The Little Giant

Adopted: December 20, 2014. Died in my arms: May 15, 2025.

My family adopted Oswald over 10 years ago, shortly after my mother-in-law, in town for a friend’s funeral, unexpectedly died. He came into a home filled with grief and brought laughter and joy, gifts he never stopped giving.

As I grew older and grayer, as my kids graduated high school and then college, as one by one my father-in-law, then mother, then father died, as a deadly pandemic swept the world, as our nation polarized then fractured along political faultlines, and as I watched so many of the lifesaving advances made by the No Kill movement reversed and abandoned, Oswald was sanctuary.

In his optimism and zeal for life, he was respite from worry and a ward against despair. He was constancy, goodness, kindness, virtue, hope, and love. Small in stature, he was a giant nonetheless, and his death leaves not only a hole in my heart, but a chasm I can’t imagine will ever stop being empty.

This is his story:

We got Oswald from a rescue group that pulled him from a very high kill “shelter” in the Central Valley of California. He was found on the streets, very thin and sickly, developed Giardia and kennel cough in the pound, had a prolapsed eye, was depressed, and ultimately put on the kill list. In years past, Oswald would have been killed.

This particular “shelter” had a policy of refusing to work with rescue groups. No animals scheduled to be killed ever went to rescue. But in California, we succeeded in passing legislation to make that illegal. For six years after the law was passed, this pound continued to kill animals despite rescuers ready, willing, and able to save them. So we sued and won (I was the plaintiff’s expert witness).

I became a No Kill advocate because to me, death is the ultimate cruelty; a frightening emptiness that leaves nothing but pain. When I think of how callously lives are ended in what we euphemistically call “shelters,” how cavalierly they are killed, sometimes cruelly and without a moment’s hesitation; animals who were once as deeply loved as Oswald or animals who were never even given a name, I feel grief. And anger. It is unthinkable that we allow this to continue, creating voids that can never be filled. Thankfully, that fate no longer awaited Oswald.

When Oswald was impounded there, 4,000 animals a year were being transferred to rescue groups, because the shelter had no choice. We had taken away their discretion to kill, which they chose to do time and time again. (Altogether, over 85,000 additional animals are rescued yearly statewide, over 2,000,000 since the law was enacted.)

Though Oswald was withdrawn, skinny, sick, and injured, he was pulled by rescue and given the care he needed. When we adopted him, the rescue group told us that he was very friendly but had lost his sparkle. Give him time, they told us, and he will love you more than you could ever know. For the first couple of weeks in our home, Oswald was sweet but leery. He would shrink on approach. He was afraid to walk outside because every little noise scared him. When a car drove by, he would press himself against my leg.

But over time, Oswald became a confident little guy — so confident that he would roam the hills around our house on our walks, ignoring my calls for him to come closer. He was his own man. Oswald was genuinely excited to meet anybody and everybody, including neighbors, strangers, other dogs, even the veterinarian, and he was fair-minded about it. If he said hello to someone in the room, he would go to every other person in the room to greet them, too. After miles of walking, rolling in the grass, a day of zoomies, trying to get the cats to act like dogs and play, and then a nightly game of fetch with a large stuffed animal, he would fall asleep and snore so loudly, you could hear it from the other room.

Oswald had found his sparkle.

But after over a decade with us, after the dark brindle was replaced with gray, he got sick: a degenerative spine disease. As his legs weakened, we compensated. I carried him more, and he walked less. Until those dreaded last few days, when he stopped eating, couldn’t sleep, and found himself confused, staring at the refrigerator or a wall. I stayed up all night with him, carrying him and rocking him up and down like a baby so he could rest for little spells at a time.

When there was nothing more to be done for him, I made the dreaded call. At around 9 p.m., a veterinarian came over. Ozzy was in my lap, my wife and grown kids around him. She gave him a sedative, and for the first time in so many nights, he was sleeping deeply, peacefully, pain-free, and snoring. I wanted to sit in this space, with him in my arms, forever.

Instead, we all kissed his beautiful, little forehead, said our goodbyes, and then she administered the fatal dose. My beloved Ozzy, the little giant who set the rhythm of my life from the moment I woke up to the moment we both went to bed, the dog who we loved more than he could ever know, was gone.

Lydia Millet, a novelist, once wrote, “dogs were a kind of love, given freely to men. Their existence meant you did not have to be alone. For if, in the end, you found yourself alone, completely alone, you could look for a dog. And there, in the dog, would be love. You did not have to deserve a dog. Rather a dog was a gift, a gift and a representative. What a dog was was simple: the ambient love of the world.”

That was Ozzy: the ambient love of the world, of my world. How can I get my aching heart to rest?