I wrote the first version of Penni's story in 2017.
At the time, I thought I understood what it was about: a dog who had been dealt an awful start to life, survived it, and eventually learned that the world wasn't such a bad place.
I thought it was a rescue story.
Nearly a decade later, Penni died.
Only then did I understand that somewhere along the way, the story had stopped being about what I did for her.
It had become about what she did for me.
Read her story ↓
PENNI
The story that took me twelve years to understand.
Penni had spent the beginning of her life locked in the basement of a drug house. She was physically abused, abandoned, and found roaming the streets of the Bronx with two other dogs. After a gut-wrenching evaluation at an overcrowded shelter, she was placed on the euthanasia list.
A rescue organization called Fur Friends in Need got her out just in time. Within minutes, I was told.
A few weeks later – somehow – she ended up with me.
On the ninety-minute drive home, she panted uncontrollably, drooled everywhere, and threw up three times. When we arrived at the house, I realized the car ride wasn't the problem. It wasn't even the tip of the iceberg.
She was afraid of everything
A basketball. A fork. A grocery bag. Everything.
Because we lived in an urban part of New Jersey, I often took her out for walks late at night when the streets were quieter. Sometimes she would freeze in the middle of the sidewalk, seemingly unable to move. I would wait five minutes. Ten. Twenty. Nothing.
I would squat beside her, pet her, stand up, walk a few steps, and come back. When nothing worked, I would pick her up, carry her two feet forward, and set her down. The moment her feet touched the ground, she would start walking again as if the freeze had never happened. It was so strange.
She almost never made a sound, either. She didn't bark. She barely vocalized at all. I couldn't know exactly what had happened to her, but it wasn't hard to imagine that Penni had learned being small, still, and quiet was safer.
That meant traditional dog training wasn't relevant yet. My first job was simply to convince her she was safe.
Looking back, I had a slightly delusional amount of confidence. I figured that whatever issues a rescue dog came with, I could work through them. If I genuinely believe something is possible and I am willing to work at it, I have a hard time accepting that it won't eventually happen.
So even though Penni had been through hell, that didn't mean it had to be that way the rest of her life.
So we worked. Together.
Before Penni, I was doing what I thought I was supposed to do.
I studied industrial engineering at Georgia Tech, followed it into a technical career, and moved wherever the next opportunity took me. On paper, things were going well. But after leaving home, I struggled to find people who wanted to do the things I loved: hiking, exploring, anything difficult or inconvenient enough that most people would rather stay home.
So I did a lot of them alone.
It was lonely.
For a while, I kept thinking about getting a dog. I told myself part of the idea was practical. I did a lot of volunteer work and imagined having a dog that could come along, a therapy dog of sorts, not for me, but for other people.
Looking back, I think I was actually searching for a partner.
The timing wasn't perfect. Neither was my work schedule or living situation. Then I realized they probably never would be.
What the hell was I waiting for?
So I got a dog.
The Dog I Picked
Together, they destroyed the yard. They destroyed a mattress. They destroyed toys. Penni chewed holes in the drywall whenever she was separated from him.
It was fantastic.
She started playing. She behaved differently indoors. She began learning from another dog that a house could be a place where good things happened.
Two years and three months after I brought her home, I said something to a friend that probably sounded completely insignificant:
"Penni is starting to act like a normal dog."
I remember the relief behind those words. However, we weren't done. In truth, we never would be. But we had crossed into a life I once wasn't sure she could have.
Outside was where I first saw the authentic her. Not the terrified animal I had brought home.
Her.
Indoors, she still shook with anxiety. Somewhere quiet and open, though, she came alive.
She had spent so much of her early life confined that she didn't know how to run properly. For months, she seemed to have a permanent scab on her chin from falling over herself.
At dog parks, she initially sat and watched the other dogs play. Eventually she chased one for a few feet. Then a few yards.
Then she ran. Progress.
At the beach, the change was even more dramatic. She sprinted, rolled in the sand, played with other dogs, and approached strangers. Open space seemed to give her permission to forget, at least temporarily, what had happened to her.
I wanted more of that for her.
Eventually, that desire helped take us across the country to Las Vegas. When house-searching, I had one nonnegotiable requirement: a doggy door to access a large yard so Penni could go outside whenever she wanted.
But even as everything changed outdoors, life indoors remained difficult. There were days when I came home and she wouldn't stand. Sometimes I approached her and she shook with anxiety. I began to wonder whether keeping her was selfish – not because I wanted to give up, but because I wasn't sure she was happy with me.
Still, I kept trying. I slept on the floor beside her. I rewarded every positive behavior I could identify. I tried everything I knew.
Then I realized there was something I couldn't teach her. Penni needed another dog to show her how to be one.
That dog was Griz, a 170-pound Great Dane who arrived with my new roommate. He was enormous, confident, goofy, and almost exactly what Penni needed.
