31/10/2025
This is Grandma Monday.
In the photo she is eighteen years old. Her mouth is a little grey, the way driftwood is grey. Her body is smaller than it used to be, lighter, almost like her bones have begun to float. People always said she was beautiful and, even then, tired and old and held together by care and routine, she still was.
Monday was one of my Merit Dogs before Merit Dog was even a proper thing. She trained me, really. She shaped what I believe about dogs, about care, about responsibility. She came into every room like the sun through a window. She had opinions. She was certain of herself in a way that felt structural. You did not simply live with Monday. You moved around Monday, you consulted her, you adjusted the world to her comfort and she allowed you to do so because she loved you.
For most of her life she was fearless in that joyful, reckless way that makes you both proud and exhausted. She was the kind of dog who would announce herself to a space, make instant friends, launch into any game, vault over whatever was in her way, and then sleep like she had saved the world. She was bright, fast, busy. She learned everything quickly and expected you to keep up.
And then, slowly, she began to change.
Her first signs of cognitive dysfunction showed up around fourteen. At first it is easy to tell yourself stories. She is just tired today. She is just getting older. She just did not hear me. You do not want to believe you are watching her go somewhere you cannot follow.
It looked small in the beginning. She started losing interest in her favourite games, the ones that had always been ours. The silly chasey games in the hallway where she would pounce and grin and dare me to try to get past her. The tug game she used to insist on, shoving a toy into my hands and growling in that theatrical, delighted way that never once meant danger. One day I realised I had been holding the toy out to her, wiggling it, giving her every cue that used to light her up, and she just looked at it politely, then at me, and then she walked away.
That moment felt louder than it should have. Fun had always been her north star. When she started opting out of fun, I knew something was shifting inside her.
Then came the getting stuck.
Cognitive decline in dogs is often described in clinical language, things like disorientation and spatial confusion, but that is not what it feels like when you are living with it. What it feels like is standing two steps behind your best friend while she stands behind an open door and panics because she cannot work out how to move around it.
She would walk into the kitchen and end up behind the door, the door already open, nothing physically blocking her. She could have just taken one step to the side, curved her body, and come out. She had done that literally thousands of times in her life. But she would freeze. Her body would go small and tense. Her breathing would pick up. She would look at the gap like it was a locked gate. Sometimes she would whine under her breath, almost inaudible, like she did not want to bother anyone but she also did not know what to do.
So I would go to her. I would put my hand on her chest and say her name softly. I would move the door wider, even though it was already wide. I would shift my own body in a way that suggested a path, and then she would suddenly unstick, like a record catching the groove again, and trot out as if nothing had happened. Tail up. Problem solved. Everything fine. And I would smile and tell her she was clever, because in that moment she was. She had done a hard thing.
This is the part people do not always understand. You do not hurry them. You do not tell them they are being silly. You adjust the world so it keeps making sense.
Monday also started to stand and stare into mirrors. For long stretches she would look into a mirror or a dark window as if something there mattered and she was trying to catch it. Sometimes I wondered if she recognised herself and then lost it again, or if she thought there was another dog in the house that she could not quite reach. I used to watch her reflecting back at herself, both of them old and solemn and patient, and it felt like witnessing a conversation I was not allowed to join. But her eyes were vacant.
Her anxiety crept up too. This part broke me more than I expected. Monday had always been so confident. She moved through the world assuming that it should cooperate with her, which is an attitude I admired. To watch that certainty thin out was like watching the tide pull away from a sandbank you know is going to collapse.
She began to shrink into herself. That is the best way I can describe it. Her body posture got smaller. She tucked her head a little lower. She startled more easily at sounds she would have ignored. She paced at night sometimes, walking that slow loop of worry that so many older dogs walk, where you can tell they are tired but their brain will not let them rest. On walks, she would stop mid stride and not know how to get unstuck.
Part of this was cognitive change. Part of it was also her senses. She was losing her vision and her hearing. Sensory loss on its own can be disorienting and frightening. Imagine the world you have always read perfectly suddenly becoming unreliable.
Her hearing went patchy first. I would call and she would not respond or not hear me when I came home. Her brain simply was not processing sound in the same steady way it once had. Her sight softened after that. Her eyes started to cloud and she would miss things slightly to the left. I learned to approach in her field of view, to announce myself with touch before movement, to give her time to smell me and orient. Consent never stops mattering just because someone gets old.
All of these changes together made her unsure in a way she had never been. That confidence that had once felt built in, like part of her spine, was now something I had to lend her.
Caring for her in those final years taught me more about love than any joyful, easy day ever did. Love as maintenance. Love as ritual. Love as I will slow down so you can still recognise your life.
We put rugs on the slippery floors so she would not fall. We kept routines predictable. We turned on more lights at night so the shadows would not startle her. We spoke gently. We shortened outings when she told us she had had enough. We made sure she could still choose, even if the choices were now smaller.
I think people assume the end of life with a dog like Monday is only sad. Parts of it were devastating and scary. Watching the edges of her mind fray was like losing her in tiny pieces long before her body let go. There is a particular kind of helplessness that comes from knowing she is anxious and not being able to explain to her why she feels that way.
But there was also a strange, quiet beauty to it. Monday at eighteen was still Monday. She still had preferences. She still had a sense of humour. She still had that softness in her face when she looked at me, the look that says we have done a lifetime together and I know you. She still leaned her body against my leg in the way that meant stay here. She still relaxed, completely, when she slept. There is an honesty to that level of trust that I do not think language can reach.
And she was loved, fiercely, right until the end. That matters. It matters more than almost anything.
When I look at her photo now I see all of it at once. I see the dog who barrelled through life at full volume and taught me to keep up. I see the elder who needed help getting around an open door. I see the mind that wandered and circled and sometimes got lost behind a mirror. I see the body settling into age the way an old house settles in the wind. I see a soul who stayed gentle, even when the world got confusing.
Grandma Monday was eighteen in that picture. She is very missed.
