As I write this now- noon of 12/31/2025- it has been roughly 17 days since I watched my dog die.
Attempting to quantify or rationalize the deluge of thoughts and emotions that've run laps joyriding around the inside of my skull these past two and a half weeks feels about as seemingly impossible as the very notion that I ever would've needed to write something like this in the first place, let alone have THIS- of ALL things- be what finally breaks my essayist egg. Well over half a decade of creative stagnation, social self-discovery, and the steady atrophic burrowing towards digital communication as my primary means of engaging with and writing text... and it's a goddamn obituary that breaks me out of it?! For as impossible as it all feels... I'm here and it's happening- so I guess I may as well try! I suppose I've been putting off my "website revamp" for all these years, and it's very much in the season to be taking care of such things- especially at this point of my life. Eulogizing about a recently lost loved one can be as good a primer as any, and I do find it quite fitting- I'd even call it poetic- when interpreted with full context but.. well- we'll get there.
This really isn't about (or even for) me, but it feels difficult not to acknowledge the cosmic irony in me putting off sitting down and writing a longer-form piece to publish my thoughts (as opposed to merely typing walls of text in private discord discussions) until literally the very last day of the middle of this decade. This entire period of my life- the whole arc- coalescing into this one very moment where I finally release the cognitive and emotional burdens that've kept me chained to the ground in expressing my prose much further beyond the people I'm most comfortable with, falling in symmetry with the very "burden" this obituary is about.... The idea that I am only now experiencing the release I've craved all these years (talking to myself in the mirror relentlessly even after years of being post-speech therapy) of creative writing unshackled from the stigmas of education and numeric judgement.. after such an intense period of heartbreak is evoking a feeling I am having a hard time attempting to conceptualize, but rests solemnly between the parallel lines of bitterness and hollowness.
I really do not know where to start with this. I got the idea to write this within the first couple days of this month- when the whole debacle started- and figured I was originally going to be doing it the day of- if not after- as that would be when my feelings were the most raw and my pathos the most primed to handle such a task; but I was wholly unprepared for when the time arrived and I just didn't want to do anything at all. Escaping into the holiday season to recover from grief seemed like the only rational thing to keep my hands busy, and it's not like anybody asked for me to write this. I said this isn't about/for me, but I am the one driving its creation. It's important to me, good practice for something I intended on doing in 2026-and-beyond anyway, and I figured I needed to get all this off my chest and onto some public record before the year was over. I can't imagine bringing myself to do this once the new year rolls around and I inevitably become busy with another handful of projects on top of an actual day job, so right now it is.
Okay. Sans the whole "defining your voice and writing style by nature of this being the first entry" thing.. there's no judgement or grading to fear, no clearly delineated system to work within. Cool. I've been looping the BBC Symphony Orchestra & Andrew Davis' rendition of Ralph Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis while writing all this and have no intention of stopping it anytime soon. It's already been an hour now, may as well get on with this.
So.... Coda.
Coda was likely born almost exactly sometime around 9 years ago, as she was a few months old when we picked her up from the farm she was staying in and we got her not long after moving into our new house, roughly April of 2017 I'd wager. She was a beagle / german shepard mix with a sleek black coat, a tanned-yet-muted brown/orangeish face and legs, and white embellishments around the tip of her nose and her chest (feet too, as she got older). I really cannot emphasize enough just how consistently shiny her coat was; muted not quite to the point of glistening- but a visible sheen under most lighting conditions regardless. She was a very pretty dog, genuinely one of the most beautiful I think I've ever seen, and I'm really trying to lean away from personal bias when I say that! Her movements were not much dissimilar from other dogs, yet she always carried a sense of grace with her. The way she would arch her back into a deep stretch before laying down, find the most comfortable spot on any given pillow/rolled-up blanket and curl regally into it, perch herself firmly upright when sitting by you on the couch or underneath your desk as if to demand scritches and comforting engagement; a dog who almost knew her sphinxlike disposition and relished in it.
