A year without your soul dog

It's been almost a year. since Justice crossed over the rainbow bridge. I honestly didn't know how I was going to survive losing him, but here I am. I think a lot of people in the early days of loss need to hear it from someone on the other side of the first year. Someone who made it. Someone who still cries, still reaches for their soul dog, still feels the weight of their absence every single day, and made it anyway.

Justice has been gone for almost a year now. And I miss him just as much as I did the day I said goodbye. That part didn't go away. What changed is that the grief became more manageable. Softer around the edges. Something I could carry instead of something that carried me.

But let me start at the beginning of this year. With the empty spots.

His place on the couch. The warm spot in my lap when I'd sit down. His favorite sunbathing patches on the back porch, at the top of the stairs, all of them just...empty. Those were the first things that gutted me. Those small, ordinary spaces that used to be so full of him.

I couldn't let go of his things. I still haven't. His food bowl is in the same spot it has always been. There are dried food spots on the wall just above it, and despite my desire to remove the millennial grey from my home, I have not painted over them. I couldn't bring myself to do it. Because painting would mean losing those spots. And those spots are proof he was here.

His medications are still above the fridge. I sleep with his blanket. I found his grippy boots in the car one day and just sat there for a moment, holding them. That is grief nobody warns you about. Not the loss itself, but the way they are woven into every corner of your life. And the fear, the very real fear, that moving anything means forgetting.

I couldn't risk forgetting.

In the early months, I had the rainbows. So many of them, the entire month of June, showing up like little love notes from wherever he had gone. I would see one and feel him so close that it almost didn't hurt as badly. Those signs carried me through some of the darkest weeks. I held onto them like a lifeline.

And then they stopped.

I couldn't feel him anymore. I chased that feeling for a long time after. In October, I set up his first ofrenda, something I had done for two years before for my other sweet fur babies I had lost. I waited for a visit. I felt nothing. Just silence where I had hoped would be filled with his presence. That particular hurt was its own kind of grief, losing the signs after they had already saved me once.

But here is what I didn't expect to find on the other side of all of that chasing. Peace.

Somewhere between then and now, something in me shifted. And now, coming up on a year, when I think about not feeling him close anymore, a part of me thinks: I hope you are having so much fun over that rainbow bridge that you don't have time to visit. I hope you are running and healthy. I hope you are warm and full and free. I'm taking care of things here. You can just watch.

That shift didn't come from nowhere. I got into therapy last year. I got on the right medications. I did the work, the real, unglamorous, necessary work of not pushing my grief down and powering through. And I let my girls see me do it. That part mattered more than I expected.

Showing them that a strong mama can fall apart and still get back up. That grief is what love looks like sometimes. Before Justice passed, we brought Scout home. I needed something to keep this family grounded, knowing I was losing my heart and my girls were losing another dear one.

I wanted the next dog in our life to know Justice, and I wanted Justice to know him. They had that time together. And Scout, who looks so much like him, it stops me sometimes, does little things that remind me of Justice in ways I can't fully explain. I'd like to think he left a piece of himself behind in our Scout. A way of staying close without staying.

I will say, grief doesn't go away in a year. I want to be clear about that. It just changes shape. It becomes something you learn to live alongside rather than something you are constantly surviving. The empty spots are still empty. The bowl is still in its place. I still cry, often, and without much warning.

But I also laugh when I think about him, too. I sit in spaces he and I would be in and just breathe. I talk about him to anyone who will listen, like he is still part of our story, because he is. He always will be.

If you are in your first weeks or months of this, I want you to know: it gets more manageable. Not smaller, not easier, just more manageable. And you are allowed to take as long as you need to get there.

I'm still getting there, too.

One day at a time.

Katrina