This post was originally published on Substack in May 2023. I've moved it here in an effort to stop supporting the platform after some recent events.
As dumb as it sounds, there’s no better way to describe Stanley than as a brother.
He was the first pet that we had as a family that we got while I was alive— so when we drove to pick up a dog named Laddie from a policewoman who did rescue, there was a lot of excitement and a lot of questions and a lot of insanity off the bat.
He had already been crate-trained, so we had been spared from a big part of the craziness that comes with a new dog, but the real situation started when we got back into the car after picking him up, and everyone in the Taylor family agreed: the name ‘Laddie’ had to go.
What followed has since become tradition in my family: an intense, days-long debate over what we should name our new dog.
My sister campaigned for Louis, in reference to a friend from school. I, after reading Brian Selznick’s The Book of Hugo Cabret (which later became the movie Hugo) campaigned for the name Houdini, which, in retrospect, I now agree is a terrible name for a pet.
Luckily, my mom nipped the debate in the bud with a good name she already had in mind. Following in the footsteps of Scully, who had passed away a few weeks before and who my mom still misses more than maybe any other pet she’s ever had, and Stella, the shy but amazing now-sister to the artist formerly known as Laddie, she put her suggestion out there: Stanley.
After some more arguing, Stanley Louis Houdini Taylor (me and my sister settled) was welcomed into our family.
We usually just called him Stan.
Stanley and I grew up together, in ways silly and profound, over the next eleven years. He was there for me when I needed him, when I didn’t, and every moment in between.
When we got Stanley, I was a couple years away from starting to figure out who I was: starting to experiment with creative work, going through middle school and high school, reckoning with my ADHD and how to effectively deal with it. As ridiculous as it sounds, Stanley followed me in his own growth, his own maturity, his own way of finding and settling into his role.
At first, we had a few years of him as a puppy, growing up in a stable home. He had an insatiable appetite that rooted in his time before being taken to a shelter— something that ended up manifesting in my family having to lock down all food in the house before we left, making sure the garbage was taken out so he wouldn’t eat it, closing and locking our bread drawer, making sure no leftovers were out, that kind of thing. He took time learning from Stella, who I mentioned earlier, about life in and around our house, whether that’s our dogs annoying habit to bark at whoever might be at the door (something that every dog of ours has taught every new dog we’ve ever gotten, meaning every single dog I’ve ever had has done it), meeting other dogs in our neighborhood, sometimes in short but well-meaning scuffles, and more.
A few years later, when Stella passed away and I was heading into sixth grade, Stanley was suddenly thrust out of the role of the new, young dog— for a while, he was the only dog, from a new rookie to a staple member of the team. He grew with us, as middle school thrust me and my sister into grades that mattered and high school applications that seemed like the end of the world. By the time we got another dog in Stella’s place, Hazel, it felt like he took a role as a mentor figure for her, as she followed him in whatever he did until she found her place in the house.
I ended up going to high school at Jones College Prep, a public ‘selective enrollment’ school in the middle of Chicago’s South Loop. It was about a fifty minute commute there every day between walking to/from the train and the half hour I’d spend on the Brown and Red lines. My time at Jones was a learning experience in every facet, from my social life to my academic life to my personal life and everything surrounding them. It forced me to grow up fast. Meanwhile, my sister was doing the same thing, starting her time at Beacon Academy in Evanston. With my dad flying out for work from Monday to Friday, my mom was pulled thin between her job starting a new kids’ section at the Chicago Tribune with her old colleagues from Time Out, myself, and my sister. To this day, I still don’t know how she did it.
What it meant for me, though, was a lot more independence. A lot more time to myself and around the city with my friends, and a lot more pressure on me to live my life and manage myself without all the guardrails. At first, it went pretty well. I wasn’t the best at waking up on time (Note: I was terrible at waking up on time), but my grades were good enough and I had a decent group of friends. Just as Stanley had found his role, I felt like I was slipping in to mine.
