“and when the time comes, to let it go”

in memory of the best dog

It was October of 2014. We’d just bought our first house, a manufactured home that sat on the outskirts of the little town of Alamosa, CO, and my husband decided that if we were going to be out in the country, we needed a dog. Enter, Samson.

I can’t remember exactly how we found the puppies for sale, but it was probably Facebook. What I do remember is that he cost us twenty five dollars and we picked him up in the Walmart parking lot. His puppy papers from the spay and neuter program said his name was “Pig-pen”, but that was quickly remedied. Having grown up with a rather stringent perspective on dog care, I had my ideas of what we needed, and I remember some back and forth about whether we needed to purchase a dog crate¹, but eventually we found all the necessary supplies and came home with the softest, sweetest pup.

We expected him to be huge, but we suspect the fact that he’d been fixed earlier than usual² meant his alleged mixture of Dane, Mastiff, Heeler and Shepherd never reached its full potential. He settled in at a respectable 65 lbs— big enough to be intimidating when we were out walking, but not a miniature horse. We brought him home when he was 12 weeks old and our firstborn was only 4 months old. They rolled around on our garish green carpet and shared chew toys. From the beginning he slid into our family to occupy his quiet, steady spot. Like all puppies do, he had his moments of naughtiness, but his instances of misbehavior were really few and far between. I remember that first year, strapping the baby into the carrier, putting my husband’s work coat over the both of us and heading out for a walk around 4 pm every day. The baby snoozed in the carrier and I worked on leash training and enjoyed the frigid sunshine. By spring I was back to running and Samson was my faithful companion, staying by my side except to bolt after the occasional jackrabbit.

Soon we would move, and move again. We spent six months living with family, where the poor dog was confined to the house for fear that he would disturb the backyard cats. To add insult to injury, he was subservient to a yappy white dog named Julie. That summer and fall we walked or ran four or five miles everyday, dog, baby and a very lost mom, around and around the lake, trying to maintain everyone’s sanity. He quickly gained stroller smarts, and learned that keeping his leash out of the wheels helped everyone.

He was surprised when the docile baby became a toddler and tried to ride him like a diaper clad jockey, complete with a fly swatter whip. After that, he learned to aggressively lick the offender and move away. Although he became a little wary of tiny people, learning to keep his distance, he never in ten years and five babies was more aggressive than to give the offending baby a deploring look, yawn in protest, and lick their face. He was also never sat upon again.

He lived for walks. His favorite (and mine) were the times he could run ahead off leash, only coming back to check in. He was always up for a run, and would go along with anyone who’d take him. In his heyday, he would lope along with one of my brothers in law for 10 miles — then come home to snooze or sit sentry in the front yard.

The dog moniker, Fido, is derived from the Latin “fidus”, meaning “faithful”. As a child, I begged and begged for a dog, and instead of the literary archetype I imagined, who’d follow at my heels and sleep at my feet, I got a spastic lab. He broke my heart by running away and eating things he shouldn’t have, and every time I left the house he got in trouble. I swore off dogs for a while after that. I’d had my heart broken by this unrepentant puppy, and I was done.

Samson was the dog I dreamed of, but never had. Somehow he knew exactly where the boundary lines were, and in all our moves, he only ran off once, never needing an electric fence or dog run. He knew who his people were, and he took his job seriously. He epitomized the faithfulness, the “fidus”, that is the best quality of dogs. Though I’ve certainly been frustrated by his nap time barking at UPS deliveries, I’ve also relied on his alert system and the reassurance of his steady breathing every time I’m home alone. His living room presence has enabled me to sleep on more than a few anxious nights.

When we moved to a ranch in Wyoming, where grizzlies and wolves ran through our backyard, he was the only reason I could let the kids play outside. I knew he would stay with them and alert us to anything we needed to know about. He loved the ranch life, and some of my fondest memories are seeing him sprint through those fields with joy.

While at the ranch, his short stint as “Uncle Samson” to the litter of puppies from our accidental rescue dog³ proved once again how good natured he was. And if I ever have any doubts about whether I loved him enough, I remember that we once spent an entire afternoon with my husband holding his head and me wrestling his man dog parts back to where they belonged so the circulation wouldn’t get cut off⁴.

In the end, he was just a dog.

And in the end, no living thing is “just” anything.

I don’t know if I believe dogs go to heaven, but what I do believe is that they show us something of God here on earth. The book of Romans declares that God’s divine nature and attributes are clearly seen through his creation, so why wouldn’t dogs be part of that? The best dogs are examples of what it means to be faithful, to love, to wait patiently, to protect fiercely, to forgive our absence, and to welcome us home joyfully.

Samson started declining rapidly this past week, and when we took him to the vet, his prognosis was bleak. We didn’t do anything wrong, but he’s old and it was only going to get worse. We’ve cried and cried, all the tears from everything else that’s happened in the last six months getting bundled into the concrete loss in front of us. It’s as if in the loss of this dog, all the other nebulous losses, big and small, have bubbled to the surface and given us a clear reason to be sad. Dogs give to us, even at the very end, I guess.

As I’ve grappled with accepting this loss, the ending lines of Mary Oliver’s “In Blackwater Woods” keep running through my head:

To live in this world,

you must be able 
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go. 

If there’s a doggie heaven, I think it looks like this field. And even if there isn’t, this picture is how I’ll remember him — an icon of joyful freedom, a gift from a good God.

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I know I promised an explanation of how

The Everything Free Life

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if you’d like to poke around. If you’ve never received a Friday newsletter from me and don’t remember signing up, it’s because you were only signed up as a subscriber to

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and I recently consolidated both subscriber lists. Next week I’ll provide instructions for how to opt in or opt out of content as you choose. For now, I ask for your grace, and your prayers for our family as we mourn our doggie friend. No one ever wants to have to make the call to put their dog out of pain, so I’m grateful for a vet who assured us it was not the wrong choice, and a tech who kindly told me she’d do the same for her dog.

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1. As with many other things, marriage is a constant lesson in all the assumptions of the “right way” to do things. For the record, I’m still a huge proponent of crate training puppies but I also can’t remember the last time we kenneled him in the house.

2. This is kind of standard for a rescue type situation, but most vets will tell you to wait ‘til they’re a year old.

3. This is a whole story in itself, but one of the cowboys got injured, had to go home and just left this dog… so we ended up with Hula. Having not had a female dog before, we didn’t realize how tenacious the other ranch dogs would be, and so, puppies. They were very fun, and a wee bit stressful. My husband has also told me I’m never allowed to have a pregnant animal while I’m also pregnant again 😂

4. It turns out that even if your dog is fixed, they can still get… excited… by a female in heat. We were horrified to find him in a predicament where it just wouldn’t go back in. We had to do something. After calling the vet, who, being very rural, was an hour plus away (it was also a weekend), she told us that we could do it, or she could. It would just be a matter of working on the blood flow and sort of shoving it back in there. Truly one of the more traumatic moments of dog ownership, but we couldn’t let him suffer. He was fine, minus the sheer indignity of the situation.