A period of grief.
I am grieving the loss of my beloved dog, Steffi. She started getting sick at the end of January, and things escalated quickly. We had to let her go on March 25, 2023.
Steffi atop Iyarhe Ipan
Her loss was such a huge blow to both Dan and I, in a way that I couldn’t fathom. There’s a giant hole in my heart, and a dearth of sound and spirit in my house. She’s the first animal I’ve ever owned until the end, and what this means is that I’ve experienced this kind of loss for the first time in my life. I am that inconsolable, adult child.
The ‘depth of despair’ I’m feeling parallels the amount of love I felt for Steffi. So hopefully, eventually, I can be grateful for this sadness.
Steffi was a huge part of our lives. I adopted her two months after moving to Calgary. I had to give up my cats when I moved in with Dan because he was so allergic to them. I needed her to fill the hole that Winston and Maya left, and to be my trusted friend in a foreign city.
Steffi was maybe 4-6 months old when we got her? She was so skinny I could see her ribs and haunches. She was rescued by AARCS because she was emaciated and because something had kicked her in the face and her eyebrow was split open. We had matching, invisible eyebrow scars, so it was meant to be.
Her other unique feature was her sideways, badly docked tail. No one knows what happened but the best guess is that she broke it in the wild, and someone docked it to fix it for her.
But after this rough start, it was all aces for her!
We had her for 10.5 years. She grew from 20 pounds to 76 pounds. (I found an email where I gleefully told my friend that probably she’d top out at 40 pounds. LOL).
Her infinitely boopable snoot.
I grew up with yappy, poorly trained dogs. Steffi was a marvel - she would sit, stay and come on command. She never rushed her food dish. And she preferred to talk instead of bark (she couldn’t bark as far as I know). She loved people, and she loved meeting new dogs, stealing their balls and playing her heart out.
She taught me a lot about trust.
She was the first dog I ever off-leashed. Her greatest joy was to hike. She loved getting to the top of mountains. If she wasn’t on the high point, she wasn’t happy. She loved to look perilously over cliffs which made my heart stop on more than one occasion.
And often this was followed by her sinking happily into a sludgy mud puddle.
She hated when I cried and preferred play-biting me over snuggling. She was 50% dog and 50% peanut butter. She was here for the joy and shenanigans.
And so, this wasn’t meant to be a eulogy or brief summary of her life, but here we are. I wanted to capture her here because she was so special, but also because I feel her loss so profoundly. I grieve for her and for myself.