With me at the time we got her were my family- consisting of my mother and younger brother- and my best friend. It was originally my little brother's idea to get a dog in the first place; our history with pets up to that point mostly consisted of fish and.. pretty much never ended well. I actually very much did not want a dog as high school and my myriad of internet projects (community management!! woooo!!!!) were kicking me in the ass enough that I was firm about not wanting to have any obligations or responsibility for taking care of such a pet, at least not until they (and I) were old enough. He begged us to consider getting a dog for years until it finally felt right: not long after the move where we knew that as we were no longer renting out a place, we would be around for long enough to properly give them a home. It's.. also entirely possible that we finally accepted his pleas as a sort of "fuck it, we ball" measure so soon after the move, which would not be unprecedented.. though was usually relegated to "let's buy a new flatscreen TV, why not?" and not adding another member to our family. It's been long enough that I can't remember the motive, so I'm going to go with some kind of mixture of both.
Her name comes from Davey Wreden's 2015 masterpiece The Beginner's Guide, which I had played through sometime in the year prior and had been thinking about quite often. While we were driving back, it was decided that as my little brother had gotten what he wanted and gave us all an obligation that I didn't originally want, I would be the one to name her in fair exchange. I cannot tell you what was going on in my head when thinking on her name (though I'm sure there was no shortage of metaphor and irony involved), but I very much latched onto Coda as a name apropos of nothing, juxtaposed against this blank slate of a puppy excitedly staring at all of us and scuttling around our laps in the back seat. Branding a creature so young and full of opportunity with the mark of an ending... oh how cool and poetic you must've felt- Will circa. 2017. If only you knew how it'd actually end... or just how many people throughout the years unfamiliar with the musical term would assume it was spelt Koda, lmao. Ah well. I certainly don't regret it.
Honestly, the specifics of her name almost aren't even that important considering she for all intents and purposes had a second name: Hija Puppy. I say a lot of very stupid and silly things quite often, and am known to be pretty liberal with making up onomatopoeia, so I cannot for the life of me tell you what- when- why- or how I came up with this but at some point I started to say "hija puppy... hija BABY" while embracing her and it caught on and stuck with the rest of my family. Likely an extrapolation of saying "hi puppy!!!" very cutely, but at this point I'll never know for sure. To us, she was "hija puppy" just as much as she was Coda, and she seemed to understand it as a sign of incoming affection in addition to being an identifier for herself. No matter how old she got: once a hija puppy, always a hija puppy....
She was a quantum ball of potential energy, probably spending at least half her life sleeping and laying down but equally likely at times to run around our backyard with the conviction of god's chosen racing through the "yet-to-be holy lands" in some dogmatic crusade bound to get them killed if they slowed down too long. Even in her later years, she could run as though she was still an excited little puppy trying to catch the birds in the sky. Never gave up on that specific goal- mind you; nobody was more excited to engage with the creatures in our yard than her, often to the detriment of ourselves and our neighbors pretty much any time after 10PM.
Savvy readers will have noticed that I explicitly framed this as an obituary and not a eulogy, because it is more important to me that I provide a holistic depiction of the dog I loved so much than to purely glaze her image in the public record to be a spotless one, even if I really do believe she was one of the best pets I could've ever taken care of. She was most certainly A Creature™, and with that came much tribulation and frustration. My family would often joke about her being the most tomboy dog they'd seen, given how masculine her growls and barks would sound and her more active behaviors. She was a notorious pillow humper, literally right up until the final hour of her life; couldn't tell you if it was actually stimulating her or just felt comfortable to rub against in the same way pillows have always been comforting when kept between my legs as I sleep (I used to do that all the time as a kid, helped with my sleeping issues). After she was done though, she often would opt for chewing and gnawing on the poor bastard until she'd create a rift in the seams, where she would then promptly gut the ever-living fuck out of it until it was naught more than a wet empty sack and a huge pile of decades-old discolored stuffing all over the floor.
She'd often eat the stuffing too if it fancied her. She ate a lot of things she really shouldn't have, and yet somehow- 95% of the time it was completely fine. The only times I can remember us needing to take her to the vet were when she swallowed entire chicken bones (and I think she still digested them???). She's eaten chocolate, cheese, plastic yogurt wrappers, napkins, paper towels, aluminum foil, and probably at least a dozen other insanely cursed things I can't put to mind. Absolute goblin mode any time she caught a whiff of unattended food within reachable distance from her- and boy would she jump up on counters to reach. Leaving food unattended became an art in-of itself, as no matter how much we'd feed her- she always seemed to have a second stomach purely for people-food and whatever-people-food-is-wrapped-within.
