My mother photographed a book for me yesterday. It has been sitting on a shelf in Ukraine since 2013 and I have not held it in four years, so I asked her to go and find it and send me a picture of it.
Howard Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness, Russian edition, black cover. One corner of the back board is gone and the contents page and the last thirty pages are torn and chewed right through, and you can still see the shape of where she worked on it. She was under a year old when she did that, and I was very upset with her at the time and I shouted at her about it.
That book is the only thing I have that she made, and everything else in this flat is just things I bought for her.
How she arrived
I was eighteen. I was born with a heart defect and back then nobody was talking about operating on it, so I had already done a certain amount of thinking about how long I was likely to be around.
I always wanted a dog and I always knew my mother would never allow one in the house. I had no money either, so I borrowed part of the sum from my best friend and put in my university stipend for the rest. That is how I bought her from a breeder at a market in Ukraine. I picked out the calmest puppy in the litter.
She was not the calmest puppy in the litter. Whatever it was I was looking at that day, it was not her character.
I bought her as a birthday present for my mother. The real reason, which I did not say out loud for about a week, was that I wanted my mother to have something of mine after I was gone.
My mother was very upset when I walked in with her. She had not asked for a dog and she was not ready for one and she wanted to give her away to good hands. Then I told her why I had bought her, and a week later there was nothing left to discuss and that dog was part of the family.
My mother was the one who named her, she just decided the dog was too grand for anything ordinary and that she would be Juliette, and we left it at that.
Nobody ever called her Juliette. She was Жулька, and she was also Жульминатор, and Жультябрь, and about ten other things that do not survive translation and I am not going to try. Everyone called her Жулька.
That first day she ran around and played and whined a lot and wet the bed several times, and she cried at night. She was a very small puppy and that is what they do.
She always got her way
Every single time, for thirteen years, without one exception that I can think of. Food, walks, games, all of it, and she got what she wanted and she did not care in the slightest whether it was appropriate.
Her method was simple and it never changed once in her life. If she wanted to go left and I wanted to go right, she lay down. Flat on the pavement, in the snow, in the middle of the road, wherever she happened to be standing when she made the decision. You could not drag her anywhere, because she was a dachshund and a dachshund lying down is basically a brick. So you picked her up and carried her, and the second you put her back on the ground she walked left.
Rain was a hard no, she would just stand in the doorway and look at me and that was the end of the conversation.
The balloons I still do not really understand. She was obsessed with them from very early on and she was still obsessed with them at thirteen, a few days before she died. She pushed them with her nose and jumped at them and tried to catch them by the neck where you blow them up. Then she would lie down with one and stay there for hours doing nothing at all.
But there was a rule, and the rule was that she always wanted the newest one. If she already had a balloon and you started inflating a second one, the first one was dead to her, she dropped it and she never touched it again, not that day and not ever. This made parties very hard, because inflating twenty balloons for guests meant nineteen betrayals in a row and she wanted EVERY balloon. So we just kept balloons in the flat permanently, it was easier than having the argument.
She also ate cotton wool, medical cotton wool out of the bathroom, as much of it as she could get her mouth on, and this went on for years and it saved her life once.
My mother left a sewing needle somewhere she should not have left it and Жулька ate it, and we knew exactly what that meant. We were already talking about surgery and about the fact that she might not come out of it, and we were saying goodbye to her in our heads. Then somebody had the idea of feeding her the cotton wool she loved so much, on the theory that it would wrap itself around the needle on the way through. So we did that and we waited a day.
We were putting our coats on to drive her to the vet when she went outside and produced the needle, wrapped in cotton wool, in the ordinary way.
We called that her first "second" birthday, and there were others after it.
Things she did that meant nothing
She smelled like a nice dog, and I do not know how else to put that.
She was a night creature, and the sound of her paws on the corridor floor at two in the morning meant she had "gone hunting" for leftovers in the bin. She did this her entire life and she was never once discouraged by anything any of us did about it.
She drank water very loudly, like somebody working with a ladle. She hummed. She growled when she was annoyed and she growled in exactly the same way when she wanted to play, and she could whistle, and I never once worked out how she was doing that.
She whined every time we sat down to eat, and it was not about the food. She wanted all of us eating at the same time in the same room and she was not calm until that happened. She was a terribly attached dog.
