My dog Freddie died last month very suddenly and unexpectedly at the too-young age of 10. Chronically anxious and high-strung, he wasn’t an easy dog to live with. But he was intensely loyal, affectionate, fiercely devoted to the family, and so smart he seemed almost human at times. In spite of–or maybe because of–his issues, we loved him dearly.

One of his most annoying habits was barking at the TV. We tried to train him to watch quietly–and watch he did, eyes fixed on the screen and head moving back and forth, taking in the action–but eventually we gave up, endured his loud objections during scenes containing sex and violence, and got used to relying on closed caption to fill us in on the dialogue he drowned out.

Over the years, as I wrote in a previous post, I longed to be able to relax in front of the TV with my dogs curled up quietly at my side. But as long as Freddie was with us, it never happened.

The night after Freddie died my husband and I sat down on the couch in the family room to catch up on the show we’d been following. We didn’t get past the credits before we had to turn it off. The quiet was deafening.

It was more than a week before we could bring ourselves to watch TV again.

A line from an old Joni Mitchell song comes to mind:

“Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got
‘Till it’s gone”

RIP, dear Freddie.