In August 2021, my golden retriever Tommy died of a heart attack at my feet.
He was six years old.
He had hemangiosarcoma — an aggressive cancer of the blood vessel walls that is tragically very common in golden retrievers.
The tumor on his heart ruptured without any warning, which led to an immediate heart attack.
He had a seizure at my feet while I was cooking myself dinner.
I rushed him to the hospital, driving as fast as I could, while he lay lifeless in the back of my car.
Twenty, maybe thirty minutes that I will never, ever forget for as long as I live.
He didn’t make it.
He was just there, and then he wasn’t.
He was my best friend, my confidant, my sidekick.
The kind of dog who stopped strangers on the street — not because he was loud or demanding or anything like that, but because he had this calm, grounded energy that people could actually feel.
Everyone felt it.
You couldn’t explain it.
You just knew you were in the presence of something extremely special.
There was no other dog like him.
I didn’t understand it at the time.
I was devastated in a way I hadn’t experienced before.
The kind of grief that doesn’t have language for it.
The kind that just sits in your chest and stays.
But looking back now, I think Tommy knew something I didn’t.
He was freeing me.
Within months of losing him, in January 2022, I moved to Los Angeles and started building the life I had always dreamed of.
The life I’m living today.
I’m not sure I would have made that leap with him beside me.
He was so much of my home that home would have followed me anywhere he was.
It would have been his birthday a few weeks ago.
I still think about him often.
Grief doesn’t go away. It just changes shape.
In the beginning, it’s sharp and constant — it’s literally all you can feel.
Then slowly, over time, it softens into something quieter.
Something you carry with you rather than something that carries you.
It doesn’t leave.
It just finds a different place to live inside you.
Fast forward five years, and I now have a beautiful husky-malamute named Sitka in my life, through my boyfriend who now lives with me.
We go on a long early morning walks together before I head to the gym.
Same calm.
Same regal energy.
Same quality of presence you can feel before you even reach him.
The same mannerisms.
The same ways of moving through the world.
They don’t just look alike.
They are alike.
Life has a mysterious way of making sense in the end.
You lose something that was everything.
And somehow, eventually, everything finds its way back to you...
just in a different form, at the right time, when you're finally ready for it.
Miss you, Tommy.
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This made me so teary.
My boy is genuinely my best friend. He is a constant joy in a life that can feel so heavy. And he is by my side almost every second of every day.
I find it hard to imagine a world in his absence. Even thought it will happen one day.
I’m so sorry that you lost your best friend. I can only imagine the pain and grief. It’s good that you could see the silver lining in time ❤️
My German Sheperd, Roxy, died of hemangiosarcoma in 2020 when she was 7 years old. It was extremely traumatic for me too. It was March and our vet refused to see her in person. He told me to give her pepto-bismol because I thought she was bloating. I drove the 90 minutes to the emergency vet so fast, thinking she was bloating and I was saving her life. Instead, I got the news that what I thought was bloat was actually blood from the rupture. I had just moved into a new town and at the same time I knew it was divine timing — freeing me for my next chalter. That knowing blended with heartbreak took me a long time to integrate but I totally get it ❤️🩹