by Robecca Leyden.

In 2014 my life changed forever. I was in my mid 20s, in a dead-end relationship (to put it lightly) and my career felt like a series of running starts I couldn’t quite get to take flight. I found myself with a lot of free time living in a dingy, one-bedroom bedsit. I’ve always been a fierce animal person. From my earliest memories I’ve felt at home with animals more so than people. I was raised with big and small dogs and because adult life hadn’t allowed me any pets of my own, I answered an advert to dog sit.

One day, I was contacted by a hairdresser and her sister. They had adopted a tiny puppy who was far too young to be out for adoption and had been abandoned at a vet clinic. They knew the vet nurse who had posted about him on social media in the hope that someone would take him in.No one knew what breed he was, only that he was very small and had some sort of leg injury the original owners didn’t want to pay to fix. The sisters had never had a dog before, but were moved by the sweetness of this tiny fluff with a twisted paw. They were going to Australia for two weeks and needed someone to look after him. I hadn’t looked after such a small puppy yet so I was apprehensive but I said yes. The night they arrived with him on the way to the airport I’llnever forget – It was dark out, and the driveway light wasn’t working, so they came through my door in mostly shadow. They had bags of puppy accessories. In one of their arms, wrapped in a blanket was a black and tan ball about the size of two fists. This was Nixon. ‘Like the President’ I asked?’ ‘Like the President,’ they answered. My Nixon.

October 18th 2025 in an emergency vet on a quiet, sunny, Sunday afternoon, he died in my arms. My beautiful boy. My Nixon. The 45 minutes prior we had to say goodbye I grabbed my phone and started taking close up pictures of his chest, paws and ears – any place I could think of that I needed to take in, remember, inhale one last time. I’d forgotten to take more pictures of Dad before he died, a mistake I’ve never forgotten. Nixon was 11, which isn’t young for a big dog but it wasn’t necessarily old. I had spent the majority of the last decade pouring my time, money, and energy into his quality of life – I felt cheated. One more year. One more month. One more day. It felt like a cosmic joke to be sitting there, in the same lobby, only a fortnight after I had, for a check up he passed with flying colours. Bitterness filled my mouth like bile. I sat there staring straight ahead with glassy eyes. His belly was still shaved from the last appointment.

In 2016 my dad died. Which you might think would be my biggest heartbreak to date. However, Nixon was my anchor in the storm that followed dad dying. He’s what stopped the death of my father becoming the most traumatic experience of my life. Nixon had slept with me back-to-back in my childhood bed the weeks following, while I supported my mother in her grief. I remember people commenting on how strong I was. How together I was. It was strange because I never knew how to answer that. I just had to be strong and move forward. For mum. The grief was different than it is now. Dad was sick for a long time, and like any father/ daughter we had our issues.The pain of losing dad was mixed in with relief he was no longer sick. Looking back, Nixon helped me grieve more than I ever realised. His silly, smiling face, walking him everyday for hours while my head processed what was happening – he was there bringing me to reality by demanding I throw this stick he just found. Or letting me know it was time for bed and then sleep curled up beside me, soft rhythmic breathing until I, too, was breathing that way.

By 2015 those two weeks of vacation sitting had turned into Nixon living with me half the time. He had grown into a beautiful high energy dog with a thick tan & black coat with white paws. Nixon was mutt through and through, we think Shar Pei mixed with Huntaway but no tests were ever done. He was so beautiful though that I would get stopped in the streets and asked what breed he was. He ultimately proved too much work for my hairdresser and was with me full time by the beginning of 2016. Which was inevitable. From the first day he sat in my shoe (yes, really that tiny) and stared at me with the most intense, intelligent little eyes – he decided I was his human and I knew I would love this dog more than anything.

I fell into a deep depression at the breakdown of my relationship, and life in general, and sometimes could only bring myself to walk him late at night. He didn’t care. We would walk the night footpath for hours, barely anyone around. I taught him tricks and commands and he learned them with barely any repetition.

Then one night after a particularly bad fight my ex pushed me off the bed I was sitting on. Hard. I fell and slid across the floor. Nixon was sitting next to me, jumped off and slid across with a second delay. He was confused and upset and wanted to protect me. The anger and shame I felt that my dog had to see me like that is what gave me the courage to leave completely.

We moved from apartment to flat back to apartment.Though none of it mattered to him because we were together. He was a big dog. We could be living in the smallest space and it never seemed to bother him. I took him everywhere with me. We became known as a twosome. Everyone knew him. When my local cafe found out he died they cried.

The days following his death, I either sat staring into space or wailing. I wished I, too, was dead. Words my mother had said haunted me; she always told me I ‘loved that dog too much, you won’t be able to handle him dying one day’. She meant this from a caring place, as she also loved him. But how do you stop loving something as much as you do?

