Life with One Dog: Rediscovering Myself and Discovering Quill

When I meet someone new and tell them I write literary nonfiction about life with dogs, their first question is usually “How many dogs do you have?” They’re always surprised when my answer is either one or two, and if I’m being honest, I think they’re a little disappointed it’s not something closer to ten. I always explain it’s a “quality over quantity” situation, meaning the quality of life I can provide for my dogs. Or, in the instance of the last year, life with one dog, singular.

This is the first time since 2005 that I’ve had one dog for more than a few months. I didn’t choose it. I would not have chosen it. We did everything in our power to save Tink’s life, and losing her left a massive, gaping hole in our house and our hearts that a second dog would have covered over like a big, fluffy bandage. So instead of covering it, I let it be exposed to the air — the way you take a surgical bandage off after a day or so, even when the skin underneath still looks tender, because healing only starts when you let it breathe. And so, we leaned into life with Quill.

The Decision to Wait for Another Dog

When Tink passed away in July 2025 from copper storage disease, we were devastated and in a bit of shock. Because the liver can bounce back from damage, we thought we could get her through another round of high liver values. Unfortunately the damage to her body was too great, and we lost her.

Pretty quickly after her passing, my husband suggested that we wait a few years before bringing another puppy into our life. He knew I would be broaching the topic, not because Tink is replaceable, but because of the gaping hole she left in our day-to-day lives.

His biggest argument was that having dogs close in age was wonderful when they were young, but heartbreaking when they were elderly, so instead of getting a puppy when Quill was not quite three, he suggested we wait until he’s four or five.

As far as having dogs close in age, he isn’t wrong about how hard it is when they’re all elderly at the same time. Babe and Dutch were close in age, and losing them within two years of each other was heartbreaking. Jax and Tink were two years apart, and losing them three years apart was even worse, I think because they’d been such a bonded pair, losing Tink felt like losing Jax all over again.

It was also time for fewer expenses. We didn’t have pet insurance for Jax or Tink, and their vet bills added up fast, especially for Tinkerbell. Just Tink’s penicillamine, the medication that chelates copper from the liver, was $265 a month, and she was on it for two years. That’s just one medication, not including the ultrasounds, liver biopsy, supplements, other meds, special food, and appointments. There’s nothing we wouldn’t have done for her, and we never regretted any vet bill required to keep her safe and comfortable. But if we had to lose her, it was time to only have the expenses of one dog for a little while.

And finally, although he didn’t say it outright, I think my husband wants to be retired before the next puppy comes home. He’s said he’d be okay rescuing an older adult dog right now, but if we’re getting a puppy, he wants to be fully present for it. As a full-time professional firefighter, he works a lot of overtime; between fire inspections on his days off and weekends at the hazardous materials drop-off center, he often only gets one full day off a week.

My husband has wanted to train our last three dogs to hunt with him, and time just hasn’t permitted all that training. Once he retires he can throw himself into that sport without constraints. Having grown up with Labs because my father hunted birds, I want our next Lab to get to hunt too, and live her best life doing what she was bred to do. And yes, we already know we want another female next.

We are on the same page as far as our plan for our next dog. The challenge was whether I could survive life with one dog.

Life With a Pack, and Life With One Dog

I love a multiple-dog household. I want to say that plainly, before I say anything about what this year gave me, because it isn’t a story about discovering that one dog is secretly better. I miss watching my dogs play together, a lazy game of bitey-face, a rambunctious round of zoomies, chewing their moose antlers side by side.

I’ve spent countless mornings drinking coffee and reading while dogs parkoured off the sofa and wrestled under my feet. “I’m not part of this game,” I’d tell them, and I could hear their answer even though it wasn’t in words: oh yes, you are. I loved being included, Jax especially loved pulling me into a game of tug-o-war whether I wanted in or not. I loved feeling like part of the pack, the one they all looked to for the schedule and the routines. None of that went away because I no longer have it. I still miss it.

In full disclosure, the idea of facing even a few months with “just” one dog was horrific, I was not sure how I could ever last a year or more. But in the spirit of “when life hands you lemons, you make lemonade,” I found real enjoyment in what has become a very chilled out life with Quill as an only dog.

When I first adopted a dog as an adult, we were a one-dog household for years. I adopted my Labrador Babe in the late nineties, and she was an only dog until 2005, when my mom passed away and I took in her German Shorthaired Pointer, Dutch. During those years, Babe went everywhere with me. We took endless walks, twice a day, seven days a week. She snuggled with me on the sofa every single night after dinner. She came with me to outdoor parties, festivals, my parents’ houses, friends’ houses. We hiked at our favorite parks every weekend. Unless I was working, we were together. She was my best friend, my furry ride or die.

In a life with one dog, you get a bond like that. It is easy to take them places, do more things outside of the house. It is simple in a way a pack never is. But you are also the sole source of enrichment, entertainment, and companionship, and some days this year I worried I wasn’t living up to that. I wondered if Quill was happy, if he was getting enough, if a thirty-minute walk and a few training sessions and an evening on the deck sniffing the breeze and all the tummy rubs I could give him were enough for a sporting breed.

I wondered if he missed being in a pack. He had gone from being with his mother, his littermate, and the other dogs at the breeder straight to life with Tink as his mentor and big sister. Or was he just living in the moment, soaking up my full attention?

