It’s been six months now since we lost the two senior members of our Sausage Squad, Roxie and Banana. While I certainly don’t feel as physically and overwhelmingly heartbroken as I did the first week of their passing, random days are still very hard. For the first month, it felt like I was perpetually living in the split-second moment that one wakes up from a bad dream and wonders whether it was real or not. I wanted so very very VERY badly for the passing of my two senior dachshunds to somehow not be real and to miraculously have them back in my arms again.

I have beat myself up with so much guilt wondering if I made all the “right” decisions in letting them both go over the rainbow bridge together or even for letting Banana go instead of waiting to see if she would get better. The spiritual side of me has been constantly looking for deeper meaning in the signs around me to convince me that things happen for a reason and/or were perhaps destined to happen the way they did. (Disclaimer: I am NOT a religious person.) In my quest to find answers I will surely never find (no matter how much people have assured me I did the right thing), one crazy detail I realized later was that Roxie and Banana passed away exactly six months after we welcomed home their new, fellow Sausage Squad members, Panini and Canoe.

It doesn’t seem like that precise timing of the senior weens passing exactly half a year later could be a mere coincidence, nor the fact that just two short weeks before we were set to pick up Panini, the original puppy we had put a deposit on and had anxiously been waiting to get for four months, we suddenly felt compelled to get two puppies at once rather than just the one…then, at the end of all this, we just happened to lose both of our two senior weens together.

Despite Banana having worse luck than Roxie with many random ailments and illnesses throughout her life, we hadn’t even been worried about losing Banana any time soon — only Roxie — so her sudden loss was quite a shock. Roxie had been really struggling to get by in her old age and I don’t think I could have ever been ready to make the decision of when to send Roxie over the rainbow bridge, just based on the fact that she was simply getting old and seemingly not enjoying life at all anymore. I would have selfishly kept her around forever until she made the decision herself to leave this world. But surely no dog wants to stick around until the bitter end like that and would likely want to end life on a good note. So it makes somewhat sense that the universe would help me with that decision and possibly “cause” Banana to become seriously ill, which pushed me to make the logical and empathetic decision to let both our two senior weens go together.

Obviously, it’s very sad to think that one dog was a “sacrifice”‘ so the other one could leave this world with them, but I try to remember that I have so much to be grateful for, since they both made it to a much older age than I ever expected them to. Banana even persevered through a really scary auto-immune illness at the young age of four and I can’t imagine not being blessed with the 13 long and wonderful years that came after that. Furthermore, the last years with them were some of the best because of the pandemic we went through and the remote work situation that came out of that, which allowed me to spend much more quality time with them.

In the weeks and months after the passing of my senior weens, I waited so eagerly for them to visit me in my dreams or for me to feel their presence again. It wasn’t until over two months later when I got my first sign of them. I was having a really emotional day, and through my tears, I began noticing that there were a ton of birds chirping and flying outside the window beside me. Not only was this an unusual number of birds, but it was still the dead of winter with snow fresh on the ground. What would a bunch of birds be doing flocking around our specific home at such a time of year? It seemed almost as if they had been sent by my senior ween angels to cheer me up that sad day… or at least that’s what I’d like to believe

The type of birds that were present that day also weren’t just ordinary sparrows that one would commonly see; they were robins, a bird that represents Spring, and more importantly, new beginnings. I couldn’t help but think that this was a sign from my senior weens that it was okay to move on to a “new season” and stop being so heartbroken over them. It seems impossible though, for my heart to just move on from the two furry companions that had been by my side through every big milestone in my adult life from graduating college to bad breakups to the first hiking date with my now-husband to the proposal with my now-husband to our wedding and then countless grand adventures after that.

Since that day with the birds visiting me, I have also had two very vivid dreams of being able to see/hold Banana, while Roxie is back to her prior youthful self and running around. In these dreams, everything about Banana has felt soooo incredibly real (something I have never experienced in any dream), but I know full-well in that dream state that she isn’t actually real and it is a gift from the heavens that I’m able to see the both of them again. When I wake, it’s not sadness that I feel when I realize that Banana isn’t actually back in my world, but rather sheer gratitude that I am able to briefly experience these surreal moments back with my senior weens.

Although I am finally at a point where I can reminisce over the good memories and adventures I had with the senior weens without my heart crumbling, I still find myself replaying their last day in my head and torturing myself with the sadness and heartache all over again. It’s as if remembering that last day brings me back to the last moment I was with them and held them.

Sometimes, too, I feel as if that sadness is also what provides a bit of reassurance that I haven’t forgotten them or left their cherished memories behind. I have the worst memory and one of the things I have worried about the most since the passing of Roxie and Banana is that the pain of losing them would only become slightly more bearable because I’d be forgetting them little by little.

This past weekend, hubby and I went camping and somewhat unintentionally ended up following the same itinerary we did last year around this same time of year when we just had the senior weens. We will always have photos to remember the senior weens by, but I can only hope that revisiting old places where we adventured with the senior weens and then creating new memories there with the teeny weens will revive old memories of Roxie and Banana, rather than overwriting them on my limited-storage brain. And in between those happy moments reliving memories, I will always allow myself to shed as many tears as I need to, without feeling like my grief has a deadline it must meet.