Saying A Happier Goodbye To Another Dog

About six months after saying goodbye to my asshole dog, we went to the shelter and brought home what we thought would be another little mess on four legs.

His name was Winston and I’d been stalking him on the shelter website for a couple of months but, knowing we had to travel in April, we didn’t want to commit to anything until we got home, and with all the shit this little guy had going on, I thought there was a really good chance one of the local rescue organizations would pull him before we even got a chance to meet.

But that didn’t happen. So on 11 May 2025, after a reasonably positive meet & greet with our resident senior, we brought him home on a foster-to-adopt basis.

I knew within a week that, despite how much I loved him, it would be foster and not adopt. If I’m being completely honest, a part of me knew the day we picked him up. His coming home with us felt absolutely right, but it didn’t feel forever.

On paper, this dog was an absolute disaster and, despite only being 5 years old, seemed like he would be a good fit for our “born a grumpy old lady at heart and now her body is catching up” 14 year old Min Pin.

When he was first brought to the shelter, his entire left side didn’t work. That got better but not great, and then he started having seizures. All of this translated in my mind to “this guy probably has limited mobility and is pretty mellow” and oh how all the gods old & new had a good laugh at that.

Turned out Winston had a puppylike clumsiness due to his wonky knee and neurological issues, but despite that, he had the energy and playfulness of a healthy young adult dog. He could walk, run, get zoomies, he just fell over a little more often than most adult dogs. And, worst of all in the eyes of our old girl, this other dog wanted to play with toys. In her house.

We tried to give them some time and space to sort out their coexistence, but by the end of the second week, I contacted the shelter to let them know we would foster for as long as necessary but adoption wouldn’t be happening, and started actively networking to find him another home.

The first thing I did, and unbeknownst to me at the time the most crucial, was create an Instagram account for him, where I posted faithfully every day, using my rather limited skills with social media to the best of my ability.

In the process of creating a new post for him every day, I learned so much about this goofy fluffy little ball of love, sharing his story in real time, falling more and more in love with him but never able to shake the feeling that this just wasn’t where he was supposed to be.

And spending a lot of sleepless nights wondering if he would stay here anyway because despite the posts and the networking and the shares, he had zero adoption interest, and we agreed that there was just no way we could take a dog with a seizure disorder back to a noisy stressful shelter.

The foster handbook we received said we could foster for as little as 2 weeks or as long as 3 months. What happened at the end of 3 months was never really specified but we decided, worst case, we would finalize the adoption and continue trying to find him a permanent home.

One of the challenges with Winston was how little he shines in a crowd, so we worried that taking him to adoption events to be seen could do more harm than good because all it might show was him at his loudest and worst. But with only 3 weeks left of our 3 month foster period, desperate times and what have you.

It could have gone better, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as I feared it would be, and I met some great people in the local rescue community. Unfortunately, it didn’t generate any adoption interest.

But thankfully, it didn’t need to because we would soon learn that some very special people had been watching him from a distance, the same way I had been months before. They’d been following the Instagram account I thought wasn’t doing any good beyond providing entertainment for a very small crowd, and had also been falling in love with him as his story unfolded.

I was rushing around getting ready to run errands when I got a text from the shelter’s foster coordinator, saying someone wanted to meet Winston the next day. I didn’t want to get my hopes up but something in my gut told me this was it.

Winston and I had an evening ritual, where he would curl up on my lap while I sat at my desk finishing whatever needed to be finished before I went to bed. I spent an extra few minutes doing nothing that night, just enjoying that quiet closeness and crying a little, feeling certain it would be the last time.

The next day, I packed up all of his things and brought them to his meet & greet, just in case. As soon as I saw them see him for the first time, I knew I’d been right to say my goodbyes the night before.

And one day short of 5 months since he’d been brought to the shelter, a ragged little mess in such bad shape that the first thing in his shelter notes was a recommendation for humane euthanasia if his condition didn’t improve, and after almost 3 months in foster care, Winston finally found his people.

This is the last picture I took with him at the shelter as we said our last goodbye.

It’s not a great picture but that’s okay. It didn’t have to be, I have lots of great pictures with him. And I didn’t want to waste time trying to get a better shot while his family was waiting, at last, to take him home.
 
 
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