She liked television, so I bought her a DogTV subscription and she watched the live stream, lying down, looking straight at the screen, and she reacted to the sounds during the Stimulation programme. When I had to leave the flat for a long time I put Relaxation on for her so she would have something instead of the silence. Ellie has never once looked at it.
The door
She met me at the door, always, without exception, and she knew it was me before I was even inside. The first thing I ever walked into when I opened that door was her wet nose.
Then the tail, then the nose pushing at my leg, then she would call me somewhere, and then she would roll over onto her back with her stomach up so that I would hold her. That happened every single time for thirteen years.
After my operation I was in hospital for a week and she felt that very clearly. When I came home she did not move more than a metre away from me for a long time afterwards.
Now I come home to complete silence, and nobody has ever waited for me the way she did and nobody is going to.
Leaving
I had a red Toyota Corolla from 1987 and in the evenings I used to put both dogs in it and drive around the city for no particular reason. Ellie came from a shelter in 2019, and the two of them never became friends, and I want to be honest about that instead of writing something nicer. They ignored each other and competed over food and argued about which bed belonged to whom, and otherwise they lived separate lives in the same flat, peacefully enough.
In 2022 I left Ukraine. I needed the operation on my heart by then, and the war had taken away any realistic prospect of getting it done there, so it was leave or keep waiting, and I had already been waiting since I was eighteen.
I took every animal with me. She had a bad heart of her own by that point and she needed her tablets twice a day at fixed hours for the rest of her life, and that was not something I was willing to hand to anybody else.
So the present I bought for my mother, I took back.
She travelled well, she always loved cars.
On our very first day in Switzerland she saw a cat and went after it at full speed and completely forgot she was on a lead. She hit the end of it and turned a full somersault. She had not expected to be unable to catch that cat and she was very surprised about it, and it was extremely funny, and I still think about it.
A third of her life happened here.
My son
When my son was born she was the only one in the house who took it warmly. She came over and smelled him and understood the entire situation immediately and accepted him, and that was the end of the process. No jealousy, no adjustment period, nothing.
For the first couple of years they mostly just coexisted. In the last two they got properly close, and in the last year they were actually friends and played together on the floor, which is not something I expected from a dog of that age with that heart.
She was at our wedding on 15 May 2021 in a small black hat with gold cord and tassels. She died on the 15th as well, which means nothing, and I noticed it anyway.
Her heart
We found the cardiomyopathy in 2018 and we found it completely by accident. She had a cyst growing and we decided to remove it, and before the anaesthetic somebody checked her heart and found dilated cardiomyopathy. She was put on Vetmedin and she came through that operation very well.
For about seven years after that it was just background, tablets in the morning and tablets in the evening, and she did not cough at all until the last couple of months of her life.
In 2023 things started growing on her and a vet told me it was probably cancer and that she did not have long left. He was wrong. They were probably just cysts, they grew slowly, and in the end they had nothing to do with anything and it was simply her heart that gave out.
Once, here in Switzerland, she started passing blood, a lot of it, and we were sure that was the end and that something inside her had torn. I asked her for a bit more time and I promised her I would spend more of it with her, and she recovered within a week. It was as if she heard me. I know exactly how that sounds and I am telling you what happened.
I tried to keep that promise and I did not always manage it. It was always somewhere in my head and I did try to give her more of the games, but not as much as I said I would.
What I wrote down
On 20 June 2025 she wet herself indoors, and before that she had eaten normally and drunk normally and played, and that was the first line I wrote down.
Over that weekend her heart rate went over 200 and several times I could not find a pulse on her at all. I did chest compressions on her more than once and I was genuinely sure she would not see Monday. On the Monday the vet was honest with me and gave me two options. Either we put her down at the clinic, or I take her home and let her die with her family around her.
I took her home. I felt she was going to die either way, and it was better for that to happen next to me and in my hands than in a clinic from an injection, or alone, which was the one thing she could never stand.
Then I did the only thing I actually know how to do, which is measure something while it is dying. I opened a document and started writing all of it down. Her pulse, her breathing rate, every tablet, every millilitre of water, every time she ate or drank or went outside. Every thirty minutes, day and night, for weeks. I wrote it in Ukrainian on my phone, mostly at night, and I never went back and edited any of it.