I’ve had my heart broken before, of course I have. My heart broke when my dad died. It broke when my childhood dog and cat died. My first love was devastating. So were my second and third. I’ve had friendships I thought of as family, end. Though nothing has ever broken me like this. I still find myself waking up and wandering the house at 3 or 4am looking for him. Waiting for him to come find me, huff and let me know it was too late to be up. In a way, no one has ever understood or looked after me like he did. He didn’t mind if I took him for a walk at 2am. Often those would be the best, longest walks. I wanted him to know how much I cherished him. I let him sit in the ocean for as long as he wanted, I let him decide where we would walk, I let him come with me to every possible place he could. In return, I got to learn what a safe attachment was, I got to connect to nature, I got to share in the smiles he would bring to passers-by. He even helped me pick my current partner, whose love of animals, especially dogs, enabled me to fall in love with him.

It doesn’t feel like anyone will understand how I feel. Yet I know millions of people do. It always seemed strange to me that people describe their pets as their children. Because on some level, watching them grow up is like a child but in so many other ways animals are smarter than people. They teach us. They have a quiet intuition that humans don’t, or maybe have lost.

Once I tried to describe to a friend what it felt like to completely bond with a dog. I never quite thought the word ‘fur baby’ described it. To me, he wasn’t as helpless as a child. I was as much his caretaker as he was mine. If we were ever stranded in the bush or a forest, I’d be relying on him. He felt like a familiar. Like in those old witches stories. He was my familiar – an extension of me. He knew me, we had our own language. I knew what all of his micro expressions meant, as he knew mine. Where I went he went and vice versa. Maybe that’s why his death exploded my life. It wasn’t just the mourning of a death, a loss. It was losing a piece of my nervous system. The piece that regulated everything. The days and weeks that followed I felt like I was walking around with all my nerves exposed. There was a ringing in my ears and I became physically ill from crying so hard and so often.

A lot of us millennials spent the majority of our 20s in what felt like arrested development. I didn’t know who I was or what I wanted. I bounced around different cities, different countries. Got the degree I was promised would open doors, only to be a waitress. I had to figure out who and what I was, in a world with so many options I was stunted. Nixon never asked me how my career or love life was going, or cared about how I looked. He just loved me wholly and snapped me into the present moment. Animals don’t have a sense of mortality or vanity and I am clutching that, heavily.

At the end of 2014, when he was a few months old, he was stolen out of the front seat of my car. At this point I had a rickety old thing, and the passenger door didn’t quite lock. I had to run into a shop, and I remember thinking I would only be gone for a few minutes. There was a woman across the street from the car park and she seemed odd. She was walking with a kind of stumble and was lingering. She kept walking and disappeared around the corner. I waited until she was out of sight and then left. I returned to the car to find him gone. Red, hot panic surged through me and I ran around the car park looking for him. I found a security guard – he saw nothing. I rang the police, the SPCA – nothing. I stood there frozen, every possible worst-case scenario playing out behind my eyes. Then I heard someone call out ‘hey miss!’. It was that strange lady, sitting in an idling car. She swung open the door and Nixon bounded out and jumped into my arms. I burst out crying. She said she found him walking in the carpark and put him in her car to look for me. A few hours bought clarity and I realised she must have stolen him. How would he have opened and shut a car door? He must have caused such a scene she regretted taking him. I got home that afternoon and closed my bedroom door and bundled us both up in blankets. He calmed me down, yet again. We were safe. This funny dog had found his way back to me. Like he always would.

This heartbreak of mine takes up so much room I struggle to breath with it. Living in the emptiness he left is the hardest part. Because I thought I had more time with him. I thought he would be there to welcome a child when we had one. I thought I would get more summers with him, more road trips, more adventures. Even now, three months later, the emptiness of each room deafens me.

The innocence and purity of our beloved animals can make it the most difficult to accept when they’re gone. We think of the joy and the space they took up with their love and ever – presence in the moment. They teach us to appreciate the smaller things, as cliche as that sounds. The curse of being a human is that we can’t just let our love or our lives be as is. I would appreciate a late summer walk in long grass, and have nowhere else l wanted to be. He would do something silly as dogs do, like slide down a hill on his tummy and I couldn’t help but laugh, regardless of what else was on my mind. I knew every moment with him had a clock ticking down till the day he’d not be there. It only made me love him more, because he was my home. Those beautiful, perfect moments with him, even though I could clearly see myself walking that same exact path without him in a future I knew would always be too close for comfort. I always knew an indescribable heartbreak was on the horizon – though I couldn’t help falling completely in love with him. I loved him so much. From the moment I saw this tiny fluff ball with a twisted paw and wise eyes, right until a much larger dog with greying hairs around his chin and the same wise eyes took his last breath in my arms, I loved him so, so much. So much so, I would spend the rest of my life mourning him.

He really was just a runt of a litter of mutts abandoned at a vet in a not so great part of town. But he was also the most magical thing in the universe.

This article was first published on Substack. You can follow me there too!