Diego the dog was born sometime in April of 2011. A precise date was never recorded. He grew up in a pack of dogs consisting of his mother, father and grandfather. They were part of a loving family headed by single mother Pascal.

Diego was a Lassie-like Scottish Collie with some Bernese Mountain dog ancestry. He had medium-long hair and a thick white bushy collar. Whenever he was out and about on a walk, he would draw the adoration of passersby. "What a beautiful dog" they would all remark. And he was.

Diego's timid and submissive nature contrasted with his respectable size and weight. He was frequently the target of extreme violence by his domineering father. On one occasion, he needed to be hospitalized with severe bite marks to the face inflicted by his dad. In the aftermath, he lost most of his vision in one eye, and with that also the ability to perceive depth. This manifested itself in his total inability to catch treats out of the air.

In addition to her role as the dog pack matriarch, Pascal was the primary caregiver to her disabled teenage daughter Amber. In December of 2017, the family intended to move into an apartment equipped with all the necessary amenities to facilitate Amber's care. The catch was that they were only allowed to take two of the four dogs with them. Pascal made the tough decision to keep Diego's mom and grandfather, and find new homes for the other two dogs. Diego's dad found a new home with Pascal's adult son. Pascal decided to find new owners for the now six year old Diego through Facebook.

This is where our lives intersected.

Late 2017, my girlfriend and I were on the lookout for a pet. We had just completed the renovation of our small house, thereby creating more space than we could fill with just the two of us. In addition, my childhood pet cat had passed away in November, and I yearned for a new furry friend to alleviate my grief. The time felt right. I never had a dog before, but due to my girlfriend's allergies, it was the only option. We were still in the phase of discussing when and where we would start looking for a puppy, when we encountered Pascal's post on our feed.

Adoption was not on our radar, but the dog in the picture looked cute and they were giving him away or sending him to the shelter. The angle at which the picture was taken gave my girlfriend the impression it was a small dog, which is what she preferred. I was quite sure it was a big dog, which is what I preferred. We looked at each other and decided it wouldn't hurt to reach out and ask whether we could check out the dog.

On December 10th, we drove over to Pascal's new apartment to meet the dog of ambiguous size. Pascal and Diego arrived at the same time. The dog burst into the room. It was barking, panting, racing around, and jumping up at us. We were not prepared for stressed-big-dog-energy. And I was right: it was a big dog. My girlfriend was trying her hardest to hide fear of this wild animal jumping up at her, panting in her face.

After a bit of small talk with Pascal about her dogs, Diego had calmed down a bit. I thought my girlfriend and I would go home and discuss our impressions before making a decision. Pascal clearly had a different idea about the intent of this gathering, and just handed over the leash.

So it was that we took home a big panicking dog, after meeting him for the first time 20 minutes prior. I sat with the dog in the back seat, holding on to the leash, trying desperately but unsuccessfully to keep him calm, while my girlfriend felt more comfortable in the front driving. During that drive, a snowstorm began.

We were completely unprepared. We didn't have dog food (Pascal ensured us he also ate pasta). We didn't prepare a place for him to sleep (Pascal said he slept anywhere). We didn't know how to handle this animal.

At home, the dog was restless. He panted heavily and drooled all over the floor. Whenever one of us got up, he followed us to smell our privates and butt. As my girlfriend was still afraid of this big dog, she unsuccessfully tried to evade him. After just a few hours, she insisted we should take him back to Pascal as the dog was driving her crazy.

I advocated for patience. We agreed we would try to keep him for a night and reevaluate in the morning. The dog was clearly stressed and maybe things would improve on their own. It seems I had built up enough rapport with the dog during our drive home that he spontaneously decided to sit on my lap, which was captured in our first picture together.

The first night was a disaster. We had decided that the storage room at the back of our house was a good sleeping location for a dog. This was wrong. With hindsight, it was obvious that expecting a dog to sleep peacefully after ripping him away from his family, taking him to an unfamiliar location, and leaving him alone in a dark room with the door closed, was an exceptionally bad idea. The dog wailed and barked all night. We heard sounds of things breaking and falling. We went to check on him multiple times every hour to try to calm him down. But a few seconds after leaving the room he would start all over again.