I went into my sophomore year in high school, my world started to unravel a bit. The Adderall I was taking for my ADHD meant that I was staying up later and later, meaning I’d barely sleep, making the Adderall work less— meaning I would take more of the ‘booster’ Adderall standard release I was prescribed trying to do homework later at night, meaning I’d stay up for longer. It was a vicious cycle that, without any good time management skills and despite my tries at organizing, made my grades plummet, made me more stressed and erratic, and caused my friends to hang out with me less. I got stuck in a tailspin.
During those months, those nights when I would get home from school with all this stress and work that I could never seem to get done, with my mom bouncing in and out of the house to pick up my sister or go on errands or one of a million other things, there was a lot of time that I’d be at home, just me and the pets.
I look back on those days as one of my lowest points. During other times when I struggled, there was always something to look at and say “hey! look at this thing I’m doing!”— one thing to prove to myself that I still had some great talent or work ethic or something inside me. Back then, everything came crashing down at once, and for a while there, I was convinced that this was just what life was— that I had hit my wall as a ‘gifted kid,’ that my pretend act of being smart or talented or something else was over.
In those moments when I had 30 missing assignments and no will inside me to get anything done, when I felt like I was sinking into the floor, I would walk down the steps in my house and see Stanley: a dog that had settled into his role as an older figure to Hazel, whose hair on his snout started getting the faintest gray hairs, and I’d sit down with him and pet him for a bit.
And we’d just sit there, in silence, with my hand scratching behind the back of his ear, and for a second, things were a little more OK.
I know how stupid it sounds, but I needed him back then. He was a comforting presence when I needed one the most, when any sort of signal that told me I can do it was helpful, and he was there. Around this time, because my mom was gone more often, I’d walk Stanley more and more. It meant that we got closer— there were nights when he’d walk into my room and start sitting on my bed with me, there were times that we’d run up and down the block to get his energy out. Even the walks were a struggle with managing my time, with initiating tasks and getting myself to do what I needed to— but Stanley was a living example of what you get when you put the work in and do things the right way: closer bonds, better experiences, less stress.
It took a lot more than Stanley to get me out of all of that— a million lessons learned, countless incredibly hard conversations with my parents (who helped me so, so much, even if I hated them for doing it), a new psychiatrist and a lowered prescription, and, to be perfectly honest, a lot more maturity on my part. But he was there for all of it. I know that he’s just a dog, that, no matter how smart he was, he had no way of knowing anything besides maybe that I was feeling happy or sad in the moment. But the power in having pets doesn’t come from the way they think— it comes in their presence.
Presence is maybe the most overlooked gift that you can give someone. Just knowing that someone is there, that they care or that they want you there or even just that they’re putting up with you, can mean the world to someone, especially when they’re struggling.
So yes, he’s just a dog. But he was there for every afternoon, every walk back from middle school and every time I came home late after hanging out with friends downtown. He was there for every victory, and every defeat and every moment I thought I had finally fixed it, only for things to fall apart again. For every slip and every nudge back up to where I needed to be. For all of it, he was there. And that mattered.
As you can probably glean from the past-tense, I said goodbye to Stanley last week. He had been moving less and less freely and was on pain meds for a good while before he eventually stopped being able to get up and down stairs. As always, he was stoic and confident throughout all of it.
The day before he was put down, my mom, back home, FaceTimed me so that I could say goodbye to him through the phone.
I took a photo of him for the last time, told him I loved him, and we ended the call.
Stanley was a constant cheerleader— someone who rooted for you when you needed it, who made his voice known when he got excited, and who loved people more than anything.
I’ve never seen a dog make friends faster than he has. Everyone who met him fell in love with him— even my friends out in Eugene, who’ve never met him, fell in love with videos of him. It may be cliche to say, but he was truly, incredibly, uniquely special. He was a gentle giant, someone who would get scared of and chased away by puppies we’d foster, even though he was 50x bigger than they were. The kind of dog who would follow you anywhere and make you feel supported wherever that might have been. He was amazing.
Stanley is a mutt, but he was in large part a Chesapeake Bay Retriever— which usually isn’t something that would matter too much, but it means that when he gets excited, he’ll go “wooo!” and jump up a little bit. It’s something that Chesapeakes are known for and something that symbolizes what Stanley felt like in the moment more than probably any anecdote I could write. He was infectiously happy, just the right amount of energetic, and an incredible presence.