Food was the one thing she was truly possessive over too. Pretty much the only times she would ever act hostile or even try to bite me in her entire life were when I was attempting to get her to stop eating something she very much shouldn't've been eating, or even just walking within the vicinity of her when she's eating something she knows she probably isn't allowed to be. Within the first couple years of her life, we learned pretty quickly that she doesn't respond well to confrontation, and distraction often works best in most situations. She was often just aloof enough that being distracted for long enough to have her mess cleaned garnered no further hostility from her. This worked less well when on two different occasions- I went outside to investigate why she was staying out so long at night only to find her actively holding a small animal's corpse in her mouth. Whether or not she was the one to have caused that was irrelevant compared to the agonizing process of slowly coaxing her back inside sans-corpse, all while feeling disturbed at the sight of such a scene. It was almost creepy how quickly she went right back to her usual "eepy" self after that.
In a macabre sense, it's funny to me that she seemed better at playing catch with corpses than balls. Coda's concept of "playing" was almost exclusively tug-of-war, with maybe a little bit of running around mixed in. Despite our best efforts when she was growing up, no amount of toys and balls ever clicked with her save for The Rope; she would at most run up to a thrown stick or ball and kinda look at it a bit before looking back almost mildly confused at what she was expected to do, and then walk away somewhere else having already mentally moved on. She was strangely fascinated with hunting despite being such a passive creature most of the time. I remember playing with her (probably without her realizing) often back in high school by angling my watch directly under my office's skylights and shining the bright dot of reflected light at different spots around the walls- ceiling- and floor of my room, watching as she ran around and jumped at it almost in a daze- the way a cat would obsess over a laser pointer. She definitely grew less fascinated with this 2-dimensional specter of light over time though, and more often went to grab The Rope in order to get you to play tug-of-war with her, even if she'd pretty much tire herself out within a couple minutes tops.
And tired she would get. It's been alluded to previously but I feel the need to re-state that she spent most of her life laying down. If there's any one thing we made sure of, it's that she was pretty much always comfortable. Of all the pictures I've taken of her, the majority of them are her laying down in some cute position curled up in a blanket at the corner of a couch, laying down in bed with/on me, or even just laying on the ground. She loved to lay down on my office rug when the sun beamed down on her in the middle of the day via my skylights, almost as much as she loved laying out on the sun-soaked grass outside for much the same reason. She often would lay down at my feet directly underneath my desk, much to my simultaneous pleasure and chagrin as I always then had to be extremely careful moving around to ensure my heavy Herman Miller Aeron wheels never accidentally rolled over her feet, tail, or face. And throughout her whole life, she's almost never needed to sleep alone. In high school and when I left for my pre-COVID sampling of college, she often enjoyed my brother's bed alongside our mother's, occasionally staying the night with me. But once I came home and dropped out in the wake of the pandemic, our relationship changed, especially once my brother left for college himself and it was just mom, Coda, and myself.
That was around the time where she very arguably went from being "my younger brother's dog" to being my dog; status as a general family member notwithstanding. She began to sleep in my bed most nights in order to let my mom have a good enough rest to feel better at work, on top of being out of town so frequently, sometimes for a week or two at a time! Throughout my antics this past half-decade or so, Coda was very often laying down on my couch or in my bed to stay within my vicinity; she'd always liked me, but I really think taking care of her to the extent I did made my presence comforting to her. When given the option to choose, she often went for my bed. My room was almost just as much hers, but so was the house really. We're getting there, I promise.
As tempting as it is to try and continue walking through a descriptive environment of her better years, I do not currently have the tenacity nor the emotional energy to really keep this up. It's been 6 and a half hours already since I've started this and probably nearly a third of that was me taking breaks to eat, look at old videos of her, and cry. I'm sadly much behind the pace I was hoping to be (this was all lot harder to write than even I figured, shocker!!) and I didn't want to spend most of my New Year's Eve writing this, so I'm going to have to get to the less fun part.
