Category: Articles

Loving Them All the Way

Published on by Harpreet ChhachhiaLeave a comment

Tonight, I gave Xena a bath.

I cleaned away the remnants of blood from last week — not because they bothered her anymore, but because I wanted her to feel fresh, clean, held. I dried her gently, blow-dried her fur, and then sat with her the way I do every night, performing what has now become ritual.

Cleaning her mast cell tumours.

Bandaging the ones that still bleed.

Cleaning her anus and the lipoma around it.

Cleaning the mast cell near her eye.

Only while writing this did I remember that I forgot to apply the Fur Fresh ointment around her eye. The cone is on, though. I’m sitting right here. She’s safe. Sometimes caregiving is like this — you do ninety-nine things right and then your heart races over the one you missed.

Beyond the physical work lies the real weight.

The daily fear of losing her.

The anxiety of that dreaded call — again.

The kind of love that doesn’t sit quietly but presses against your chest until breathing feels incomplete.

Xena has been my heart and soul since she stepped into my life in 2014, after Zoe passed in 2013. And now Zach is gone too. Losing him shattered something in me that I’m still gathering up, piece by piece. Taking care of two dogs with terminal illnesses has taken a toll — on my back, my knees, my head, my heart.

Sometimes, in the middle of work, I just start crying.

I look at Xena and think of Zach.

A song plays, and I’m undone.

I am hurting. I am exhausted. I am terrified of the inevitability I don’t want to name. And still, every day, I choose to show up and make her comfortable — because this is what love demands when it is no longer convenient or pretty.

I don’t expect help from friends. I’ve made my peace with that. But my family and my partners have risen in ways that matter. My sister has been a pillar. Her husband, who was close to Zach, sees now — truly sees — the toll this has taken on me. Anand is grieving too, even if his grief speaks a different language than mine.

And me? I am so tired.

So anxious.

So stretched thin that sometimes I can’t take a full breath.

I want to write this because I want the world to understand something simple and brutal: loving an animal doesn’t mean loving them only when they are young, beautiful, playful, and easy. Loving an animal means going all the way. It means staying when they are old, sick, inconvenient, and breaking your heart.

This is the first time I’ve had two senior dogs at the same time. I’ve always had one elder and one younger — balance, continuity, hope. But losing Zach and knowing Xena may follow within months has cracked something open in me.

Six months apart.

Two souls.

One heart learning, again, what it means to love without conditions.

This is not a story about strength.

This is a story about staying.

When My Child Dies, the World Ends

Published on by Harpreet ChhachhiaLeave a comment

On loving animals in a world that refuses to take that love seriously

There is a particular kind of grief that has no language in public life. It is a grief that is often minimised, politely ignored, or brushed aside with well-meaning but hollow phrases. It is the grief of losing an animal you love not as a possession, not as a companion, but as a child.

My dogs are my children.

I do not say this metaphorically. I say it as a lived truth. I cannot have children of my own, and the love that might have gone into raising a human life has found its home in them — in their care, their safety, their health, their fears, their joys, and their complete dependence on me.

They matter to me more than any human being in my life. This is not a comparison I arrived at casually, and it is not something I say to shock or provoke. It is simply how my heart is structured. They are my heart and soul. When one of them dies, it is not a chapter closing. It is my world crashing.

This is where most people stop understanding.

We live in a world that insists on hierarchies of worth. At the top stands the human being — rational, vocal, educated, entitled. Beneath us, everything else exists to serve, support, or be sacrificed. This belief is so deeply embedded that it is rarely questioned, even when it causes immense suffering. Animals are expected to endure quietly, to disappear quietly, and when they die, for the humans who loved them to “move on” quickly and without fuss.

But animals do not have voices. They do not have free will in the way humans do. They cannot leave bad situations, argue for their rights, seek therapy, or explain their pain. They love unconditionally, without strategy or self-interest. Their dependence is total. And it is precisely this dependence that creates a bond unlike any other.

Human beings can choose whether or not to love us back. Animals do not calculate. They give themselves entirely.

I have attended many funerals in my life. I have lost human family members I loved deeply. In those moments, the compassion I received was immense and generous, and I am grateful for it. Society understands human grief. It knows the rituals, the condolences, the appropriate responses.

But when one of my dogs dies — when my child dies — the response is different. Muted. Awkward. Sometimes absent. There is an unspoken assumption that this loss is somehow smaller, less legitimate, less deserving of space.

