Five months. That is exactly how long it has been since the cancer took my husband, David, away from me. Five months of coming home to an echoing, empty house that used to be filled with his laughter, his heavy footsteps, and the smells of his cooking.

But the house wasn’t entirely empty. He left something behind, or rather, someone. A massive, 110-pound Rottweiler named Brutus.
To be completely honest—and this is hard to admit without sounding heartless—I never wanted Brutus. David was the true animal lover in our family. He was the one who rescued Brutus as a rowdy pup, trained him, wrestled with him in the backyard, and spoke to him like a best friend. I was always intimidated by the dog. Brutus was a powerhouse of muscle, a giant shadow with a deep, rumbling bark that made my chest vibrate. I tolerated him because David loved him fiercely, but we never bonded. I stayed on my side of the room, and Brutus stayed on David’s.

When David got sick, Brutus became his shadow. In those final, agonizing weeks at home, the dog never left the bedside. He would rest his heavy chin on the mattress, his big brown eyes filled with an unbearable, knowing sadness. And when David finally closed his eyes for the last time, a piece of Brutus seemed to die too.
After the funeral, our house became a mausoleum. Brutus completely ignored me. He didn’t bark, he didn’t beg, and he barely touched his food unless I left the room. He spent twenty hours a day lying on David’s side of the bed, staring blankly at the drywall. It was like living with a ghost. We were two broken beings trapped in our own separate silos of grief, sharing the same roof but completely isolated from one another.

I thought he resented me for being the one who got to stay alive. I genuinely believed he wished I was the one who had gone instead.
That all changed last night, in a way that I am still trying to process.
Around midnight, a severe, unpredicted thunderstorm rolled into our town. I have had a paralyzing phobia of lightning and thunder since I was a little girl—a terror so deep that it completely bypasses my logic. When David was alive, he would wrap his arms around me during storms, hold me tight, and whisper that I was safe until the weather cleared. But David wasn’t here anymore.