I wonder whether my mother knew just how much happiness she was giving me that day. I doubt she could have imagined that the dog she brought home for my birthday would someday help me endure losing her, or that I would come to treasure Riley not only for the animal she was, but for everything she represented.
My mother simply wanted to surprise her daughter with a dog.
And for eleven years, that dog made my life better in ways neither of us could have anticipated.
I find myself hoping there is somewhere for Riley to go now, somewhere beyond the pain and confusion of her final days. I hope, in whatever way such things might be possible, that my mother was there to meet her. I imagine Riley greeting her with one of those ridiculous air chomps, perhaps even doing her little dance in the hope of being fed.
I hope there is sunshine there, and a comfortable place to sleep. I hope there is an apple tree, although I suppose Riley would be perfectly happy with a couch.
Most of all, I hope she is no longer hurting.
I know these are things I cannot be certain of, but grief has made me more willing to find comfort in possibilities. I like imagining that somewhere my mother is laughing at the same strange dog she brought home all those years ago, while Riley continues to be entirely herself.
I miss them both more than I know how to explain.
I miss my mother, and the life we had when she was here. I miss Riley, who spent eleven years quietly making that life a little happier. I miss the girl I was when I first met her, before I understood how quickly the things we love can disappear.
Sometimes I wish I could go back to being twelve, to that afternoon when my mother brought Riley home, before I knew how much of life would be spent learning to say goodbye.
But I can’t. All I can do is be grateful that, for eleven beautiful years, I got to love a dog who was so entirely herself.
And now, when I look toward that little apple tree in the corner of our yard, I try not to think about the empty patch of grass beneath it. Instead, I picture Riley as she was on so many summer afternoons, stretched out in the shade, snoozing peacefully, without a single care in the world.
I imagine the sun slipping through the branches, warming her fur, and the gentle rise and fall of her breathing as she sleeps.
For a moment, she is young again. Her hips don’t hurt, and there is nowhere she needs to be. She is simply Riley, happy and comfortable in the little world she loved so much.
And I think that is how I will always choose to remember her.
Not as she was when I had to say goodbye, but as she was for all the beautiful years before it.
My sweet Riley, sleeping beneath the apple tree.