This might be the first you’re hearing of it, but I’m getting ready to embark on a new album cycle next week. Bringing in a new piece of work into the world after working incredibly hard on it for most of the last two years. But I feel like I can’t even really get into that until I write something else first. I’m not sure what this piece will be like yet because I feel too covered in grief goo to know the shape, but I feel incapable of moving forward until I swim around in it a bit first. You see, last week I had to unexpectedly say goodbye to my best friend of nearly 12 years. The goodbye was anticlimactic. I wanted a right-sized farewell to match the gravity of the friendship that had colored and cared for a hundred different versions of myself from 22 to 34. But we don’t get to choose what a goodbye looks like. So last week was my physical goodbye, and this writing can be part of the emotional one. A goodbye to Townes, the dog I barely remember a time before knowing.

I got Townes in Seattle, Washington while working at a veterinary clinic in 2014. I was living in a duplex with a small yard with my ex-husband and our three cats. I was around dogs every day at work and I wanted one so badly. Jory and I sent an email asking our landlord if he was okay with it, and when he said yes my search was unstoppable. I connected with a rescue out of Georgia that sent hordes of rescue pitties to the PNW where their chances of adoption were higher, and when I saw a picture of a little, wrinkly, brown and white baby, I knew he was going to be mine.

Townes acclimated to our cat-filled home quickly, and I took my new role of dog person very seriously. I had grown up with dogs and had been around puppies, but Townes was my first My Very Own Dog. After a week or two of leaving him home when we went to work, our upstairs neighbor let us know Townes might be suffering from some separation anxiety. She was particularly sensitive to it as her own dog, Ruby, had fairly recently jumped out of her second story apartment window due to anxiety and had been treated at the vet I worked at. I became very focused on easing Townes’ anxiety. I enrolled him in local puppy classes and began bringing him to work with me. We’d walk down Leary Way by the shipyard and the Fred Meyer to Ballard Animal Hospital every morning. Jan Anguiano, the chain-smoking, big-hearted, grumpy angel who worked the front desk with me would squeal his name every morning when we walked in and feed him treats. He would wiggle and kiss her. I learned Jan passed away a few years ago and I still miss her terribly. She would shit talk the new Seattle tech bros moving in and changing the neighborhood.

Me and Townes and Jory spent weekends at the dog park with my friend Monday and their dog Cowboy (Lou), and spent evenings exploring our new city together. Townes’ stayed pretty anxious, especially in the car, but we’d still try to take him camping and exploring new areas in Washington. His love of other dogs and my insatiable need to save them all lead us to adopting another pittie from the same rescue a few months later, my sweet little Ripley Sue.

In the summer of 2015 when our landlord told us he would be selling our duplex soon and we needed to move, it became abundantly clear that finding a home in Seattle with our three cats and two pitbulls would be impossible at our customer service salaries. I was also incredibly homesick for Utah, so we decided to move back and save up for a bit and find a place with a yard where we’d be closer to our families.

When we got back to Utah, Jory took the cats and stayed with his parents, and I lived with my dad and stepmom for about six months with the dogs so we could save up a little money for a down payment on a house in Salt Lake. I was young and don’t think it ever crossed my mind once how much responsibility a dog is, let alone two. I was barely 23 and thought I had everything figured out.

We bought our little house in Salt Lake City in February of 2016. It was tiny, but the yard was enormous and perfect for the dogs. I really can’t believe how peaceful we made 600 square feet work for two humans, three cats, and two young dogs, but for a couple of years, everything made so much sense to me there. In 2018 I got divorced. Because it was my enthusiasm that led us into getting the dogs in the first place, it made sense for us to split and have me keep the house and the dogs together. Jory was never really a dog guy and I understood.

In the following couple of years, navigating my own big divorced life and new found freedom, I don’t think I was very aware of Townes’ growing anxiety. He was always intense and his separation anxiety never really chilled out, but it started showing up in new ways at this time. He was never great at the vet, but it became impossible to take him without complete sedation for everything from checking his heartbeat to trimming his nails. He didn’t trust anyone who came into the house, especially when it was a new romantic partner. He would follow people I brought home around and developed a deep distrust of hugging and kissing (lol). At the time I saw him as a quirky buzzkill.

On my 28th birthday party, things came to a violent head. During the party, Townes’ anxiousness reached an uncontrollable peak that led to him attacking Ripley. I still can’t think of the events of that night without feeling a bit choked up. I felt like I’d traumatized my friends and put myself and my dogs into a dangerous situation. They’d never fought before that night but Ripley and I ended up in the emergency vet the morning after - her with a deep wound in her neck that required surgery and long-term recovery care, and me with deep wounds in both of my hands and yellow bruises up both of my arms. I remember few more hopeless-feeling times in my life, mopping up spilled beer and blood from my floor in the days that followed. I felt lost and ashamed and scared of Townes in a way I never had before. I saw his anxiousness as something I needed to fix and I saw my home as a violent place I no longer wanted to occupy.