So.
Exactly half a year ago, I finally moved out to Denver from that old house in Florida after 5 years of idly living there while I worked through my life post-COVID. It was a massive shift for me and I already plan on writing about it (hopefully finishing it sometime before the anniversary of my lease starting). Some time passes, and one morning while I'm talking to mom- she lets me know that Coda had bitten the petsitter who'd been taking care of her whenever mom had to leave on a business trip. She was attempting to either move her or take something away from her, and Coda was apparently in a corner when she approached. It was a fairly understandable situation, so we chalked it up to situational misfortune and helped the petsitter with treating her injuries financially. It was additionally awkward because she had a good camera and had been taking lots of really quality photos of Coda playing and smiling and having a great time. But at least it was just an isolated behavioral incident.
..right?
December 1st, around 7PMish MST.
I get an urgent call from my mom while I'm talking to somebody in VR, and take the headset off to go sit at my desk and talk to her more properly.
She informs me that Coda had now bitten the second petsitter she's had, a neighbor a couple houses down. The bite was completely unprovoked after an otherwise normal check-in as the sitter went to calmly pet her as she was leaving. The bite went straight through most of her hand and was bad enough that the puffing and inflammation ultimately delayed doctors' ability to take x-rays to even assess the damage by well over a week.
This was obviously extremely bad news, especially given Florida's liability laws around this. Mom was already physically and financially helping her through treating this, and the potentiality for hefty legal fees should the damages be permanent or if this ever happened a third time were far too much for us to handle, so she took Coda to the vet and had her formally evaluated.
The vet's diagnosis concluded that she seemed physically healthy, if aging a bit, and such unprovoked behavior was likely a byproduct of some unknown psychosis or similar, and while they could prescribe medication to possibly help, it was only likely going to get worse as time went on.
As a result, Coda was now classified as a "risk" and would no longer be allowed to stay overnight at the clinic, as well as pretty much any other pet environment.
We couldn't possibly keep rolling the dice hoping she'd continue to behave around strangers (who likely wouldn't even take our case if we properly informed them of the situation), and mom no longer could even leave her at the (expensive) clinic's overnight when she needs to travel out for a week.
Through audible tears, mom told me that within a week or two- we were going to need to put her down.
Originally, my mother and brother were planning on visiting me a handful of days before christmas to go skiing for the first time, before I flew back to Florida with them to celebrate the holidays before returning to my new home before.. today! Instead, I immediately spent quite a bit of money changing my flight to head out the next day and spend the next 2 weeks there being with & taking care of Coda one last time and helping mom work through it all.
You don't need to be regaled with the play-by-play details of those weeks, and I didn't take any pictures or video myself because it didn't feel right, this was an immensely personal bit of time we were sharing. But what's relevant for the story here is that while Coda was very much often mostly her usual self.... I could tell something was wrong, in the subtle ways only the person who'd known her the most could.
From the moment I walked in to greet her, she sniffed me up and down but wasn't nearly as energetic as she normally would've been; she's been more frantic about my return after being gone 5 days than when I was coming home after 5 months. My best guess is that the natural compressibility of memories with age was beginning to take its toll and mess with her perception of time. I could also tell that her legs were acting up again. Over the last couple years, she's started having occasional bouts of leg issues which would make it uncomfortable for her to jump up on couches/beds, meaning she would be much less affable to the suggestion whenever you'd sit down and motion for her to join you. And it seemed to get especially bad for her in the last few days before d-day. We got her a plush ramp at one point to help, but it was about as intuitive to her as a thrown tennis ball- bless her heart- and she'd usually just stand right next to it putting her head on the couch/bed and looking at you as if to coax you down to her level.
Additionally, she was getting ravenously frantic when taken outside to use the bathroom- especially at night. She became obsessed with our grill, which had been unused (and unremarked by her) for years, and had naught but perhaps a decaying hornet's nest inside of it. Multiple nights when I'd take her out, she'd start rushing so hard I had to grab onto the doorframe of our porch just to stop myself from flying, and use all my strength to slowly reign her back in to a chorus of barks and growling. In isolation, years prior- it could've been chalked up to dog antics or just something hiding in the yard.. but with all the other additional behavioral quirks I haven't listed and the very context that brought me out back to my old home in the first place.... it painted a pretty clear picture to me.
