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The Summer of Goodbyes
- Rachel
- Aug 1
- 10 min read
You never know when your world is about to change in a way you can't undo. There's no warning bell. No dimming of the lights. No text message. It just happens, usually in the middle of something ordinary, and you don't find out until much later that this was the moment everything shifted.
My moment came when we were camping in Vedauwoo. A new spot, tucked back in the trees, escaping the worst of the July heat. The dogs were having a ball, running the woods the way they always did up there, like nothing in the world could touch us.
I wish I could tell you I remember every minute of it vividly. The truth is, if it weren't for the pictures still sitting on my phone, I wouldn't know a thing that happened that weekend. I go back and look at them now, knowing what was coming, and I see it. What I thought was just dramatic Weimaraner behavior at the time, I know now was my boy slowly dying in front of me. Maybe that's exactly why I don't remember it.
I didn't know it then, soaking in the beautiful July evening, but this night would be the beginning of ten of the hardest weeks of my life. Heck, that hard still hasn't let up.
The call came the night of July 29th. Nebraska. We needed to get there, and we needed to get there fast.
We left early the next morning. I was thankful for the Dawn that day in a way I hadn't expected to be. My husband hitched up and towed our whole life east to be with his family, while I went back to grab a few things from the house before following. The camper stopped being just a way to travel. It became sanctuary, a piece of home we could bring with us into the middle of an emergency.
We got there as fast as we could. In those two days, we sat together as family in that strange in-between space where you're still hoping even though some part of you already knows. That's all the time we had left. In those two days, we told stories. We told him how much we loved him.
Dennis loved his family tremendously. Candy came in a close second, tied with hunting and fishing, depending on which day you asked him. He always had a twinkle in his eye. And I loved watching him enjoy the heck out of his grandkids.
On July 31st, Dennis died, and I watched my husband lose his father in real time, right in front of me, with nothing I could do but stay close and let it be as hard as it was.
The hole he left behind is still enormous. He was loved fiercely, by his wife, his kids, his grandkids, everyone who spent any real time around him, and he is missed every single day.
I am so thankful we got there in time to say goodbye. Not everyone gets that. I didn't know yet how much I'd need to hold onto that gift in the weeks that followed.
I had no idea it was only the first goodbye of the summer.
---
Four days after we lost Dennis, on August 4th, we lost Moose too.
Looking back now, I can see it so clearly. Moose wasn't right. I know that now. I didn't know it then. I was watching for signs in the wrong place, worried about the wrong emergency, wrapped up in getting east to be with family. Hindsight hands you a clarity you had no right to expect in the moment.
We didn't know it was his heart. We had no idea it was anything at all, not really, not with a name. Underneath everything, some quiet, stubborn part of me believed we still had time. Time to get through this. Time to get home and figure out whatever was going on with Moose. Time we did not actually have.
We had just made it back from Nebraska when we finally decided we needed to take Moose to the emergency hospital. We were not prepared to have to say goodbye.
I was bracing myself for something fixable when we took him in. An infection, maybe, or a scare that would pass. I was not bracing myself for congestive heart failure, a diagnosis we had never once heard until the vet said it out loud in that emergency room.
It was sudden. It was violent, the way it can turn on you all at once with no warning at all. And it was so far from what I expected walking in that morning that I still remember standing there, not fully able to process the sentence being said to me. I thought we had more time. We didn't.
Twelve years old, and that same joyful dance still broke out whenever he wanted attention, which was most of the time. He had the softest ears in the world, silky and impossible not to touch, and he'd lean into your hand the second you found them. He loved to hunt with his dad, as long as it didn't involve cold water. He sang for his dinner every single night, the kind of racket that would make you think we never fed him at all. He loved the farm, and he loved riding in the Rustler even more. He loved us with his whole heart. We loved him right back.
Moose was gentle and kind, the sweetest soul. He was one of a kind. He never needed to be the loudest voice in the room. He just needed to be near you. I think about that ridiculous little dance of his more than I expected to. Grief does that. It takes the smallest, silliest thing about a creature you loved and turns it into the thing you would give anything to see one more time.
---
The summer wasn't done with me yet.
One week later, on August 11th, my stepdad Charley died.
I had just spent a month with him in May, at the beginning of the summer. I already wrote about it, the pancakes, the healing, the quiet grace of two people who loved the same woman finding their way back to each other after years of circling. I thought Happy Trails sung out on a rain-soaked porch was a beginning, not an ending.
It wasn't supposed to be the last time. But in my heart, when I left the farm in May, I think I knew it was. I remember calling my friend Liz on my way out of the driveway to tell her exactly that, and her telling me she'd felt the same thing. Another harbinger, mostly ignored at the time, but there, hanging over me the whole summer.
I don't have a tidy lesson to offer here. I can't go back to the farm. I'm not welcome there anymore. Along with Charley, I lost my home in New York. The friends are still there. My aunt and uncle and cousin are still there. But it isn't home, not anymore. I don't even know if I'll be invited when they decide to spread my mother's ashes. That's a story for another time - and if I am honest, it may not ever get airtime here.
Charley was one of the last threads that still tied me to my mom. Losing him felt like losing a piece of her all over again. And losing the farm as a place I could call home means there's one less place left in the world where I can go and still feel her around me.
