I lost my best friend last weekend. He was only five years old. Rocky was the best dog I have ever had. I am utterly disconsolate, which is why you have not seen me write here since last Wednesday. I am no stranger to this pain and have felt immense grief over Mocha, Melody and Bella, to name just a few of many. The Weindlings are dog people. I was born with dogs and I will die with dogs, but this little fella…I would have given anything to have Rocky at my side the rest of my life. Anything. He’s my wolf.
The primal origin of man’s relationship with dogs has a deep meaning that evades the human language’s ability to capture it. Tens to hundreds of thousands of years ago, we negotiated a détente with a hungry predator scavenging our kills, and an evolutionary spark unlike any other was born. We domesticated them into the most loyal, loving creatures who have given me a purpose connected to the basics of life unlike any other. It is our evolutionary responsibility to navigate dogs through a world filled with hostilities to their well-being, but we need them too. Dogs can be trained to detect different forms of cancer, even in other dogs. They save our lives in more ways than one.
I will never really know the complete reason why Rocky died. He had a blood clotting disease basically his entire life that went undetected, in part because of where it built up in his body–but also because he was a magical being who was able to build new pathways to deliver blood behind the clotting, which kept his body working and all of us in the dark about the ticking time bomb he was born with.
And not just working, but thriving. Rocky is the most athletic dog I’ve ever had. We joke that his Pitt Bull plurality plus a mix of practically all the medium to large-sized dogs built him like an NFL free safety, and he spent a lot of time demonstrating his awesome talents to tackle in the open field against the other dogs in his pack, Annie and Pippin.
Rocky is the most profoundly unique soul I have ever met. I can still feel him with me and strongly believe the present tense is accurate to describe his present state, even if his material form exists in the past tense (call it “woo woo” or trauma-driven rationalization if you want, but another description of this feeling I feel could possibly be quantum entanglement). My family got Rocky during the early pandemic in 2020 when we were all living together, as my sister worked her ass off to get a puppy during a time it was seemingly impossible to do so. One day we finally caught a break when a man from the adoption agency called us and said, “I have a dog 45 minutes away if you want him.” We piled into the car, and that’s where I met who they called Hamish, sitting under a tree at a park. I had a mask on, and this cute little pup walked around our circle and booped me on the nose with his nose. That’s how we first met.
On our way home, I suggested we stop at my Nana’s house close by to introduce him to her, who died a few years later. One of the many beautiful gifts my little man gave us was taking her favorite chair as his own dog bed, giving it a utility in my office and preserving my Nana’s memory in a way that I never could. I am writing this while sitting in my Nana’s chair/Rocky’s bed that I’m sure would touch my Nana’s heart but also mildly annoy her over his hair under the cushion. She was the type to scold us for taking on the immense responsibility of a puppy, but forget all about it and fall deeply in love the moment she met him. And boy did she fall in love with a dog I decided was now named Rocky.
I never had the opportunity to name one of my dogs outside my third one, Bart (a lot of things are making sense to some of Splinter’s readers knowing I was a Simpsons child now). I liked the name Rocky because I am a rabid Colorado partisan and damn near all dog people have had a dog named Rocky around them at some point. I love dogs and I wanted a dog in the grand spirit of them, and holy cow did I ever get it. He was all the dogs: 29.1 percent Pitt Bull, 12.7 percent Black Lab, 12.3 percent Australian Cattle Dog, 6.9 percent Chow Chow, 6.4 percent Dalmation, 6.3 percent Border Collie, 5.4 percent Golden Retriever and 20.9 percent “Supermutt,” an older lineage filled with small amounts of DNA ranging from Miniature Pinschers to German Shepherds. His DNA test was like a Stefon SNL skit, it had everything, and it all combined to create the cutest puppy in the world.
Rocky and his sister Annie who I will get to in a moment saved me in a big way during the pandemic. I was far from the only one going through tough times in 2020, but it was the worst period of my life since my mom died of cancer in October 2009. In early 2019, Paste had a meeting where we were informed that in Google’s latest tweak to their ad monopoly, they had devalued political content and basically insta-tanked our revenue by a percentage significant enough to put the writing on the wall. The death of Paste Politics was part of a much larger trend seen at outlets like Vice, as the digital media economy collapsed over the next few years while Google’s stock price rose about 170 percent over the same period.