She was getting old. As bad as it felt to admit it, time had finally caught up- and it was hers.
We both still tried, however. My mom and I spent a good chunk of a day just researching shelters and calling up places and getting information to see if there was something, something, anything else we could do instead. The cold empirical reality though was that the few handfuls of shelters around the country that would take cases of dogs who may or may not bite were all quite far, often geared towards bully breeds or very large dogs specifically, and were highly selective with waiting lists in the 3-6 month range at minimum.
The only other option left was to take her to a kennel pound where she'd spend the rest of her days in a box on a wall surrounded by other (likely rowdy) dogs, only being let out once or twice a day to eat and shit before being caged back up in her hole.
So.... there were no other options. Try as we might, there was nothing else we could reasonably do.
We couldn't ask either of my nearby friends to take care of her, as even though they'd both done so in the past and she was generally comfortable around them.. we absolutely would not risk harm being done to such close family friends, both of whom now had their own lives and schedules anyway- meaning temporal coverage wasn't guaranteed.
My little brother couldn't take her as he was sharing an apartment with his college roommates, and wouldn't have the time or space.
And I couldn't take her because... frankly, I'm having a hard enough fucking time taking care of myself. On top of the fact that it's a deluge of additional costs and considerations for someone who still does not yet have a job and hasn't paid their share of rent in half a year, living off ramen bowls and an electric scooter. That last point especially is crucial, as while Denver is a very dog-friendly city (and people walking their pets is a very common sight!), I do not live anywhere particularly close to one of the bigger and nicer parks for her to play in, and wouldn't be able to drive her to one; let alone drive her to any facilities she may need. It would also obviously lock me into needing to do remote work (drying up thanks to layoffs and """"AI""""), and be unable to travel out to the mountains on any kind of backpacking trip (of which I would like to do many!!!) for fear of running into the same petsitting issue here.
Aside from the general sensation of edging being on the verge of tears for ~2 weeks, one of the primary things wracking my brain was this cognitive dissonance in simultaneously feeling as though we were giving up on her, even though by all objective metrics- this was going to be the most peaceful and least painful way of her passing away. Fighting as hard as I was to figure out how to keep her around meant... what: a couple more times I'd see her over the years anyway? Deteriorating health and wellbeing?? Spending the rest of her life at a farm somewhere in Pennsylvania??? Even IF she was miraculously able to stay home somehow, it's not as though I was planning on visiting every month! I was already going to have maybe a single handful more times I'd get to hug her before she left our plane of reality, so this was merely just.. earlier than expected.
At one point a night or two before d-day, I sat down next to my brother at the edge of my bed, Coda laying between us, both of us petting her and tearing up thinking about what was to come. And in that moment, I told him what I'd been conceptualizing to help work through it all:
For a long while, we were all one happy family. And then when life came knocking, my brother had to move on. I was slow, stubborn, and depressed about everything, but eventually- I had to move on too. Mom's the reason either of us could afford to move on, and isn't in a position to take care of her alone, and can unfortunately no longer rely on external help anymore.
So... it was just Coda's turn to move on too.
I'm not typically one to issue content warnings in the middle of my work, but I feel the need to stress here that for this next bit, I'm going to get a bit detailed with the event, so feel free to skip to the next part if those ruminations are uncomfortable or triggering for you.
In the 24 hours leading up to her death, I cannot emphasize the extent to which we made sure that every individual thing she had primarily done in her life was done once more, with all of us. We comforted her, played with her, hung out in the backyard, drove her around- and even took her downtown to Lake Eola (for the first time? ...last time too I suppose) to have a walk and let her experience all the sights and smells she desired. When we all got burgers that night, we bought one just for her and even gave her some of ours. We emptied both of her treat bags and let her feast throughout the night and morning. It's not like they were needed anymore.