Learning to Trust
Without realizing it, I was changing too. My instinct had always been to understand and solve. Penni required patience, empathy, and the willingness to see the world through her eyes instead of constantly trying to make her see it through mine.
Around the same time, I was moving into leadership roles at work. It’s funny to think back and realize that no formal training shaped the way I treated people as much as what I was learning at home. The patience and compassion I learned to extend to Penni was showing up elsewhere.
The dog I had gotten when I was lonely also expanded my human world. Through her, I met hikers and adventurers who shared the interests that had once kept me isolated.
Penni didn't just accompany me into the world.
She made my world bigger.
Eventually, that world grew far beyond anything I expected. I started sharing her photographs online, mostly because friends kept telling me I should. Her story took off. National media featured her, and a video from The Dodo reached tens of millions of people within days.
At first, my reaction was basically: Why do this many people care about my dog?
Then I read what people wrote. Some said they had adopted because of Penni. Others said she changed how they saw fearful or abused animals. They weren't merely watching her. They were feeling something.
That seemed worth something, so I kept telling her story.
For a while.
Eventually, social media began to feel wrong. I didn't want attention to become the reason I did things with my dog, and I didn't want telling Penni's story to become more important than living it.
So her public story went quiet.
Her actual story didn't.
For a long time, I treated Penni's rehabilitation like an engineering problem.
Understand the problem. Develop the solution. Execute. Evaluate. Repeat.
That works beautifully with systems. It works poorly with a terrified animal.
Penni couldn't be optimized. She didn't care about my timeline, and progress wasn't linear. Sometimes we worked for months and got nowhere. Other times, she made a breakthrough I couldn't explain.
Eventually, I stopped measuring success by whether I could make every trace of her anxiety disappear.
This was Penni.
I didn't need her to be anything else.
By then, she had become exceptionally good at hiking. Technical terrain. Long distances. Scrambling. Mountains. She had endurance, she was agile, and she loved it.
These were the things I had spent years doing alone.
Suddenly, I wasn't alone anymore.
I remember realizing it on one of our harder hikes: I've got something here.
I had found someone who could do the things I loved, at the level I wanted to do them, and genuinely wanted to be there.
It wasn't "me and my dog" anymore.
It was us.
Partners
Her body healed faster than her mind. After years of being comfortable around dogs, her new reality was one of distrust and unwillingness to meet new dogs.
But this time, I didn't see her the way I had when I first brought her home.
I understood.
Of course she was afraid.
She never completely returned to who she had been before the attack. Years earlier, I would have considered that unfinished work. Now it was simply part of Penni.
And that was okay.
I generally stopped posting Penni. But I never stopped photographing her.
Mountains. Beaches. Deserts. Car rides. Backyards. Friends. Ordinary afternoons.
The photographs were never really for other people. They were for me.
For nearly two decades, one of my Christmas gifts to my mom has been a collection of a hundred printed photographs from the year, each with a note on the back. Together, they form an encyclopedia of my life. I have never wanted the important parts of life to exist only in my memory.
Penni became one of the most photographed parts of it.
So while the internet stopped seeing her, I kept documenting our life.
And we kept living it.
Years later, Penni was attacked by another dog. A neighbor had mistakenly put it in our yard, believing it was Penni.
It was bad. She was covered in puncture wounds.
At one point, Penni managed to pin the other dog on its back. She could have hurt it badly.
She didn't.
The other neighbor that had came to her rescue told her to go inside. Penni stepped over the dog that had just hurt her, walked through the doggy door and into the house.
Even then, that gentle part of her remained intact.
The Quiet Years
When she finally stood, I gathered my things and we started down. I was gentle the whole way, trying to make it a little slower so I could soak it in that much more.
We kept hiking for years afterward. We spent plenty more time exploring the desert. But we never climbed another difficult mountain together.
That one was ours.
We got to say goodbye to it properly.
Not long after the attack, Penni dislocated her shoulder. Between the attack and her shoulder, nearly a year passed before she was healthy enough for us to really go again.
By then, she was around ten years old when we headed to Red Rock outside Las Vegas and climbed another mountain.
Almost as soon as we reached the top, she lay down, rested her head on my backpack, and fell asleep. She started snoring.
I sat beside her and replayed all the scrambling we had done in that area over the years. Every few minutes, I looked over. She was still comfortably asleep, so I let her sleep.
Nothing dramatic happened. But in that moment, I realized something. I simply looked at her and understood that this part of our life was ending.
This was the last hard one. Our last technical summit.
So I stayed.
Probably another hour.
I didn't rush back down. I just sat on top of that mountain with my dog, grateful that I had recognized the moment while I was still inside it.
The Last Hard One
Around the same time, I started working on a photo journal. Because photographs had always been how I preserved memory, I wanted something physical for documenting a life with a dog. A place for a photograph and the story behind it: what happened, why it mattered, and how it felt.
The first batch of samples arrived several weeks before Penni died.
A week before she died, we went for a walk around the property.
I left home at eighteen and spent most of my adult life moving for whatever came next professionally. No matter where I lived, some part of me considered it temporary.
