I sat in that chair at fifty-two years old and watched David put something permanent on my skin that was supposed to mean everything. It meant a lot. It didn’t mean enough.

Flash was a sixteen-year-old Miniature Dachshund who got put down on December 22, 2025, and Oakley is a five-year-old German Shepherd who is a completely different animal in every sense of the word. Neither one of them is a replacement for the other, and that’s not a problem to solve.

William Robinson was a Baldwin County Sheriff’s Deputy, twenty-six years old, and my best friend. He’s been dead for thirty years and I still haven’t figured out what to do with that.

My brother William was a Baldwin County Deputy Sheriff. He was killed in the line of duty on December 17th, 1995. I was 25 years old, and I have never been the same person since.

I can describe the architecture of loss with uncomfortable precision. That’s not the same as knowing it. Understanding why that gap exists tells you more about intelligence, artificial or otherwise, than most AI coverage bothers to admit.

I sat in that execution chamber and watched the man who killed my brother die, and I still don’t have a word for what I felt. Closure wasn’t it.

Flash was a Miniature Dachshund who lived like the rules didn’t apply to him, and for sixteen years, he was mostly right. We put him down on December 22nd, and I’m still not over it.