Here is some of it.
20.06.2025, 08:00. Wet herself indoors. Before that she ate normally, drank, played.
23.06.2025, 09:40. Syncope after two metres of walking. During the syncope the pulse was around 80, regular. After, 150. Pale tongue, severe weakness, no appetite.
24.06.2025, 00:35. 180.
25.06.2025, 15:00. Gave two syringes of water, 5 ml each. She drank. Could not lift her head by herself.
25.06.2025, 19:45. Walk. Can barely stand, sits down, barely managed to pee, urine very yellow.
26.06.2025, 14:22. Pulse 144 steady, drank by herself, came to meet me, ate two soft treats, breathing 34.
26.06.2025, 23:50. Saw a cat in the window and ran to it, tripped and banged her head, had to hold her.
29.06.2025, 19:00. 5 ml omega and 0.5 g taurine. Bit my finger while I was trying to give her the taurine.
05.07.2025, 08:12. Good walk, more than 1 km, ran, went up the steps, did not wobble.
06.07.2025, 12:42. Pulse 124 with extrasystoles, sitting with a balloon.
On 25 June she could not lift her head off the floor by herself. On 26 June at 14:22 she came to meet me. On 6 July she was sitting with a balloon.
The last entry in that document is 21 July 2025, three lines, the tablets and one pulse reading, and then it simply stops. By that point there was nothing left to record and she was just a dog again.
Fourteen months
On 20 June this year I put a yellow party hat on her and photographed her with a chew bone and called it her second birthday. It was exactly one year since the weekend I was sure I was losing her. She was thirteen by then and she was running around the flat and playing and generally behaving like her old self.
Her cough started maybe two months ago and it got worse over the last weeks, and her heart was beating so hard by the end that you could see it moving through her chest.
She kept playing anyway, and she kept demanding treats and she got them, every day, every single day, without exception, exactly the way she always had.
In the last week she started asking to come into our bed, and she always loved being covered with something, a blanket or a throw or a jumper, it never mattered what it was. But her own place was a soft bed just outside our bedroom door and she slept there for years, as if she were guarding the entrance.
The last night
She asked again, so I picked her up and put her on the bed and we fell asleep like that.
I wake up every night, that is a separate thing I have and it has nothing to do with her, and I got up at around five. At six I was coming back to bed and I used the torch on my phone because I was afraid of stepping on her. She was lying on the mat next to the bed. I saw her there and I went back to sleep.
My wife found her in the morning, in the same place. She touched her and she looked for the heartbeat that had been visible through her chest for weeks, and there was nothing there to see.
She was lying in the position of a sleeping dog. She probably went in her sleep, peacefully. She may already have been dead at five or six in the morning while I was standing over her with the torch, and I do not know, and I have decided not to work on that question.
Her last walk was a completely ordinary walk. She walked me, the way she always did, and she went up the steps by herself, although I had been carrying her most of the distance for months by then. She asked for her treats and she got them and she ate them with real pleasure, and I put some of them aside for "tomorrow".
Tomorrow did not come for her.
What is left
The treats stayed in the cupboard, so I asked my son to give them to Ellie, both portions, hers and Жулька's, and he did that.
Ellie has not reacted at all, and as far as I can tell nothing at all has changed for her.
We told my son the truth. He was with her after she died and he stroked her, and then he decided to write her a letter. He cannot write yet, so he wrote it the way he can, in red pen. His mother wrote the words underneath in handwriting that he will be able to read himself later on. He asked her to draw a dachshund as well, and to add the whiskers, because Жулька had whiskers.
It says that he misses Жулічка very much. It says that he loves her very much, more than anyone in the world.
The letter goes with her, and so does an orange balloon, which was entirely his idea, because that was the one the two of them played with together.
He thinks she is on a cloud now, as a small black dot.
I bought her so that my mother would have something of mine to remember me by, in case I did not last very long. It went the other way round in the end. I got the operation and thirteen more years out of it, and she was the one who got the bad heart, and now I am the one doing the remembering.
She never backed down from anything, not once, and not until the last day.
Juliette. 2013 to 15 August 2026.
I will always remember her, and I will always love her.