In the morning, the floor of the storage room was covered in drool and a bit of blood. He had small wounds near his mouth and his front paws from attacking the furniture around him. He had chewed off part of the door frame and ripped up a gym mat. He was elated when we opened the door.

That was it, we were going to take him back to Pascal. Not because we were angry with the dog, but because it was clear we were bad owners who were in way over their heads. He was getting hurt in our care.

And yet at the last moment we decided against it. Somehow, we'd already bonded with Diego. We vowed to do better and try again.

We got him a big crate the next day and read up on crate training. The crate started in the storage room, but quickly migrated to the living room after we realized Diego simply preferred to be closer to our bedroom. As Diego never slept in a crate before, it took multiple nights of me sleeping on the sofa besides him before he was comfortable there. Eventually we got him to sleep peacefully in the crate 95% of the time.

Unfortunately, the other 5% of the time he would go bananas during the night for no apparent reason, attacking the crate and wounding himself. We ultimately gave up on forcing Diego to sleep in the crate after he got a stomach bug, and we woke up to find the crate and the book shelf behind it full of dog excrement. That particular morning, I was very late for work. After the poop incident the crate was replaced with a mat, and not much later Diego discovered that the couch was the superior sleeping spot. We covered our couch in rags, and it remained so until the day he died.

When we were with him, Diego was the sweetest dog. After the first few days he was completely at ease around us in our house. He would constantly ask for cuddles and belly rubs. He would hang out, sleep, grunt, snore and stretch across the floor.

We taught him how to play like a dog. At first he did not understand what he was supposed to do. Waving a dog toy past his nose and chanting ooga-booga nonsense at him to make him excited just elicited confused looks. Within a few months, after putting effort into dog school and using toys that dispensed treats, we got him to play tug of war and even fetch. Old dogs can indeed still learn new tricks.

He taught us the joys of walks and hiking. Diego refused to go to the bathroom in our yard, so we developed the habit of taking him on three to four medium to long walks every day. Daily walks started small and expanded as we got into better shape and bored of the same routes. We came up with code names for the different walks to communicate where we'd gone: the new district, the horses, the corn, the angry man, ...

On weekends we got into the habit of doing long hikes with the three of us. The hikes became even longer during the COVID pandemic, when there was literally nothing else to do. Eventually we took Diego with us on walking holidays in neighboring countries. This would have been unimaginable without Diego, as we were mostly sedentary before he arrived in our family. Through all our walks and hikes, we discovered all the beautiful hidden spots in our area.

Most of the walking duty fell on my shoulders, especially when it was dark or when the weather was bad. When it was cold and rainy, walking sucked. But when the skies were clear, and I was walking on dirt roads through silent corn fields and beneath the stars, I experienced a unique kind of peace. When things got hectic at home, or I was emotional, the walks provided solace. Not that problems were ever resolved by a walk, but time and distance to clear the head help to reevaluate situations with a better state of mind.

I also started taking Diego running. He never got the pacing down. At the start he would be over excited and sprint like a maniac. After the first kilometer he lagged behind. As he got older he stopped sprinting, but until a few weeks before his death he could still run fast enough to keep up with me on a bike.

We tried to take Diego on all the holidays we could, but sometimes it was not possible. Finding accomodation that accepts dogs, especially big dogs, is fiendishly hard. This is why most people with dogs just go camping. Luckily, we could rely on the mother of my girlfriend to provide Diego with a second home.

Diego was a quiet dog. This had benefits and drawbacks. He rarely barked at other dogs unless barked at. He did not bark at visitors in our house. He was quiet at night. Unfortunately, he also did not let us know when he got sick at night and needed to go outside. We woke up to feces on the kitchen tiles multiple times, always on the worst possible days. Restricting his diet to the most bland dry dogfood minimized the problem.

In addition to poop events on the floor, we did not anticipate the additional cleaning work that Diego would generate. When it was rainy, Diego got wet and muddy. As he dried, he would spread sand and other debris all over the floor.

Every day of the year he shed an enormous quantity of long soft thin hair, which ended up literally everywhere. Despite daily vacuum cleaning, walking barefoot in our home became an icky matter after Diego joined our family. The silver lining was that a house that is never clean turned out to be great preparation for kids.