By mid-2019, I was out of a job. In late 2019, I woke up to a blood-curdling scream from my father one morning, as he discovered that our precious Great Pyrenees, Bella (pictured below), was lying dead on the floor. Without seeing her, I knew what happened.
Her health was declining, and the night before, she had tipped over and had a very scary and rigid moment while not being able to get up, but I was able to stabilize her and get her moving around. In retrospect it might have been a seizure, either way, when I heard my dad’s scream, I knew I had lost the dog who to that point in my life, meant the most to me. I love all dogs, but I think it does a disservice to the uniqueness of each relationship to say they all mean the same to us. It’s all deeply profound and life-affirming, but they’re not all the same. Dogs have different personalities just like we do.
I was depressed from the moment Bella died up until the day I met Rocky. I had taken up golf which began to help a little, but the combination of watching writers and editors far more talented and experienced than me also struggling to find work and mourning a best friend I felt a deep, soulful connection to, with that all-encompassing heartbreak beginning just before a global pandemic bungled by Donald fucking Trump…it all made me feel like I was losing my mind. Diving head-first into UFOs as my pandemic activity certainly didn’t help either.
But my sister knows me and knows how much a dog can brighten your world. She got me Rocky in early 2020, and my life has been up only from that first boop on the nose. I made enough money learning how batshit insane crypto is to support myself through a freelance hell that all too many writers are familiar with, then decided to cash in my casino tokens and go back to school to switch careers one last time into something I know this greedy society won’t destroy: finance. Then one day I hit the lottery when I was sitting in class learning how to price derivatives (a hell I would only wish upon Elon Musk), and learned that my previous and future employer bought Jezebel and the beloved website that I applied to write for just before it died in late 2019.
But I am not sitting in that classroom in Boulder or serving as Splinter Editor-in-Chief now without Rocky. Not a chance. He helped stabilize my life at one of its lowest points, and he turned my turbulent un-/underemployment that was making me feel aimless and useless into an opportunity to create some of the greatest days of my entire life.
Another one of the best days of my life came when Rocky met his big sister, Annie. Unbeknownst to my sister, brother-in-law and I, our father had been scrolling longingly on Great Pyrenees adoption forums as we searched for puppies. We were honestly kind of annoyed because we finally got Rocky and a puppy is a 24/7 job and all of us were still reeling from Bella’s sudden death, so another Great Pyrenees was not at the forefront of our minds. But the three of us have never been more wrong in our entire lives, and Rocky and Annie formed an amazing bond that brought untold joy into our life while the whole world fell apart outside.
They needed each other. We all needed them. Rocky was a stupid puppy who didn’t know anything and started fights he couldn’t finish, and Annabelle had just gone through a traumatic event down in Houston. We don’t quite know what happened, other than she lived with owners who were found dead in the house with her and her biological brother, and she was separated from her brother when a Great Pyrenees rescue got them when no one else would take them. We’re not totally sure how old she is, we think she was five or six when we got her a little after Rocky, but she’s such a goof and has so much youthful energy you could still convince me she’s a puppy even though she’s likely ten or eleven now.
But Annabelle was in a dark state when we got her. Great Pyrenees are notoriously stubborn, and initially she would tell us to pound sand when we called her in from the yard. If you lightly tugged on her collar to try to get her to come in, she would run back into the house with her tail between her legs, making this frightened noise that has convinced me she was abused in Houston. She slept in the narrow entryway to the garage and pretty much would only leave it to go outside or eat. You can see how nervous she is in this video meeting Rocky and all of us for the first time as he was just enamored with her. But eventually, Rocky coaxed her out of her shell, and he breathed life back into her practically overnight. In just a few days, Annie went from weary of Rocky to being attached at his hip, and their activities alternated between love and war all day. Annie lost a brother in Texas, but gained one in Colorado.
We tweaked her name to Annie to give her some rhetorical separation from Bella when we got her, and it is a bit surreal feeling such a deep connection to a big white dog so quickly after losing our family’s longtime big white dog. I call her both Annie and Annabelle now and she doesn’t care, she just loves being part of the pack, and she adores Rocky. Bella would have too. Earlier I described their relationship as brother and sister, but Annie and Rocky are everything to each other–mother and son, battle-tested foes, best friends. They have it all.