I grieve the loss of a home, a place I loved, and the magical memories that live there. I grieve the pieces of my mom that were thrown out, dumped in the garbage, callously burned or destroyed. I grieve the loss of my stepdad, a man I had finally made peace with, who I did truly love.
I will grieve this all for the rest of my life.
I am so thankful for that month. For the chance to make things right. And for the time I did get to spend at this special place.
---
I was not there for Bruno. I need to say that first.
I was in Arizona for work when it happened. October 5th.
It was 4:30 in the morning when it started. He jumped up onto the bed and then immediately jumped back off, in what was clearly excruciating pain. I was supposed to get on a plane in five hours for a work trip.
We got him to the emergency vet, and then I made it to the airport in a haze, thinking that by the time I landed in Phoenix I'd have all the answers and Bruno would be safe at home. That's not what happened.
Bruno had a herniated diaphragm. I had no idea what a herniated diaphragm even was. I googled it, and I still have zero idea how he did that to himself, or what actually happened. All I know is that I don't remember a single thing about the conference after the moment my husband called me. I'm not even sure how I survived the three days that followed.
I have told myself a hundred different stories about that day. I have run the timeline until I know it by heart, looking for the version where I catch a different flight, where I never took the trip at all, where I'm somehow standing in the room instead of standing at a gate in a different state, useless. There wasn't a version of that day where I made it home in time. I know now there was nothing I could have done differently. No amount of googling gives you the one answer you actually want: why. That doesn't make it easier to carry.
Bruno and Moose.
Here is what I know now, even on the days I don't fully feel it: guilt is grief looking for somewhere to put its hands. It wants a decision to undo, a moment to rewind, a way to make an impossible thing feel like it was somehow within my control. It wasn't. I didn't abandon my dog. I lived a life that occasionally required me to be somewhere else, the way every one of us does, and the worst possible thing happened on one of those days. That is not the same as a choice I made against him.
Bruno was my soul dog. Rescued, ridiculous, the naughtiest boy I ever loved, and somehow the one who woke up happiest every single morning of his life, right up until the end of it. He loved me, and he loved life, and I will miss him forever. I don't know how to write a paragraph big enough to hold what he was to me. I'm not going to try today.
I'm just going to say his name, and let that be enough for now.
Bruno♥️.
---
If I wasn't already drowning after Bruno, the next morning brought another tidal wave. October 6th, I got the call about Momo.
She had been part of my life for twenty-six years. Not blood, but the kind of person who becomes family anyway, through decades of simply showing up. My out west mom, the one who watched over me when my own mom couldn't. She couldn't make it to my wedding, but she altered my dress anyway. Mom of my best friend first, and somehow mine too, eventually, in the same way. Her home was always open to me, and I have so many wonderful memories of holidays spent in her kitchen, Ricky Martin bon bon shaking, and so many laughs.
I don't think I've fully found the words for losing her yet, especially not stacked directly on top of the morning before. Some griefs arrive too close together to process separately. They just become one long day that happens to have two names in it.
---
It's been a year, and I am standing once again on the doorstep of all of this loss, reliving it all over again.
Five losses in ten weeks. Dennis. Moose. Charley. Bruno. Momo. I'm not writing this for sympathy, and I'm not writing it because I've made peace with all of it. I haven't. Some of these tidal waves of grief still threaten to drown me.
There's a Japanese art called kintsugi. It is the art of repairing broken pottery with gold instead of hiding the cracks, so the break becomes part of the piece's history instead of something to disguise. I've spent the last year trying to put myself back together that way, sometimes with gold, sometimes with duct tape. Some days it works. Some days the cracks just stay cracks, and I'm learning that has to be okay too.
Grief journeys are messy. They don't move in a straight line from broken to healed. Some days you're the version of yourself who's finally figured it out, and the next day you're right back on the floor, wondering how you're still standing at all. I used to think there was a right way to do this, some timeline you were supposed to follow. There isn't. There's just the messy, uneven work of carrying it, one day at a time, in whatever shape that day takes.
Some days the grief is so heavy I can barely stand up under it. It shows up uninvited, in the middle of something ordinary, and knocks the wind out of me all over again. Other days, I remember to live. I laugh. I feel the sun. I let myself have a good day without guilt attached to it.
When they say grief is just love with nowhere to go, well, they aren't lying.
I will survive these anniversaries by taking the time to remember how much they were loved, and by finding ways to keep sharing who they all were with the world.
I'm writing it because the version of this brand that only shows you golden hour and open road isn't the whole story, and I promised myself a long time ago that Sol Wanderer would be honest, even in the hard chapters.
Especially in the hard chapters.
What I can tell you I have done for the last year is kept moving. Not because I was strong, not because I have some special resilience the rest of you don't have. I kept moving because I didn't know what else to do, and somewhere underneath all that loss, I knew I had to do something. The Dawn and Penny pulled me through a lot of it. The Dawn kept me moving when I wanted to give up. So has this blog. So did Penny, and a trip east to Vermont I hadn't planned on taking. Some days, those were the only reasons I got out of bed at all.
That part of the story is next.
Tonight, I just grieve. Feel the big feels. And remember that I was blessed to have such wonderful people and doggos in my life. And tell the universe and anyone who will listen just how much they were loved...
Keep Moving.
Rachel
Love you…..❤️💔❤️