Home was one particular piece of land in Georgia: the property where my mother grew up, my grandparents lived, and my great-grandfather built a house.
Buying that property was the one goal I had held my entire life.
About a year before Penni died, I finally got the opportunity.
We came home.
Penni's life had started in a basement. Then a shelter and a few urban settings.
It ended in the woods.
Here, I could open the door and let her go. She wandered across several acres between family homes, through trees, along a creek, and around a pond.
I rarely had to wonder where she was.
She was home.
And so was I.
Home
At the beginning of her life, I would have given almost anything for that terrified dog to stop looking at the world like something was about to hurt her.
Now, I stood beside her while she looked at it like there was nowhere else she'd rather be.
When we made it home, I cried. For the first time, I understood how close we were to the end.
Years earlier, I had been lucky enough to recognize our last summit while I was still sitting on top of it. Somehow, I had been given the same gift again.
I knew this was our last walk.
So I didn't hurry her. I let her stop. I let her smell whatever she wanted to smell and look into the woods for as long as she wanted.
We got to say goodbye to this part of our life, too.
It was a tiny walk. Once, it would have taken less than two minutes.
That day, it took fifteen.
Somewhere along the way, I realized we had done this before.
When I first got Penni, our walks took forever. She would stop in the middle of the sidewalk and refuse to move. Back then, she stopped because she was afraid.
Now she stopped because she was old.
She sniffed the air. She stared into the woods at squirrels, deer, and whatever else moved through the property. She didn't chase them.
She just looked.
Near the end, she had become quiet again, too. This time, there was no fear behind it. She was simply tired.
The same silence. The same slow walk. The same long pauses.
But a completely different dog.
Our Last Walk
I knew dogs sometimes leave when they're dying. One of our childhood dogs had walked into the woods and never returned. I wasn't going to let that happen to Penni.
I brought out an old army cot, lay beside Penni, and kept my hand on her. Sometime around 2:30, I fell asleep.
About an hour later, I woke up. She had wandered off.
I panicked, put on a headlamp, and searched the property. I found her at the edge of the yard, sitting on a hill overlooking the woods.
Her mouth was open. She was panting. This was because her lungs were failing.
But if you didn't know that, you would swear she was smiling.
She looked content. Happy, even.
And although I was crying my eyes out, I felt happy for her.
I couldn’t help but smile.
The next day, a veterinarian came to the house and helped Penni die peacefully. She didn't spend her final moments in a clinic.
She was home.
The following evening, Penni asked to go outside around 9:00. She walked into the middle of the yard and lay down.
I pulled out a lawn chair and sat beside her. An hour passed. Then another. She didn't want to come inside. So I stayed with her.
Around midnight, she moved to another part of the yard.
Her Last Night
A few days after she died, I tried to decide what I would say if I could explain all of this to her in a way she would understand. After everything I did for her and everything she did for me, I think I would tell her this:
If Penni had never existed, another dog's life probably would have been saved.
I just question whether mine would have been saved in the same way.
She gave me a partner when I was lonely. She taught me patience when my instinct was to solve and empathy when my instinct was to analyze.
She showed me that something can carry damage forever without being defined by it, and that accepting someone exactly as they are can matter more than trying to fix them.
When we met, Penni was terrified of the world. I was building a life by doing everything I believed I was supposed to do. She needed to learn that the world could be safe. I needed to learn that a life could not always be solved like an equation.
Over the next twelve years, we moved through that world together.
She learned to run. I learned to slow down.
She learned to trust. I learned to be patient.
She gave me a reason to explore more of the world and, somehow, made me more connected to the people in it.
After all that movement, we ended up in the same place.
Home.
A few days before she died, I opened one of the boxes of journals. I pulled one out and started filling it in.
The first thing I wrote about was our last walk.
I added a photograph. I wrote what happened and what I remembered about standing there with her. Then I kept going.
I wrote about big moments and completely ordinary ones. Things I hadn't thought about in years came back. I could touch the photographs and remember how those moments felt.
It was incredibly cathartic.
I created the journal believing that holding on to those memories might make losing a beloved dog a little easier to bear. Then, I became its first customer.
Somewhere in the middle of filling it out, I realized something else.
I was grateful.
Not that Penni was gone. I was grateful to discover that I could love something that deeply.
When I was younger, I sometimes wondered whether I had that capacity. Connection didn't always come naturally to me. At times, I wondered whether some piece of me was simply missing.
Penni played a huge role in answering that question.
Apparently, that spectrum of love went a hell of a lot deeper inside me than I knew. She didn't merely occupy that space. She showed me it existed.
I used to think I rescued Penni. But that is an incomplete version of what happened.
I gave her safety, patience, mountains, beaches, deserts, and finally woods. I gave her a home.
What She Left
Today My Dog Made Me Smile
A photo journal for remembering your dog. Each page offers a 4x6 photo slot with journaling space, with room for 51 photos total.