A few months later, I had moved into my then partner’s home with both of my dogs and my cat Rudo, but couldn’t bring myself to trust Townes again for a long time. I knew it wasn’t his fault. I knew he was just a dog reacting to his big dog feelings in a big dog way. But my new normal became stress and baby gates. I didn’t let them be in the same room together again until years later. I put Townes into obedience training again and got him on anxiety medication through the vet. I prioritized him and learned how to observe him differently - how to advocate for him and understand how my behavior had been so distressing to him for so long.

When I moved back into my home in early 2021, I found comfort in the new normal, splitting my tiny house into two with baby gates. I found comfort in having to take two separate dog walks every day (I wrote In The Garden, By the Weeds during this time.) Though I started to feel far away enough from the violence of that birthday party, I never let myself fully set down the worry that something like that could happen again until Ripley passed away in 2022. When she died and I put the baby gates away, I was heartbroken to lose that angel of a dog, but I also realized how loud the incessant hum of stress was that I had grown accustomed to by continuing to have them both in the same home. In Townes’ training, my friend Jules that worked with us told me that Townes’ main issue was just how much he loved me. He didn’t know how to share me. He didn’t want to. When Ripley died, and Rudo the cat passed a year later, Townes comforted me in those losses, but also suddenly had the opportunity to blossom as an only pet.

Before 2023, I loved Townes, but he was not a consistent comfort. He was difficult. He was stressful. I was ashamed of the way that I loved him - careful and fearful. I know that my own anxiousness fueled his anxiety, but I didn’t know how to help it. But from 2023 to now, I had the absolute privilege of getting to know a completely different dog than the one I had known before. In our last three years together, Townes became my whole world. He aged into a perfect beast. He finally had what he always wanted - me, completely to himself. Our routines became each others. We spoke a new language, just the two of us. His demeanor changed, he became trusting and playful. He slept so much more and cuddled more intensely. We learned every street in our neighborhood and became friends with every dog in every yard. My neighbors learned his name and he leisurely checked every inch of our local park on the daily.

In December of 2024, Townes tore his ACL and had to have surgery. The recovery was long and brutal - I wrote about it in a newsletter - but it brought us even closer. It was also the first time his mortality was front and center for me. I cried while I held him as he whimpered from the surgery anesthesia that week because for so long before then, I would imagine how much more simple my life would be without him and his challenges, but for the first time I didn’t want to imagine that anymore. He had become my comfort. My safety. This creature that once brought so much stress and fear and anxiety was now my go-to for easing it. When I’d travel, I’d look at pictures of him constantly, counting down the minutes I could be home again with my dog. He helped me rebuild my home into a place I wanted to be. He helped me rebuild myself into someone I wanted to be, someone to be counted on and protected and cared for. For so long I had been afraid of being alone, but when I had the love of this stinky guy, I never was. I learned how to find comfort and peace in solitude because of him.

Last Saturday, Townes woke me up like he did every morning. He stopped sleeping in my bed with me most nights a few years ago as he’d gotten too sensitive to my body heat, but every morning when he’d sense I was waking up, he’d come into my room and wait for me to ask him to come up. He lifted his self up onto the bed and torpedoed his nose into the pillows and “do his dives.” I got out of bed and let him sleep another hour in my spot in the blankets until he got up and asked for breakfast. We had a big, long, old man walk where I barely moved and he demanded to sniff every scent. He ran in the backyard and sniffed every dandelion and barked at the squirrels. We went to bed that night like normal, until a few minutes after I turned the light off he came in to tell me something was wrong. I rushed him to the vet not understanding the gravity of the situation until a couple hours later when the vet told me that some unknown cancer inside of him had ruptured and there was nothing that we could do. I held my phone in my hand. It was 1:30 in the morning and I didn’t know who to call, but I also knew I couldn’t say goodbye to him alone. My phone buzzed with a text from Axel, my teenage cousin who Townes loved, telling me something unrelated. They were there in 30 minutes.

We told him we loved him and I thanked him for everything. For teaching me about patience, and second and third chances, and the gift of getting older and letting someone love you so big. For teaching me about change and dedication and responsibility. For showing me forgiveness in action. For teaching me the importance of so many big stretches, for structured and consistent playtime, and stopping to smell every flower. I thanked him for all the times I thought I couldn’t make it but always did because someone had to take him for a walk in the morning. I thanked him for the sound of his breathing that had gotten louder as he’d aged, that lulled me to sleep like a baby every night. The sound of his breathing that Jordan recorded last time he was in town and plays at end of the last song on our new album that we’ll be releasing this summer. We didn’t know how much that would mean to us so soon.

I don’t know yet how to be in such a quiet home without his constant snores, but I do know that being loved like that has changed me so deeply that I’ll never forget how it sounds. I love you, Tinto. Thank you for being my dog.