For Sooty

This one isn’t about data pipelines. There’s no framework, no architecture diagram, no code snippet at the end.

Yesterday I said goodbye to my best friend.

Sooty was a miniature schnauzer — nine kilograms of stubbornness, loyalty, and heart. Born October 2011. Gone February 2026. Fourteen years that changed the shape of everything.

I don’t have the right words for this. I’m not sure anyone does. But I tried to write something that comes close, and I wanted to share it here — because this is my corner of the internet, and she deserves a place in it.

Sooty

There is something about having a dog that nobody warns you about. They don’t tell you that the first time she falls asleep with her head on your lap, something inside your chest will rearrange itself, and from then on there will always be a space in you that is exactly the shape of her.

She is going to know where you are. By the sound of your keys in the door, by the way you sigh when you sit down, by the particular shuffle of your feet on the kitchen floor at six in the morning. She will never once say your name and you will never once doubt that she knows it.

And every time you come home — every single time, whether you were gone for eight hours or eight minutes — she will greet you at the door with the excitement and joy and emotion of a relative she hasn’t seen in years. As though your return is the most remarkable thing that has ever happened. As though the world had gone quiet without you and now, finally, it is loud again.

She will follow you throughout the house, every room, no matter how small the journey — just to check you’re still there. She will sit beside you during every bad movie, every 2am bout of insomnia when the ceiling has nothing useful to offer. She will follow you into rooms you didn’t even mean to walk into and look up at you as if to say, Well? We’re here now. What’s the plan?

She is your partner in crime before you even commit one. She will be at the door before you even reach for the leash. She will bark at the mailman every time she sees him, because someone has to warn him — my house — and she has appointed herself to the role.

And there will be days when the world does what the world does best, which is to come at you sideways and keep swinging. Days when the meetings don’t stop, when the inbox is on fire, when your body feels like it was assembled wrong.

And on those days, she will not ask you what happened. She will not offer advice. She will press her whole warm ridiculous body against yours and stay. Just stay. And occasionally lick your hand — not to fix you, but to say I’m checking. I’m still here. Are you still here?

And yes, she will also be the reason you cannot sleep in. Every morning a fresh day — a stretch with energy, a shake, and a tail wag, sometimes all at once, as though the night never happened and everything is new again.

She will remind you that the sun has come up and that this, apparently, is cause for celebration. She will remind you that her bowl is empty and that this, apparently, is an emergency.

She will stand at the door and look back at you with those unbearable eyes and you will put on your shoes even when you don’t want to, and you will step outside even when the sky is grey, and you will walk — because she asked, because she needs you, because somehow the needing is the gift. And every walk a new adventure. She knew where to go. Lead on.

Sometimes she sniffed where she shouldn’t have. Under the fence — and got bitten. The neighbour’s cat — and got a claw slap across the nose. But she bounced back up every time, because that is the thing about dogs: they do not hold grudges against the world for being sharp. They just shake it off and go looking for the next thing to love.

When she was young she would whimsically play throughout the house, tearing from room to room like joy had legs, and then — no matter where she was, middle of the floor en route to the bowl, or outside in the windy grass — she would zonk out. Batteries depleted. Gone. As though living that hard required sleeping that deep.

And as she got older she would remind you — time for bed, come on — at 7pm. A bit too early for you, but the right time for her. And you would learn that she was not wrong about most things, and maybe not wrong about this either.

She will see you through the worst of it. She will be there when the phone call comes. She will be there when you can’t get off the couch. She will be there when you forget what it feels like to be okay, lying beside you like a kind of proof — that warmth exists, that loyalty is not a theory, that someone in this world looked at you and thought yes, this one, always this one, no matter what.

And she will be there for the best of it too. She will be in the background of your happiest memories, tail going, ears up, a blur of joy in the corner of every photograph. She will teach you that happiness is not complicated. That it lives in tennis balls and puddles and the space between your hand and the top of her head.

And here is the part they really should warn you about.

She will teach you that love does not need language. That it does not need to be earned or explained or defended. That it can just exist, simple and enormous, in the weight of a head on your chest, in the sound of breathing that is not yours but that has become as necessary as your own.

She will teach you all of this, and she will teach you so well that by the time you have to let her go, you will understand exactly what you are losing.

And I think that is why it is so hard to say goodbye. Not because we didn’t know it was coming. But because they spent every single day of their lives making sure we knew exactly how much there was to love.

And they were right. And we did. And it was everything.

Rest easy, Sooty. You were the best girl.