The biggest challenge we faced with Diego is that we couldn't leave him alone in the house. It remained a daily disaster for years. The diagnosis: separation anxiety. Pascal never mentioned this to us, as she never noticed it herself. Before he came with us, Diego had always been in the company of other dogs and never learned how to be by himself.

Whenever we left him alone, even for 10-20 minutes, he would drool all over the floor from stress, scratch at the door like a maniac, bite the door handle to try to escape, and drag everything he could reach onto the floor. At the time, we both needed to leave the house to go to work on a daily basis. This went just as well as one might expect. Luckily he never deliberately destroyed furniture like some other dogs with separation anxiety do.

When we first got him, Diego didn't know how to climb stairs. He taught himself just to be able to check out our bedroom when he was alone and panicked. We found dirty dog paws and drool on our pillows and sheets on multiple occasions. However, he never considered he did not know how to go back down the stairs. This meant that he got himself stuck upstairs every day, further exacerbating his anxiety. Carrying a big struggling dog weighing 20 kg down a steep narrow flight of stairs became our daily dance with injury and death.

We experimented with the wildest measures to protect both the house and the dog. We had an elaborate routine to prepare the house before we left to minimize damage. We installed a doggy cam so we could observe his doings remotely, and even speak to him to try to calm him down. We put a bitter paste on the door handle to discourage him from biting into it. It did not work, but did inadvertently prank multiple visitors who were trying to leave our house. We tied a GoPro camera around his neck in an attempt to figure out what triggered him. We installed a child safety gate to prevent him from climbing the stairs. After he learned to jump over the safety gate via the piano, we eventually managed to teach him how to go down to the stairs. The main reason we started taking a 6.5 year old dog to dog school is that we read that teaching discipline could improve general behavior.

Curing the problem required medication, dog therapy and a strict regiment of progressive desensitisation exercises. We made progress on the problem but never completely solved it. Instead, circumstances simply improved for Diego.

From late 2018 until September of 2019 I wrote the manuscript of my PhD thesis; the majority of this work I did from home, which Diego strongly appreciated. He thanked me by keeping my feet warm while I was writing.

In early 2020, the COVID pandemic broke out and my girlfriend and I were both affected by the first lock downs. These were arguably the happiest years for Diego, as both of his new owners were home all the time and frequently took him on aforementioned long hikes to pass the time. When the COVID pandemic receded I stayed in remote and hybrid roles. On days when we both had to leave the house, we would take Diego to the dog daycare owned by Linda. In his final three years, Diego was a regular and warmly welcomed visitor in the house of Linda and her daughter.

In 2021 we moved to another house in a quieter neighborhood, and Diego's anxiety improved markedly. We never really found out whether the reason was the house, or the fact that he was growing old and a bit deaf.

In 2020 I got married to my girlfriend during lock-down, and in 2022 our first daughter was born. Diego was not very interested in the baby, and increased his distance from us.

Before and during the pregnancy, he would regularly fall asleep on my wife's lap while they were both hanging out on the couch. After my daughter was born, he preferred to stick to his own side. It was as if he felt he now came in second place and was giving us space.

Not that he completely ignored us either. While I was working, he preferred to lie on the floor one meter behind my chair. Occasionally he would still meander over to my desk, requesting head scratches.

As my daughter learned to crawl and then walk, Diego began to perceive her as a threat to his own safety. Luckily, he always chose flight instead of fight. The old dog would fall asleep in the most inconvenient places, transforming into an immovable object that blocked door doors or obstructed walkways.

Yet when the toddler approached, he would jump up startled as if he'd heard a gunshot, and hide in a safe spot. When my daughter came close to turning two, the two foes buried their hatchet.

In his final years, Diego started suffering from minor health issues associated with advanced age. Dismounting the couch required willpower and effort, especially in the evenings after a long nap. Occasionally we would scare us with a weird hacking cough, which often produced little drops of slime. He was diagnosed with chronic bronchitis; the vet told us it wasn't something to be hugely worried about.

Late 2023, we noticed he would sometimes leave behind streaks of bloody snot in places where he'd slept. X-ray images of his nose revealed nothing out of the ordinary. Medical examination did find advanced tooth decay and a small cut on the side of his dry nose. He was operated on his teeth and we received some ointment to lubricate the nose. The vet said that, while this was probably the last time they could anesthetize him, he was in great shape for an old geezer and would probably last another two years.

