“She never let me out of her sight,” Anna wrote in an essay for Elle revealed in June. “She watched me intently as if I was the thing she now needed to guard, though, where guarding once incited her primal rage, she would now guard me with the deepest kind of love I had ever known.”
Calling the canine a “constant through marriage, four moves, graduate school, a career change (or two), a mental health crisis, a divorce, and finally a reinvention,” Anna added that she spent Petunia’s ultimate moments telling her “how grateful I was for her love and companionship.”
“I promised her that I was okay and that I would be okay without her; crushed, lonely, but okay,” she wrote. “I thanked her for staying with me—for guarding me—until I was strong enough to survive without her.”