The Last Night with Princess

By Cliff Potts

Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — March 22, 2026

Princess died today.

She did not go quietly into the background of my life. She fought. She wandered. She tried to stand when she could not stand. She tried to reach her puppies when her body would not let her. She tried to make sense of a world that had suddenly stopped making sense to her.

And through all of it, she kept coming back to me.

Princess was not a people dog. She made that very clear to anyone who tried to get close to her. But she chose me. For reasons I will never fully understand, she decided that I was hers, and she stayed that way to the end.

Last night was chaos. There is no other word for it. She paced, she fell, she circled, she tried to get outside, she tried to get to her puppies, and she collapsed over and over again. There were moments when it felt like the whole world had narrowed down to just keeping her from hurting herself.

But even in the middle of that, she found me.

She laid her head on my chest. She pressed her muzzle against my feet. She came back, again and again, to where I was sitting, as if that was the only place that still made sense.

This morning we got her to a veterinarian. Milk fever, they said. Hypocalcemia. Her body had given everything it had to her puppies, and there was not enough left to keep her going. They gave her what they could. We brought her home.

For a while, it looked like she might turn the corner. She drank a little water. She lay on the cool concrete. She wandered, slowly, as if trying to remember how the world worked.

But by afternoon, the truth was clear.

She could not stand. She could not walk. She was disoriented, exhausted, and in a place her body could not come back from. She still tried to reach her puppies. They tried to reach her. I kept them apart, because that was what the doctor said, but I let her smell them. I let them come close, one at a time, so she would know they were there.

In the end, she lay by my feet.

That is where she chose to be. That is where she stayed. And that is where she died.

We buried her on the far side of the river. It is quiet there. It felt right.

Princess was a smart, stubborn, independent dog who did exactly what she wanted, right up until the moment she could not anymore. She did not belong to the world in general. She belonged to herself. And, somehow, she belonged to me.

She helped keep me grounded after my wife died. She moved from being a presence in the house to being a presence in my life in a way that is hard to explain unless you have lived it. Losing her is not just losing a dog. It is losing a piece of the structure that held everything else together.

And yet, for all of that, I cannot say that she was unloved, or that she did not know it.

She knew exactly where I was. And she came back to me, every time.

If there is anything that matters in a life, human or otherwise, it is that.

Princess was loved.

And she will be missed.

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