You are the whole story
The sound I miss most is the tags. That small metal noise from the hallway when she stood up and shook herself, which meant she had heard me put my keys down and was on her way. Twelve years of that sound. The house was much quieter afterwards than I expected it to be, and I had expected it to be quiet.
Here is the asymmetry nobody prepares you for. Your dog is a chapter of your life. You are the entire book of theirs. Every single thing that happens to them, you are in. There is no part of their life that you are not the main character of.
The days, counted
A medium-sized dog lives somewhere around twelve or thirteen years. If yours is three, you have roughly three and a half thousand days left. Two walks a day is seven thousand walks. It sounds enormous.
Now make her nine. You have about fifteen hundred days. Four more summers of lying in the grass. Four more winters of her refusing to go out in the rain and then going out in the rain. Maybe a hundred and twenty more baths, if you are the kind of person who counts baths.
The number falls off a cliff in the second half of a dog's life, and it falls quietly, because dogs do not complain and they do not slow down all at once. One year you notice she takes the stairs one at a time. You tell yourself she is being careful.
The walk you are about to take
I walked my dog for twelve years, mostly while looking at my phone. I want to be honest about that rather than pretend I was some kind of monk of the footpath. Thousands of walks, and I can describe perhaps thirty of them.
The ones I can describe are the ones where something happened — snow, a fox, the time she found a whole loaf of bread in a hedge and would not give it up. And the ones near the end, when the walks got short and we would just go to the corner and back, and I paid attention because I knew the number was small.
That is the only real lesson I have from twelve years of dog. Attention is what turns a walk into a memory, and attention is free, and I spent most of mine on my phone because I believed there would be thousands more walks. There were. And now there are none.
They do not know the number
This is the part that undoes people, so I will say it plainly and then move on. Your dog has no idea that any of this is finite. She is not saving anything for later. She does not have a bucket list. Every time you come through the door she reacts as though you had been gone for a year and might never have returned, and she will do this on the last day exactly as she did on the first.
There is something almost unbearable in being loved that way by something that cannot count. It also means you never have to worry that you are letting her down by having a normal Tuesday. The ordinary Tuesday, from her side, is the whole point. You came home. You sat down. She put her head on your foot.
What to do with the number, practically
Two things, and neither is sentimental.
First: take the photographs now, while she is well. Almost everyone I know has hundreds of pictures of their dog as a puppy and almost none from the last two years, because the last two years are when you stop thinking of her as new. The pictures you will want are the ordinary ones — her on the sofa she is not allowed on, her being completely unremarkable in good light.
Second: front-load the things she loves. If your dog is eight and has never been to the sea, the sea is not a next-year project. Beaches, rivers, the long walk in the woods that takes half a day — these are activities with a hard age limit, and the limit arrives sooner than the death does. A fourteen-year-old dog cannot do the woods. A ten-year-old dog can.
The last good year
People talk about the last day, and the last day is hard, and there is a great deal of writing about it already.
The thing I would tell my earlier self is to think about the last good year instead — the final twelve months where she can still run, still swim, still get up without thinking about it. That year passes without any ceremony at all. It is just a year, and it looks like all the others, and you only identify it afterwards.
Work out how many days you have left with yours. Then look at what is under your desk or on the sofa right now, and go and do the thing she likes, the stupid one with the tennis ball, the one you have done ten thousand times.
She will not know it is one of a countable number. Only you will. That is the deal, and it was always the deal, and it is still worth it.