The night before- my little brother had his final sleep with her, and that night- her final night- it was my turn. I don't think I'm ever going to forget the hours I spent curled up with her, antipodal to the orientation you're supposed to sleep in the bed, brushing her and hugging her and softly crying into her fur as I smooched her and told her how good she was, and how much I loved her. The way the melatonin wasn't enough to let me lull to sleep with her until I finally readjusted to sleep how I normally would, and let her curl up against me in my arms and legs one.. final time. The early hours in which I woke up and immediately curled up to hug her at the foot of my bed once more, softly playing gentle music through my phone as I held her and looked at her face and stayed by her side until the very last moment she got up out of my bed, when my mom came in to wake us up for.....
I had resolved to be in the room when it happened from the beginning, as my actions in the weeks prior had largely been to try and act as normal as I reasonably could so as to make sure she was happy and comfortable, and I knew I needed to be there to make sure it stayed that way for her. Mom agreed, and joined me. My little brother had been very uncertain about it in the days leading up to it, and I was very firm with telling him it wasn't something he should feel obligated to do, and that it was a choice he would never be able to take back once he decided. So as we all sat in the room with her, waiting to be ready to knock on the opposing door to signal we were ready, he ended up ducking out and going back to the car. A short-lived venture, as he quickly made up his mind that he needed to be there for her and rushed back in right in the nick of time before the process was to begin.
We were all there with her, she was the happiest she'd ever been while at the clinic and was smiling and wagging her tail right up until the end. It was very peaceful. She didn't fight it.
I knocked on the door because I knew the others wouldn't. It was time.
Right before they were going to inject the anesthetic, I asked if I could play some music, and started playing Masayoshi Soken's Flow from the Endwalker soundtrack on my phone speaker. The very last thing I wanted her to hear alongside our soothing remarks as she faded out of time.
If there's anything that'll stick with me about that moment, it's how fucking fast it all happened.
Reasonable estimates given to us by the doctors beforehand made it sound as though it'd be a slow 5-10 minute procedure.
She collapsed on the floor within seconds of the anesthetic being applied, and was dead not even a minute or two later.
My immediate reaction wasn't to cry or sob or yell, I just fell back against the wall in shock and babbled something to the tune of "wow. wow. wow wow wow wow wow wow wow WOW. fuck-fuck-fuck jesus fucking CHRIST."
I'd moved in front of her alongside my brother after she'd collapsed to the floor. We were the last things she ever saw. Her eyes were still and her face unmoving. I tried to close them with my hands but unfortunately movies fucking lie to you and extant facial muscles sorta refuse to let eyelids stay fully closed, leaving a kind of half-lidded cold gaze. The doctors took the blankets she was laying on and covered her before leaving us be to have time alone to process and grieve. We mostly just exchanged shock and lamentation. I attempted to install Tetris on my phone to try and play it to keep my hands busy and alleviate the stress but the app I'd installed was some tetrinome puzzle dragging game, it wasn't even real fucking Tetris. I uninstalled it and gave up in anger. Even in the darkest irony pits of my brain, I couldn't find a single fucking thing even remotely humorous to say. I just expressed that I was glad it was over, and that the weeks of anticipation and dread were finally done.
"Alea iacta est."
She was gone. That was it! No takesies-backsies!!!
My mom and brother left first to go handle paperwork and sit outside. I stayed a couple minutes longer alone with her to hold her still-warm corpse just a little longer, one last time. Even if the lack of movement betrayed any comfort the warmth still brought. Even if she could no longer feel me or hear my words. I was going to hold her and say them for as long as I still could. I made sure she knew even in death- I would be there to comfort her. She never liked being home alone.
I gave her one last kiss on the head before covering her and opening the door to leave. I turned, looked down- tears hitting the floor, and said
"I love you so much Coda, now and forever. Hija puppy. Hija puppy...."
