📖 While You Were Here – A raw and poetic memoir about love, grief, and the little dog who saved a broken man’s life.
🛒 Free with Kindle Unlimited
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There are some stories you write after the fact, when the grief has cooled and the pain has edges. But While You Were Here isn’t that kind of story.
This one was written in real time, with Daisy still curled beside me, her breathing rhythmic and grounding, her gaze forever unblinking in its devotion. I wrote it because I know what’s coming—and I couldn’t bear to write it after she was gone.
I didn’t want to wait until I was surrounded by absence to honor the presence that saved my life.
“She didn’t care if I was sick, if I was broke, if my heart was shattered into a million pieces. She just was.”
Daisy entered my world in the middle of a pandemic, when the world felt like it was coming undone—and so was I. I was reeling from cancer, betrayal, and the kind of grief that doesn’t speak in words. And there she was. Six pounds of snarl and softness, curled at my side like she’d always been there.
And maybe, in some way, she had.
“Her hungry eyes, her need for a walk, her desire for a cuddle—they were gentle, persistent reminders that life, even in its darkest moments, still held beauty and purpose.”
This memoir is not a chronology. It’s a mosaic. Fragments of memory, pieces of ritual, the cadence of companionship. It’s written like grief lives—in spirals, in scent, in sound. It’s not about her death. It’s about her life. Her staying. Her refusing to let me disappear.
One of the first things I wrote in the book was this:
“She was my constant. My furry shadow. My tiny, fierce guardian.”
Because that’s exactly what she was. When everything fell apart, Daisy made sure I got up. Made sure I showered. Made sure I kept moving, even if just to the end of the block and back. She asked for nothing, but demanded everything that mattered: my presence. My stillness. My recovery.
There’s a chapter in the book where Daisy narrates her own beginning—from hunger, from cold, from the outer edges of survival. And I remember thinking, as I wrote it, how closely it mirrored my own.
We were both forgotten things. Broken things. And we found each other not through accident, but necessity.
“I was a knot of yellow fur, slick and shivering, pushed to the periphery of the warmth… I was dying. I knew it, with the simple, brutal clarity of a creature born to fight, but given no weapons.”
I didn’t save Daisy. She saved me. And she did it the way all great love does—not with grand gestures, but with quiet, relentless presence. She stayed.
I remember one night after a particularly brutal wave of grief, I looked at her and whispered:
“Oh, Mama. You’re finally here.”
It wasn’t the moment she arrived in my home. It was the moment I realized I had a tether. Something real. Something permanent. Something that didn’t want anything from me but for me to stay alive.
I know this post is longer than most. But I also know if you’re here—if you’ve ever lost, or feared losing, a soul that understood you beyond language—you understand why.
This book is a goodbye I didn’t want to write later.
It’s the flashlight I built for the cave I know I’ll have to walk into.
It’s for her. But it’s also for you.
If you’ve ever loved an animal that held your broken heart with more gentleness than any human ever did… this is for you.
If you’ve ever whispered thank you into fur, into ears that didn’t need words… this is for you.
If you’ve ever known you weren’t alone only because someone with four legs refused to leave… this is for you.
“When the world felt too loud, too chaotic, too painful—her quiet presence was a sanctuary.”
📘 While You Were Here is available now.
Free with Kindle Unlimited.
📚 Read all my books: amazon.com/author/theclobra
This one is different.
This one is real.
And this one… I wrote with a lump in my throat and a dog in my lap.