Loss, Listening and the Work That Follows

By Elizabeth (Elli) Frank, Founder, Mr. Bones & Co.

My dog did not die of old age. He was not ravaged by cancer. He did not get lost forever.

On April 6, 2018, after six years of falling madly in love with a dog whose freckles gave way to his soul, I made the decision to have Mr. Bones behaviorally euthanized. I say this plainly now, but for many years I only talked it into circles, insulating myself from judgment. This truth held hands with shame, and shame is an expert at turning memories into mirages.

July 2012

Our paths became intertwined years earlier, during a late-night doomscrolling session in July 2012 where I fell face-first into the New York City municipal shelter system’s Urgent List, a photo roll call of animals facing immediate euthanasia.

My ADD brain steers me to fixate on minute details. I knit these nothingnesses into fantastical narratives, a personality trait equal parts gift and flaw. That night, atop the worn comfort of a Macy’s sofa in my Washington Square Park apartment, it wasn’t his bulbous smile that reeled me in, but the incongruous smattering of red freckles just above his nose. They felt like magic.

I had adopted my first dog, Charlotte, two years earlier, but was ignorant to the epidemic of pet homelessness. As I spun a story for a dog I’d never met (he had to be Irish), the compulsion to save him saturated me. The next day, just before the shelter’s “last walks” began, a freckle-faced Mr. Bones found himself in the backseat of my Honda CR-V, headed to his second life in Greenwich Village. As the Brooklyn shelter disappeared in the rearview mirror, I was already painting a future onto him I never imagined I wouldn’t be able to carry.

Whatever his origin, the creature inside his malnourished body wore healing wounds and old scars like I’d once worn Girl Scout badges; hard-earned and haphazardly stitched wherever they fit. In our first weeks together, he survived life-threatening canine influenza and underwent two surgeries to remove multiple teeth shattered to the pulp. As his body healed, the parts of his story written in invisible ink revealed themselves. What began as a need to save this one dog became the spark that started Mr. Bones & Co., six months after his adoption, a mission guided by his life long before I would ever face losing him.

The road we trudged was uphill and muddy. When one of us stumbled, we fell in unison. Grace, my favorite of the compassion goddesses, held us in that space, merging our battered pieces into a whole.

Mr. Bones never passed his AKC Good Citizen test; he had trouble with a stranger’s hands on his body. He was wary of men, but children were welcomed with a gentleness that hinted his core was forged from diamonds, freckles, and fire. While most adult dogs were triggers, he was a doting parent with puppies, fostering more than sixty-five during his lifetime with us.

I committed myself to working harder than whatever had created his PTSD, maneuvering my life around managing his reactions. Weekend escapes to a newly purchased retired farm in the Hudson Valley gave way to the surrender of my coveted, rent-stabilized apartment in Manhattan for the ground floor of a Brooklyn brownstone with a private backyard. These adaptations were shaped around the needs of my soul dog, but over time, new demands snuck into the margins of my life. Our final transition was leaving 21 years of city life behind and moving to full-time farm life in January 2018.

I told myself the move was for my dogs, and in part it was, but it was also for a man whose presence was reshaping my world. Leaving the city was not just about giving Mr. Bones more space; it was a self-surrender to a relationship quietly teaching me to give things up. My compliance, fueled by the isolation that loving a human-reactive dog created, triggered a choice that unexpectedly marked the beginning of the end of our journey.

There were incidents with my dog I do not share aloud, moments that play in my mind like Super8 film, spooling wildly and melting before the end. These were the times he bit someone, like the policeman in Washington Square Park who ignored my pleas not to touch my dog on a late-night walk. His jacketed arm ended up in Mr. Bones’ mouth. I wrapped myself around my dog as my brain fixated on the officer’s partner, whose hand had drifted to his holstered gun. If I didn’t let go, he would not shoot.

These memories live as scraps of thought on long drives, campfire stories unburdened of complete truths. When these self-defined failures boil over, they spill as wounds time has fed on, not healed, a side effect of cocooning with silence.

For years, this part of our story was my greatest writer’s block. The rewrites have vacillated from justification, where author and intended audience are one and the same, to insisting I was “brave” and without another option. My words have blamed a past I cannot know as the truth, and myself for an evil I was not the origin of. None wholly truthful, all excluded the conditions under which younger me made the decision she did.

That version of myself knew little about animal behavior, veterinary behaviorists, or how pain and behavior are intertwined. I understood too late how balanced (aversive) training can stoke trauma. I allowed losses and consequences to isolate me, compounding my inability to name the controlling, emotionally, and sometimes physically, abusive relationship I had stepped into, one my dog was trying his hardest to protect me from. That man was the last person Mr. Bones ever attacked. His final bite was my last opportunity to listen to what he was asking of me.

At this moment is where stories like ours typically end in triumph, neatly packaged for a Dodo video. This one did not. On April 6, 2018, in a sanitized New York City animal hospital, with his most trusted veterinarian and a friend he adored, I ushered Mr. Bones from this Earth, my hand on his heart consuming its last beat, logged inside me with my other secrets. I made the 2.5-hour drive back to the farm alone, crying harder than I had ever expelled myself before, or since. Silence had fostered my greatest betrayal.

I have eaten with this decision every day since.

Somewhere between his death and today, I stopped inventing narratives about the life Mr. Bones led before me. I only know that it was not kind, and that is enough. I cannot say with certainty that his outcome would have been different had I possessed the knowledge and strength I have now.

The dull ache from losing Mr. Bones has since been woven into the loss of Charlotte, who made her way to him from our farm on March 6, 2025, peacefully accompanied by me and two current dogs as her death doulas. The contrast of their deaths is a burden I wear like a necklace, heaviest where it rests atop my heart.

While time has not offered me absolution, it has gifted me growth. Not understanding how to listen to my soul dog sparked a learning journey, shaping me into an outspoken advocate for force-free, ethical animal welfare, and hearing how our animals communicate. I also learned how to ask for help. While I still struggle with the latter, the engagement a desire for education creates makes an inhospitable environment for isolation. Through this ongoing work of being a better woman than the one I was yesteryear, I honor the legacies of my dogs.

I did remove that man from my life, though not immediately, and not without cost. The control that once distorted my choices and eroded my judgment is now just a yellowed page in my story, an echo of an unintended encounter that shaped both my weakest and strongest self.

Wherever my boy is, I hope he knows I finally heard him.

His mama is safe.