In the aftermath, we drove to get some fro-yo and I picked up a Jimmy Johns sub to eat. Munching on chips helped alleviate the immediate stress, but we were all still very much raw from that entire experience. We drove home and I ate my sub while calling up 2 of my closest friends to let them know it had been done, and vent about it a bit. Then I opened up FFXIV, tanked a run of Sohm Al and played a frontline match in an attempt to keep my hands busy and try to improve my mood... until I ended up just sitting around Limsa next to my friend while venting even more about earlier, before closing the game and cutting our call off short as I didn't want to rope anybody else into what was ostensibly just me needing to grieve. My family were in the living room watching TV and trying not to cry, and after some deliberation (and crying)- we all concluded that this day would forever be capital-F Fucked, and all we could reasonably do at that point was sleep it off.
In the days that followed, we all felt measurably better (if a bit hollow and sardonic) and got a few more visits from friends and good dinners before heading out to Denver once more. We fulfilled our ski trip in Steamboat Springs and it was an absolute blast- if a fair bit physically painful. The rental boots I got on my first day were old and made awful contact with my feet and heels, making it feel like I was walking around in iron maidens for 6+ hours. The newer boots I exchanged the day after were noticeably better, but still hurt due to rubbing up against all the same sores I'd developed the day before. Aside from that however, it was a very good time and exactly the kind of reprieve we as a family needed after such a loss. And even though all of us still tear up at times when talking about her (I've been an absolute waterfall writing the back-half of this, FWIW), we're all definitely at the point where we know we're okay; living the best lives we can, for her.
Additionally, we got confirmation that the second petsitter's hand was beginning to recover, and that x-rays showed it was unlikely there would be any significant lasting damage. Considering how empathetic we all felt for her situation (and frankly- worried about further fees), this was a great relief for all of us and about the closest thing to a "happy ending" this entire story was going to get.
So. What now? What was all that earlier about the house metaphor and "we'll get there"?
This is going to be the loosest and eulogy-est part of this entire obituary, and I've got pretty much exactly an hour left, so please bear with me here. Even Hunter S. Thompson made clear his distain for writing these and wallowing too long in the textual actualization of one's emotions and despair.
Up until this point, I have been your narrator describing to you an outline of Coda- the once-living creature. But I would now like to paint you a picture of Coda, the concept.
For a very long time after I came home post-pandemic and dropping out of school, I was deeply entrenched in depression and upset with where my life had gone. My creative productivity had sharply fallen after my insurance provider kicked me off my medication in the wake of COVID, and pretty much all that was keeping me going was the near-constant socialization and networking I was doing to not just build a support network, but hopefully gain some kind of footing in an industry I could then break into in order to make the money I needed to leave. That social net ended up servicing me very well, and I'm extremely grateful for absolutely every single person I've met and befriended during this time (if you're reading this and we haven't talked in awhile- I'm sorry!! life's a bitch and I hope you're doing well, poke me sometime- I won't bite)!! Unfortunately, that didn't extend to any kind of career prospects, and the fields I was putting effort into scouting around were all the most volatile ones being hit with near-constant layoffs and AI bullshit.
This meant that even though I was in my old high school home- the nicest place I've ever really lived in, eating rideshare-delivered food almost every single night for years and generally having a modestly good access to technology and creature comforts, I was increasingly miserable with each passing year that slipped beneath my hands and feet as I could barely muster the energy to crawl myself out of this pit I felt like I was constantly sinking into.
The house was killing me. I begun to refer to my office as my ambrosia of dust and decay. I'd often lay on the couch looking up at the sky and wondering when something would finally happen and snap me out of this cycle of atrophy and misery I was passively feeling subjected to by my surroundings, when I'd finally be given an opportunity to escape.
That "opportunity" would eventually come in the one-two punch of Rain World holding up the most starkly crystal clear mirror any piece of media has ever held to show me exactly what I was and what was to become of me, and later that year- the 2024 election eliciting a near-total departure from social media and a genuine extrinsic reason to get the ever-living FUCK out of the political hell-state I'd lived in nearly my entire life. I resigned myself to cheap apartment living in a faraway city with the expectation of getting a food service job wholly unrelated to my skillset because anything was better than yet another year of atrophy. I wasn't going to still be at that place when I turned 25. It just wasn't happening. I needed to get my life back in order- at least try to get a degree of some kind before I hit 30.
Why is any of this relevant? Well.