Dogs don’t think the way we do, and I know I was applying my own feelings to his. Maybe it was a throwback to when my half brothers would come and go, and I would go from being one of three back to a part-time only child. But that’s a whole other article for another time.

I tried to remember this all year: we never wanted to be a one-dog household, and I don’t think Quill wanted that either, but we made the best of it, and he deserved our undivided attention while we did.

Leaning Into Quill as an Only Dog

Quill’s first two and a half years were chaotic, and none of it had to do with the usual chaos a young Labrador contributes. He came home while my husband was recovering from an emergency appendectomy. Then I had an unexpected hysterectomy. Then Tink got sick. Then Quill got sick with myasthenia gravis. Then Tink again. There was a lot of stress and our household was out of sorts for years, far beyond what I can convey in these few sentences.

So when we decided to wait on a second dog, I thought about all the things Babe and I used to do together and tried to bring some of them into life with Quill. We’ve walked every single day. He comes to the pet store, the Walgreens pickup window, for random pup cups. Instead of going to my parents’ for Sunday dinners, our adult kids come to ours now, and my granddog Loki comes to play with Quill. We’ve also had his buddy Chewie to stay for a week, and at some point we will go and let him meet Chewie’s new little brother Banner. Yes, we are assembling a full Avengers cast made of dogs around here.

I’ve been looking for other fun places to take him, though we’re limited by his myasthenia gravis and the fact that he no longer gets the Bordetella vaccine and a few others. I’m still weighing whether the risk is worth what it would open up, like sniff spots or dog pools.

Over the last year, my bond with Quill has grown much deeper. I feel like we went through losing Tink together, and helped each other heal. Those first few days after she died, I remember thinking now what, and we figured it out together, not because I chose one dog, but because we had no other choice.

Part of the stronger bond is simply time. When you get a new puppy, you love them immediately, and you’re invested in keeping them safe and happy. But that bond is new. It’s still forming. This one has had four years to grow, and it grew fastest in the year I least wanted to be spending alone with him.

Quill Becoming His Own Dog

Quill has grown into his own dog, which he needed to do. He always looked to Tink for everything. I’d say, “Do you want supper?” He’d look at Tink. “Do you want to go outside?” He’d look at Tink. Before doing anything, he’d look to Tink. I’d say, “Quill, what do you want?” even though he had zero idea what I was saying.

And while that was sweet, a testament to how amazing his bond to her was, I also wanted him to be his own dog. To just be Quill.

Now he has his own routines: morning walks, his 8 p.m. lick mat, nose-work training, chin scratches with the neighbor kids who call him over to our fence like little paparazzi, and his favorite pastime, sitting on the deck, nose quivering, reading the breeze. It’s his version of scrolling the TikTok For You feed, and I love watching his nose work that hard, detecting things I can’t begin to understand. He still doesn’t know when mealtime is the way Jax and Tink did, they’d come stare into my soul fifteen minutes early, every time, but he absolutely knows what time our morning walk is, and when it’s getting close to the lick mat.

Living With the Fear of One Dog

The one thing I’m afraid to think about too much is that I am absolutely incapable of living without a dog. I haven’t not had a dog since I adopted Babe in 1999. With Quill as the only dog, if something happened to him, I would have no dogs at all, and I don’t know how to be a person who has no dogs.

Quill spent a few hours at the vet last spring for x-rays, and I was home alone without any dogs or humans. The entire time I was overwhelmed with anxiety, with no idea how to function. I contemplated going to sit in the vet’s waiting room the whole time.

The only way I’ve remained on board with the one-dog-for-now decision is to use the old Scarlett O’Hara mindset: I can’t think about that now. I remind myself that we know how to manage Quill’s Myasthenia Gravis, to just enjoy life with him, and to trust that it will all be okay.

What This Year Actually Was

I would not have chosen this year. I want that said plainly, because I think it’s easy to read a piece like this and assume the person writing it eventually decided the hard thing was secretly the right thing all along. That’s not what happened. What happened is that I was handed a year I didn’t want, and the one thing I got right was refusing to numb my way through it.

It would have been so easy not to. Not a month went by without a post about an older dog needing a home, or a breeder with an unexpected opening. My husband sent me one of those posts recently, and I was ready to have my bags packed, Quill in the backseat, telling anyone who’d listen, get in, we’re going to get a puppy. We already know she’ll be a Lab, and a girl, and that she’ll hunt with my husband when he retires. None of that wanting went away this year. I didn’t wait because the wanting stopped.

I waited because I finally let myself actually grieve Tink instead of redirecting my pain with a puppy, the way I have every other time I’ve lost a dog. And somewhere along the way, I got a year with Quill I wouldn’t trade.

I still love a full house of dogs, and I still miss it. That didn’t change. What changed is that I learned to go through the grief and the loss instead of adding a distraction in its place.

A Little Realization After Posting

After I published this, I realized I’d written about this in April. Five months doesn’t sound like much, but in a dog’s life, it’s a whole chapter. We hadn’t crossed the one‑year anniversary of Tink’s passing, and our routines were still forming instead of settling. So although I’ve written about this before, helping each other through the loss of our Tinkerbell has been an incredibly important part of our dog‑obsessed world — and something I know a lot of other dog owners have had to navigate, or will in the future.