I understand that not everyone shares my relationship with animals. I do not expect people to feel what I feel. I do not expect constant presence, elaborate gestures, or performative sympathy.

What I do expect is consideration and understanding.

Friendship, to me, is not just about shared laughter or history. It is about knowing what the other person values, what holds their life together, what breaks them when it is taken away. If someone says they care about me, then they should know that my dogs are not peripheral to my life — they are my life.

When that understanding is missing, I notice. And something shifts.

This is not about punishment or resentment. It is about clarity. Loss has a way of revealing people — not their cruelty, necessarily, but their limits. And once you see those limits, you cannot unsee them. I cannot feel the same depth of connection with someone who dismisses or minimises the deepest grief I am capable of experiencing.

In recent times, we have seen institutions decide the fate of countless animals while framing the issue entirely around human inconvenience and human suffering. The irony is staggering. Humans, for all our flaws, have agency. Animals do not. Yet it is always animals who are expected to pay the price for human failure, fear, and neglect.

For me, love does not operate on a species hierarchy. Grief does not recognise one either.

When my dog dies, I am not losing “just an animal”. I am losing a child I raised, protected, worried over, and loved every single day. I am losing a being who trusted me completely in a world that often does not deserve that trust.

And if that truth makes people uncomfortable, so be it. My grief does not exist to be convenient. My love does not exist to be explained away.

This is not a demand for understanding. It is a statement of who I am — and how I love.

After Everyone Leaves

Published on by Harpreet Chhachhia2 Comments

When the funeral is over, and the house finally empties of people, grief does something cruel and ordinary at the same time. Life resumes. Chores return. The day demands to be lived — and that is when the absence announces itself.

Not in grand ways. In small, brutal details.

The food bowls are the first thing I notice. I used to juggle three every day. Now I carry two, one in each hand, and my body still prepares for the weight of the third. Muscle memory has not yet learnt loss.

In the corner of the room, his mattress sits unused. The edges are stiff with dried drool — the very drool everyone used to shy away from. Zach was intensely affectionate. He loved with his whole body. And yet, visitors would dodge him, hold their clothes away, laugh nervously.

“Zach, sit down.”

“Zach, go away.”

He never understood why love had conditions.

The medicine chart still hangs on the fridge — morning, afternoon, night — followed meticulously, desperately, faithfully. A quiet record of how hard we tried. His leash hangs with the others, but his remains vacant. I notice the name tag first. Zachary. Still there. Waiting.

Then comes the first midnight walk without him.

We step out as a family, no one leaving anyone alone. The girls walk beside me, steady and present, as if they instinctively know that this is not a walk — it is an endurance test. I see the spot where Zach always stopped to pee. He took his time. He ambled. He was a big boy. He occupied space without apology.

And now that space is painfully, offensively empty.

I don’t have many grand things to say about our relationship, except this: I loved him. Fiercely. Quietly. In the way fathers often do with sons. It wasn’t demonstrative. It wasn’t dramatic. But it was solid.

Nothing like my relationship with my own father — because Zach always looked to me for help, for reassurance, for safety. And I always told him the same thing: I’ve got your back.

I used to sing to him —

You’re my honey bunch, sugar plum, pimply imply umpkin —

and he would come charging towards me, tail wagging wildly, a weapon that bruised shins and toppled objects. Love, again, without restraint.

The house feels hollow now. Zach was a large presence — lumbering, filling up rooms, claiming corners, leaning his weight into life. The gentlest boxer dog. The sweetest. And according to everyone in the family, one of the most handsome dogs they had ever seen.

He knew my aunts.

He lived through Covid with me.

He witnessed deaths.

He stood beside me through grief before becoming its centre.

He was my baby.

My baby boy.

And he has taken a piece of my heart with him.

People often talk about grief as something that arrives suddenly, but this grief has been rehearsed for months. Living with two terminally ill dogs teaches you anticipatory mourning — the long, slow exhaustion of loving while preparing to lose. And yet, when the moment finally comes, it still catches you unprepared.

Condolences arrive. Kind words follow death easily. But the real work of grief happens afterwards — when no one is watching, when the house is quiet, when memory ambushes you in ordinary moments.

These memories will keep jolting me as the days go on. I know this. I have seen enough death to know that time dulls the sharpest edges. Pain becomes a low ache. Survivable. Livable.

But not yet.

Right now, I am grief-stricken.

Right now, I am wracked with pain.

Right now, love has nowhere to go.

And so it lingers — in empty bowls, unused leashes, dried drool, midnight walks, and a father that remembers him even when the world moves on.