For all that time- most of that half-decade I spent back at my old home, much of the time I was wallowing the hardest were in those weeks where it was just the two of us, alone. And in all the times I'd comfort her, all the repetition, it began to creep into me- the realization that she'd been a part of my life for as long as the house had been. We'd gotten her so soon after moving that for all intents and purposes, she spent pretty much her entire life in that house.
It wasn't just a house to her, it was Coda's Castle.
The backyard was her personal garden, our (extremely bougie) kitchen- her fancy dining room, my office- her study where the tall hairy tech wizard who made weird noises lived and frequently pampered her with hugs and scritches.
It was hard not to conceptualize her as this princess locked away in an ivory palace of comfort and love, myself- chained up alongside her by nature of the situation I'd found myself in. And for as nice as it was- especially to be with her, my heart- body- and soul were aching and yearning to be free once more, to go outside and do things again; the way I'd done all those years prior in college. To not feel stuck in the middle of hypercapitalistic tourist hell for the foreseeable future, within the same couple-thousand-feet radius I'd been living in since 2009.
So... as painful as it is to type this out after shedding so many tears for the 11 hours I've now been writing this, there is a catharsis in the fact she is now gone. It's an extremely hard and personal emotion to pen to paper, but losing Coda felt like the other shoe finally dropping. I'd already finally gone and ditched the house, letting her go was both the next logical step and the last thing left still keeping me even somewhat emotionally attached to that place- and her character- as a concept. Obviously I still love my mom and have things there, so it's not like I'm not going to visit in the future; I am very glad I still have a home there if literally all else fails.... But I'm not going to say that I miss the entrapment, that dastardly conceptualization which drove me to the point of lunacy at times.
Bleeding hands, stricken walls, tear-soaked pillows, dusty shelves covering the long-dead roaches who'd burrow beneath them, and the reverberations of one Will Cook's mad rambles and ravings piercing every orifice of that place as loudly and frequently as they could muster the energy to. The droning of sustained piano notes and flowery ornamentation against the hall's silence giving rise to a chorus fit for an audience of one:
Coda. Coda Coda Coda Coda Coda.
You were certainly an interesting one, I'll give you that! An otherwise individualistic creature who yet thrived on the presence of others. Jumping with curiosity at each and every new person who ever graced themselves presence within the walls of your castle, but never harming anyone out of malice- only the scratches left by your claws. A gentle soul to those you considered family, though I wouldn't really call it kind. Save for your relentless licking (in the pursuit of residual food perhaps?), it's hard to recall a time you ever did anything selflessly aside from the simple act of existing. You were oftentimes a needy dog, rarely ever content with the pockets of interaction I'd be able to give you between any tasks I'd be doing, and often forcing me to have to stop whatever I'd be doing to care for even the most subtle of needs at the first sign of discomfort. Not that any of that's your fault, we definitely pampered you a bit too well all things considered... but you certainly never seemed to take much umbrage with your princess attitude. And why should you really? The world outside was a scary awful place ran by evil greedy people intent on maximizing their own living comforts at the detriment of the very planet we all share. You conceptualized absolutely none of that except as flashing colors on a screen in the living room you'd often see in your periphery while laying on that oh-so-smooth leather couch.
Your life didn't need to be anything more than it already was. Your caretaker's anxieties about your relative inactivity compared to other dogs and the fact you'd never experienced anything outside of Central Florida were their own, and you seemed perfectly content playing within your land of dreams as you rested in total comfort on each and every couch and bed within your castle. Waking up each new day to explore the yard once more for new sights, sounds, smells. Ideas and visages to take back with you to wonder and dream as you always had. As you always would.
I don't believe in Heaven or Hell as anything more than metaphysical proxies for where any given individual believes you should spend your nether-years based on their perception of you and your character, so I can't really say where you ultimately deserve to end up. I just know that when it's finally my turn to lose my cognizance and decay into nothingness, I'll be right there with you again; running around- chasing birds across the endless sky.
You were beautiful, self-absorbed, loving, possessive, playful, destructive, intimate, a complete bitch in every sense of the word, and one of the best goddamn things to ever happen to me.
I love you so much Coda, now and forever. Hija puppy. Hija puppy.