Despite his various ailments, Diego still seemed to enjoy life to the fullest. He still jumped up to go on long walks (except in the evenings). He still wanted to smell all the smells and raised his leg everywhere. He enjoyed eating his food, though he did so more carefully than when he was young. We would run anyone over for a treat. People on the street were always surprised to hear about his age.

The bloody snot went away, but eventually returned. This happened a few times, so we didn't think much of it. But after his walk on the evening of Friday the 12th of April, 2024, blood started pouring from Diego's left nostril. Within a few minutes, the kitchen looked like a murder scene. There were puddles of blood on the floor, as well as bloody paw prints from him walking through them. There were blood spatters on windows and walls, as he sneezed without relief to clear his nose of the blood. We were mortified and called the emergency vet, but they said they couldn't do much and it would stop on its own. After 15 minutes, it did stop. We spent the evening cleaning, not yet fully realizing this was the beginning of the end.

On Saturday, Diego had no nosebleeds, but on Sunday's morning walk he sneezed and it started all over again. Not realizing the predicament he was in, I tried to continue our walk, but a small distance further he collapsed from exhaustion. My wife came to our rescue with the wheelbarrow. We loaded him into the truck and went straight to the emergency vet. After a brief examination, she recognized the symptoms of severe blood loss but otherwise found him to be in good health. She administered two injections to stop bleeding, but made it clear this was not a cure. She could not look into his nose to find the origin of the bleeding; this would require us to take him to a specialized clinic. Just to figure out what was wrong, they would have to put him to sleep again and operate. He probably would not survive the ordeal.

What was his prognosis then? The vet said that if he continued to bleed, he would eventually get anemia. It dawned on us we might have to say goodbye to Diego sooner rather than later.

On Monday Diego mostly slept to recover. He only took a few steps outside to pee. On Tuesday he seemed revived and energetic. We went on three short walks, which proved to be his last. There were no nosebleeds on either of these days.

On Wednesday morning, the 17th of April 2024, I woke up at 5:00 to the noise of Diego scratching the bottom of the stairs. When I turned on the light, I saw a small puddle of blood and a distressed Diego. Suddenly, he sneezed, and the carnage began anew. It was worse than anything I had seen before. I sat on the floor holding his head while he bled for longer than an hour. As he was losing blood, I saw him become weaker by the minute.

At 7:00 I woke up my wife. We had to take him to the vet. After going over all our options for the 10th time, we came to the realization that this day would be the day we would have to let him go. My wife called and made an appointment at noon.

We cried all morning over what was about to come. For hours, we pet and hugged our stinky old dog with blood stains in his fur. We gave him entire bags of treats. Still there was a voice of doubt. What if the vet decided it wasn't time yet? We'd look real foolish then.

At 11:30 it was time to go. Diego managed to drag himself to the car, and I lifted him into the truck. This was the last ride.

When we arrived on the parking lot, Diego knew something wasn't right. His final act of defiance was to take a massive dump right in front of the entrance of the practice. We used our last doggy bag to clean it up.

After a short examination, the vet came to the conclusion we feared. It was time to say goodbye. She prepared the injections. There, on the table where he would die, my wife took the last picture of Diego and me together.

We whispered in his ear that we loved him and we wished him farewell. After a first injection, Diego went to sleep with his eyes open. After the second injection, I felt his breathing and heart stop. The light left his eyes. Then our old sweet smelly dog was gone.

It's been a few weeks now since he died. For a number of days his absence in the house was painful. We cleaned up his eating and sleeping areas, but they remain empty. Vacuum cleaning the floor the first time after he died felt like I was erasing his presence, as I removed fallen hairs that would never be replaced. By now, my wife and I adjusted to the days. My kids are too young to understand he is gone, and they will retain no active memories of him. At night, I still half expect Diego in his spot on the couch when I go downstairs and switch on the lights.

I'm trying to keep up the habit of daily walks. In his memory and for my health. It's so easy to let a good habit slide; the time just gets absorbed by other urgencies. Perhaps I'll pass on the worst weather.

Walking the same walks over and over without a dog feels a bit silly. But if there is anything Diego taught us, it is that there is always novelty to be discovered in routine, as long as you take the time to smell the flowers (and bushes, and rocks, ...) along the way.

Rest in peace, Diego. We will miss you, friend.