When people and vets call me Rocky’s dad, I really appreciate the respect for the meaning of our relationship by using that term, but I disagree with it as a literal characterization. Dogs are family to us, but not like that. They are our evolutionary family. Comparing dogs or any pets to humans does a disservice to their purpose as agents of joy and love, which is what the “woo woo” part of my brain believes is their mission to teach mankind.
We lived another lesson in joy and love when my sister and brother-in-law got Pippin the following winter, a reactive and scared dog who grew up on the streets as a young puppy. His life easily could have gone down a lot of ugly paths if not for the heroics of the adoption agency and my siblings who had the patience of saints to train him to be the dog he is, which is a goofball exploding with love.
And holy moly does Pippin love Rocky. More than anything other than his people. Rocky socialized Pippin and taught him that the world is filled with love and he has nothing to fear, and now Pippin teaches others the same lesson. At full size, Pippin wound up weighing fifteen pounds more than my little man, but he forever looked at Rocky as his big brother he loved to pick fights with who could always kick his ass. I could write another 100,000 words on how special their relationship was, but these pictures below do more than I ever could to demonstrate their love for one another. Look at these goobers, this is seriously how they greeted each other the first time they met.
Rocky saved all of us, but he really saved Pippin.
Our pets’ shortened lifespan is also a lesson they are put on this earth to impress upon mankind. The reality that they will likely die before us teaches us to respect the two things we all share, life and death. Every one of us will eventually follow the path that Rocky traveled on last week. That’s just the deal we all get here on earth, and if there is anything I have learned, you must find a way to make peace with this fact. No matter how bad of a hand you are dealt, life itself is still a gift, proven by the unparalleled pain of death ripping it away.
And fuck did Rocky get a raw deal from life. This is so fucking unfair. I have never felt pain like this before. Losing my mom at eighteen years old hurt more than anything, but a pet is a unique loss and Rocky is a unique pet. They’re your buddies. Your warriors. Your soul companions who understand you better than you do and spend every day of their lives leading you to your best self. You express love and affection to them in a way that you don’t with humans, and it gets you more in touch with what truly matters. I firmly believe that relationships with pets help ground you in a way that no human interaction can in a changing society rapidly becoming more alien to our primal instincts. We need humans, but we also need animals.
And I need dogs. I need Rocky. I don’t know how to live without him, but I know that the only thing he wants for me right now is to do exactly that and be with Annie and Pippin to comfort them like I comforted him.
I did everything I could to save him. In December, Rocky started limping heavily and we learned that he had a degenerative disease in his back left hip, so we began doing some treatment and rehab for it, with a hip replacement surgery looming if that didn’t work. Two weeks ago, he had this sore swell up on his back right foot, and it was so swollen and painful that he couldn’t walk on it, so he had to put extra weight on his bad leg. We gave him some meds to reduce the swelling and pain which worked, and then he started getting sick.
On Thursday his vet ran tests and found his kidney levels dangerously elevated, and they sent us to the hospital, where their vet told us that after they did some imaging, they discovered “the biggest blood clots I’ve ever seen” sitting directly on Rocky’s kidneys, cutting off the bloodflow to them. They also said that sore on his right foot was surely related to the blood clotting, and it would not be surprising at all if his hip dysplasia was also connected to getting less blood to his back half, given that the scans suggested this issue plagued him his entire life.
The vet said most owners pursue palliative care at this point because kidneys do not fuck around, and the only other option is very expensive and very risky. My sister lived that brutal reality with our precious Melody, a small Maltese mix who was her Rocky. Melody was also born with a ticking time bomb in her body, and my sister kept her alive longer than 99.999999 percent of people on this earth would or could have. It’s one of the many injustices of America that many people cannot afford to keep their pets alive as long as their body could allow it, and that this economic reality shapes a lot of vet care towards cheaper and less effective options, lest businesses lose customers. We need Medicare for All for pets.
My family is not rich, but we all have jobs and some savings, plus my grandfather who fought the Nazis and must be hanging out with Rocky while my Nana showers him with love, ensured that we are lucky enough to be able to take on dog debt. We don’t care. It’s worth it. And I was determined to save my little man’s life. I wasn’t about to lose him at five years old without a fight, and being that young also meant we could pursue aggressive options to save his life against the blood clots because he was so strong.