He was scared of fireworks and loved peanut butter— until peanut butter got too unhealthy for him so we started swapping it out for carrots, which he would get so excited for that he would come to the fridge every time it opened hoping someone would give him one. He was the best you could ask for, an incredible dog who meant the world to everyone he met.
He was great to us.
If you’re anything like me, you feel a little bit of cringe whenever you see someone make a certain kind of post on their story after a pet dies.
The collage of photos, the text box in the middle with something along the lines of “rest easy angel ❤️” on it, the weird showmanship feeling of it all. It just rubs me the wrong way.
I usually don’t do that kind of thing— when my pets have died in the past, I’ve usually just kept it to myself and moved on. Honestly, it’s not anyone else’s business, and no one else cares about my pets.
But I’m not writing this for other people. I’m writing it for myself— to process the loss of a pet when, for the first time, I wasn’t at home to say goodbye to them.
When a close friend of mine died late last year, I started this Substack to hopefully post about her and her life. I have still not been able to get myself to finish that post.
And while I will someday, the writing I have done was already what I needed from it. A way to think back and process all the memories, to have an excuse to dig through old posts and photos in a way that didn’t feel sad, but felt like I was celebrating their life.
That’s why I’m writing this. To celebrate a dog who meant everything, a dog that deserves to be thought of with as much care and love and effort as he did thinking of me and my family.
When MKBHD’s Andrew Manganelli posted about the loss of his dog, Mac, on Twitter, he wrote:
When I got Mac in 2014, I told my mom that I just wanted a dog that felt like my dog.
As I mentioned before, we’ve had pets before Stan, and we’ve had pets that passed away before him. But he was different. I got to know Stanley from the start, to get close with him, to spend time with him when I needed him and when he needed me. There’s no other way to say it than that he was my dog.
I was talking to my mom about this, and she said it best when she just said: “You’re right. He was your childhood dog.”
If that’s true, then there’s nothing more I could have asked for in a childhood dog than this.
That’s a tough phrase to say— “childhood dog.”
It marks yet another moment where I’ve been forced to look around and realize that I’m not a kid anymore.
As I’ve gone through life milestones over the last couple of years, I’ve felt that a lot. Whether it was growing up and leaving my summer camp (something I ended up making a short film about,) navigating my way through the pandemic, the college process, beginning and ending relationships, moving across the country for college— I’ve had to reflect a lot on where I am in life, the responsibilities and the standards that come with it, and honestly asking myself if I’m up to the task.
This one is up there with the ones that have hit the hardest.
Stanley’s life is a chapter in mine— one where I go from an overly-energetic, 5’2” tech nerd with a long-predestined path in computer science to a digital creative, learning what makes me who I am along the way and finding out, frankly, how to be human— how to manage your time, to express yourself, to stay healthy. Last week, that chapter sealed itself. And while I’m not saying that I don’t have any more growing up to do— I definitely have more to understand, and even further room to grow—now, I’m doing it as someone else. Someone with a bit more perspective behind me, with ideals and goals, with stories and people that have shaped who I am— this incredible, amazing dog being one of them.
His memory is a lesson: one about taking the time to care about the people you love, about making your time matter, and about putting meaning into everything you do. About choosing to appreciate your surroundings.
If you got this far, thank you for taking the time to read my thoughts. I’m not asking for thoughts and prayers, nor condolences— all I ask is that you take the time to appreciate those you have around you. Tell them you love them, that you care about them, that they matter. Be there to help them. Check in on them, see how things are going. Reconnect with somebody. To put it bluntly, you never know what you have in a moment until it becomes a memory.
Somehow, I’m saying all that talking about a dog. But I mean it. He might have never known— neither did I until I really took the time to sit down and write this— but he meant so, so much more to me than he could have ever thought.
Stanley means more than just who we were or what we did together. He represents a time when I wasn’t sure what was ahead, or what my life had in store, but I figured it out. A time when I got through it.
He was a comforter, a companion, and a friend. He was my brother.
I’ll miss you, buddy. You did everything and more.
-GT
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