Goodbye, Black Dog

Written for a good friend

Background music while reading: “Hello Black Dog” by Matt Maltese

Tuesday, July 21, 2026

I am not a dog person. I do not pet them when I pass them on the street. I am not someone who takes their dog in the car, who really thinks about their dog very much at all. Sometimes, I feel like it makes me an evil person. I like dogs. I’m not a dog person.

I did, however, become an Ace person. Ace, the 12 year old black lab. Ace, who ate full tennis ball covers and pooped them out in the yard. Ace, who has eaten so much that should have killed him and didn’t. Ace, who we think was going blind at the end of his life. Ace, who I didn’t care for when we adopted him. Ace, who failed his Leader Dog test. Ace, with a chipped tooth and too much drool. Ace, who loved attention and being loved on. Ace, who made a deep and quiet impression on me in a time of needing deep and quiet companionship. Ace, who I’d call a friend.

Ace died this morning. We found out he had cancer a few months ago — terminal, growing in his shoulder. Pain medication and close monitoring bought him six extra months of life, but you cannot buy time twice.

Never been much of a hugger either. Ace continued to prove me wrong.

I don’t even know how it started. Like I said, when we adopted him I disliked him. He was too energetic, too loud, too busy eating our food and making messes I was forced to clean as a moody teenager. I found him inconvenient to my life. And then we moved houses, the first dog died, and we all seemed to grow up a little bit and realize what was happening. My mother would tell you that it felt like one day, out of nowhere, I became “obsessed” with Ace.

I remember feeling differently toward him after our first family dog died. I felt so terrible that he was confused for a bit, that he seemed visibly less energetic, that he had to be the dog that stayed. Around this time, I coincidentally started to spend more time alone with him; outside in the yard, writing in the den, watching movies in the living room after everyone else went to bed. I also started to notice myself become more of a homebody, as my relationship with my mental health began to stretch and take a new shape.

The thing about Ace was that he was just there. When you spend a lot of time in a house feeling like you aren’t really all “there,” it becomes very important that you have someone or something that does. Ace laid beside me when I came home from college for two weeks, struggling intensely with my mental health. Ace listened as I talked to myself, laid with me in the backyard, sat close as I cried on the bathroom floor. He showed me companionship — specifically during a time where I thought I had to explain things perfectly in order to be fully understood, that I had to be understood to be properly cared for.

The talented Matt Maltese has a beautiful song titled “Hello Black Dog.” To me (and, after some research, Google) the song is about reckoning with depression/anxiety/looming thoughts and feelings of the past. The “black dog” is something you work to coexist with — not hate, not banish, not “fix,” but just exist alongside. This song — and season of my life during which it hit the hardest — moved me so deeply I actually got a tattoo of a dog on my upper arm. Something I carry with me, and something that doesn’t have to hurt.

Ace slept at everyone’s feet during family dinner, he let me give him a few baths without complaining. He laid with me in the yard. He walked off-leash with my dad. In his final years of life, he didn’t really go anywhere besides the vet, the kennel when we left for vacation, and the field across the street. He has been a witness to all of our lives for 12 years. He put up with too much and got away with the same amount. He cheated death multiple times, and he deserved to win; we gave him enough grief for snatching our lunches off the counter, for trying to run away, for barking and throwing up and living loudly.

Last night, Ace and I spent some time in the backyard — a place I’d like to say we both love. Ace has historically loved attention of any kind, so after I told him we loved him and didn’t want him to be in pain, I was almost shocked to watch him get up and limp to the back door. I think he was giving me permission to be fine with the fact that nobody really knows when it’s appropriate to put your dog down. Or maybe his back just hurt from the ground and he wanted his bed again. Either way, he walked over to the back door and did not look back for me.

My first impression of Ace is not too far from my final one: he always had a lot of love to give, we just had to give him somewhere to put it. I regret the times I yelled at him, I cherish the times he wanted to put his head into my lap. He proved me wrong in some pretty good ways. He wanted to be loved, and, though we can be a fairly dramatic bunch, I think we did alright by him.

I will probably, hopefully, love another pet deeply one day. But never exactly again like this. There has been something special about me and this black dog. He knew a lot more than I was giving him credit for. I cannot imagine all the secrets he is the keeper of, all the things we forgot and remembered because of him. He held onto a lot for us. I hope he lets go.

The dear Ace in his favorite place, pain-free forever. 2014-2026