The vet at the hospital told us that other than palliative care, our only option was to rush him to the uber-vets at Colorado State University (CSU), the heroes of this tragedy. The only procedure that could save Rocky’s life was injecting an ungodly expensive poison into his body to break up the blood clots and get blood flow back to his kidneys, and CSU is the only kind of vet hospital in the state with the ability to manage that process. The hospital said they would probably do the surgery early tomorrow morning, but on the drive up with Rocky to Fort Collins, we got a call from CSU to tell us that the doctors were on their way from their homes to save Rocky’s life tonight.
My heroes met me in the lobby, and told me how they were going to put a tube down Rocky’s carotid artery to get the poison-injecting instrument near the blood clots choking his kidneys to death. The surgery sounded, and was, brutal. The lead surgeon said that in his 30-year career, he had only done this procedure seven or eight times, and in every other instance, this blood clotting issue had already debilitated the dogs’ back legs to the point of immobility, making this delicate dance around Rocky’s kidneys a first for one of the best vet surgeons on earth. Meanwhile, Rocky was being his mouthy and petulant little self just a few days before, running the fence and telling people on the other side to piss off. His legs weren’t great towards the end but at no point did he ever come close to being immobilized.
The doctors were amazed by this sneaky little guy who grew brand new pathways around his blood clots, and kept his body working to the point that basically as good as veterinary care gets in this country said they had never seen this kind of case before. The lead surgeon said that given where the blood clots had concentrated in Rocky’s body over time, unless we were looking for it or were lucky enough to stumble upon it scanning for other things in a dog who had zero health issues before December, we never would have seen it before it became a problem. Rocky was so supremely special that even what killed him was just as unique as he was.
But it didn’t kill him on Thursday night. I named him well, he’s a fighter. The surgery team said this procedure usually takes about two hours, but for Rocky’s massive blood clots it took them about four and a half, and my experience of that time wondering if I just said goodbye to my little man was felt in decades. The moment they came out and said “he’s OK” will remain one of the greatest feelings of my life, in part because it gave me one of the most fulfilling days of my life.
Which was Friday. CSU called that morning and said even though Rocky was far from out of the woods, all things considered, he was in decent shape, and I was free to come visit him in the ICU. I came upon my poor little man wrapped in tubes with his belly and neck shaved, exposing some really gnarly scars. But he was still my Rocky. They saved him. All of him. At least for a day. One of the best days we ever had together.
The moment I came around the corner and he woke up to my voice will be etched into my soul forever. Perhaps the last thing I ever see when I get my chance to meet back up with Rocky one day. You could just see the trauma on his face, and as I sat down next to him, he did his patented lovey-dovey move of nuzzling his head in the cradle of my neck and we just held each other for what felt like eons. His strength was severely depleted so he couldn’t sit up for long, but his whole spirit was still in there. I sat next to him all day to pet him and give him all my love, and the vets said they think it had a real effect since his heart was one of the next looming fights and we needed to keep his heart rate down.
But the most immediate challenge was peeing. His kidneys needed to turn around or else the heroism of the surgery team the night before would be a temporary solution in the face of a tidal wave of kidney failure. To get out of the woods meant two things: getting his kidneys working in the short-term, and then hopefully we could use daily medication to break up the rest of the clotting in the medium to long-term, especially the last big blood clot that was too close to his heart for the surgeons to work their magic on the night before, lest they inject poison directly into his heart from underneath or go down through it. That was the one that wound up killing him.
I will forever cherish the memories Rocky and I made in that corner of the ICU around a bunch of other animals I really hope made it out of there. One of my last moments with Rocky was leading him outside with my heroes to do his business. He still was able to get up and walk around and follow me about 500 yards through the hospital to the backyard. He didn’t go but he did do his typical nosy nellie bit where he walks to a chain-link fence and lets his small prey drive go wild looking for rabbits and such on the other side. Despite all the immense trauma from the last 24 hours on death’s doorstep, he was still Rocky every moment of the subsequent 24 hours. Friday was a day filled with heart-warming memories of love and comfort and a celebration of our special relationship that deep down, we both knew was having its going away party.
But there was still a glimmer of hope late on Friday. My little man saved me $25k that he can add to my debts to him which now run to infinity, all through a heroic act of peeing. I was told a good urine value from his acutely injured kidneys is 1, bad is 0.5, and underneath that it gets very dangerous. When Rocky woke up from surgery on Friday, his urine value was 0.18.
When I got there, it was 0.4, and my heroes and I concluded that if he did not get this number to a good level, we needed to do dialysis ASAP (the first procedure that night would cost me $25k, and a whole program would have been $40k). They said it was a “50/50 shot” and also presented serious blood clot risks, but if his kidneys weren’t working, it was his only chance. There was a facility in Boulder that specialized in dialysis that I would have driven him to, and so around lunch, I left to eat for the first time in decades while CSU took Rocky to do more imaging and testing, and I wondered how large this bill will stack up and whether this herculean effort was all for naught in the face of immense blood clots and kidney failure.
When I got back, Rocky’s urine value was above 1. My little man was fighting. We could mathematically prove it. He didn’t need dialysis tonight, and they could keep him at CSU and keep battling the blood clots while hoping that his kidneys could improve over time like Melody’s did so often until they didn’t.
Which for Rocky, was Saturday, February 15th, 2025. He was up against an unbeatable duo of kidney failure and catastrophic blood clotting slipping into his heart. The CSU experts told me that no one really knows why this blood clotting disease happens to dogs, it’s much more common in cats and they have a better grasp of why they get it, but the potential causes of it in dogs are narrowed down to one of cancer, heart disease, or a total mystery. Rocky had been screened for cancer when he was diagnosed with hip dysplasia, and on that and every other kind of scan after it, no one ever saw any evidence of it. If it was heart disease, that presents its own complex set of mysteries, so ultimately, we will never truly know what killed Rocky, or other dogs afflicted with this horrible blood clotting disease that can sneak attack you and destroy your entire life in just a few months.
At least, not with the information we had before all of Rocky’s procedures.
Colorado State is a top-tier veterinary program for a reason. Their research helps them save more animals’ lives which helps them do more research, etc…and I can personally testify that everyone in that building knows what they’re doing. I didn’t waste tens of thousands of dollars fighting for Rocky’s life in a losing effort. For our final act of this life-changing five-year romance that went out in a blaze of tragedy and glory, Rocky created a ton of useful data and imaging for CSU that may save other dogs and cats’ lives who are battling this monstrous blood clotting disease. Maybe even people too, as my heroes told me that Rocky’s case was so unique that they were also citing human literature to try to figure out how to treat him.
Rocky had a seizure right as we arrived on Saturday morning. I came upon him on a gurney, snorting specks of blood into a cup giving him oxygen, and my sister comforted me and told me from experience that the heart-shattering noise he was making was just the fluid in his lungs moving around, and not him struggling to breathe. After getting in his ear and telling him how deeply I loved him as CSU combatted the mounting problems his body presented, my heroes concluded that all options that wouldn’t kill him had been exhausted, and unlike just before we got there, he was probably in some real pain from the blood clots breaking down into his stomach after the seizure.
I made the call to end his suffering and absorb it as mine forever.
We took Rocky into a room on the side of the ICU and brought Annie in to say goodbye. She was freaked out and tried to turn back towards the door, which the doctor said was a normal reaction as dogs want to give dogs in pain the space to heal. But I got her to come over to my side of the gurney to look him in the eyes as he began to leave us. She sniffed his snout one last time and I swear I could see Rocky’s little nose budge a bit as he drifted into a morphine sleep. Annie retreated back to Rocky’s other side with my sister and brother-in-law, as I crouched in the corner and stared lovingly into Rocky’s eyes as he left this world for the next. I wanted him to know that the person he chose was there with him to the very end.
Being chosen by Rocky has been the honor of my life. The ultimate answer to all questions about Rocky from my heroes at CSU is “we don’t really know,” but they said that it’s very hard to envision how a sedentary dog would have been able to create new blood pathways to get around these clots, and they imagined that if he had just sat around his whole life, this blood clotting issue would have become a problem much earlier and he would have had built up less of an ability to fight it. Adopting Annie and Pippin and taking them and Rocky to the Rockies time and time again helped keep him active and build the strength that would extend his life and irrevocably change all of ours.
Rocky’s final act of heroism is the part of this that makes me cry harder than anything because it’s so beautiful. The vet who walked me out and explained how “we learned a lot” at CSU from the past two-plus days of fighting for his life gave me something I will cherish forever. Rocky didn’t die in vain. He is a gift not just to me, or to my family, but to the whole world. We funded research together. He advanced medical science. Rocky is immortal, and will live forever in the data that future heroes cite to try to save other dogs’ lives.
Knowing what I know now, that he was born with a ticking time bomb and the little brat hid it from us by being an athletic freak, and that his death will help research of a disease in dogs we know little about, makes me feel like the luckiest human to ever walk this evolutionary path. I cannot believe my good fortune that I even had the chance to meet this staggeringly inimitable being in the first place, let alone be chosen as his person. Everyone who ever met him, even the vet techs who would check him in for just a second, fell in love with him at first sight.
His eyes were magically expressive, and he has a way of connecting directly to your soul that many other dogs don’t. I call him my little man in part because my little buddy was taken by Ollie who passed just after we got Rocky, but over time it became an object of affection for how unique he is. I adore all my dogs, but Rocky hit me harder than any of them have, in large part because of how direct our communication is. I know it sounds crazy (not to Border Collie owners), but we really talk to each other in our own language.
He hates when I watch TV because it means he’s not the center of attention, which is a problem because I am afflicted with terminal sports brain. Without fail, at some dramatic point in a game, Rocky will chirp at me and lead me away to an angle where he knows I can’t see the game, all so I can pet him while focusing on nothing else. And he was always successful.
When he didn’t feel like telling you what was on his mind, he would paw you, like to let you know that you can stop petting that spot on him and move to another one. If that new spot was not the spot he wanted, my little prince let you know with another paw right away until you got it right. I call him my little prince semi-jokingly as I doted on him as a puppy, and he took it literally and manifested it into the world. Never underestimate the degree to which dogs train you. He was my alarm clock every morning, and every day since his death, I have woken up utterly heartbroken once the part of my brain trained to see him around 7 a.m. does not.
The moment Rocky passed from this world to the next, I felt a strange lump around my diaphragm that was not physical, but I could feel it in a way that felt like it was a solid object inside me, and an utterly shocking sense of peace and comfort I am still struggling to understand overwhelmed me. I know in my bones it did not come from my incredibly frayed emotional state, I was hanging by a thread at that point after three days of little sleep, lots of I-25 travel and nonstop grief. I drove to CSU to tell Rocky the comforting phrase I taught him to get through vet visits and such, “it’s OK,” and I am dead certain that Rocky left this world finding a way to tell me that “it’s OK.”
I love him so much. I already know that in Rocky’s honor, I will eventually get another puppy, because we as a family believe in linking our dogs, so Annie and Pippin can one day teach another kindred spirit how Rocky touched this whole world, and the link flows through the dynamic duo of Melody and Ollie all the way back to my childhood with Bart, Joey and Molly.
I will never replace Rocky. I will never replace any of my dogs I have lost because they are all special and unique, but this little man was just fundamentally different. My sister believes you get one soul dog and Rocky was mine. He carried me at a point where I needed help, and I unwittingly returned the favor by keeping him active and extending his life much farther than his mystery blood clotting disease ever would have let him on its own. I am not very religious, nor Christian, but the fact that my perfect dog was born on Christmas and died way too early while giving a gift to the world through his death is just so unfathomably beautiful that the ultimate feeling I feel from this tragedy is love.
The waves of love have hit me so much harder than the pain of not having my best friend around anymore to paw at me in the morning and tell me it’s time to get off my ass and let him out and go to work. This has shattered my life into a million pieces, but I am staying grounded in the fact that I am a much better person because of my five magical years with Rocky–this horrible weekend included–and we really may have saved some other Rocky’s lives together in his final act in this realm. I cannot think of a better way to honor my little man’s hallowed memory than proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was a gift who was too pure for this cruel world, all while immortalizing him in both medical journals and on the internet. Writing this was extremely therapeutic for me, and my hope in publishing it is that this can provide some comfort to others who are also grieving the loss of their perfect little loved ones. I love you more than words can describe Rocky, soon I will get your pawprint tattooed on my heart because the outside needs to match the inside.
