He’s older now. The Doberman, who once bounded through the yard like a shadow stitched to our son’s heels, now moves with a deliberateness that feels almost ceremonial. His muzzle has silvered, his sighs have deepened, and his rituals, those quiet, stubborn negotiations, have become the heartbeat of our evenings.

Almost every night of late, he suckles his blanket. Not always. Just when he senses we’re leaving, or when bedtime feels like a separation rather than a pause. It’s not a habit, it’s a language. A way of saying, I know what’s coming, and I need to soften it.

He sleeps with us, though we pretend he doesn’t. We send him to his bed, and he moans, groans, sighs. Then, when he thinks we’re asleep, he climbs into ours, slowly, reverently, like he’s returning to a place he never truly left, and then promptly plops down like a ton of bricks. After an excruciating sciatica injury induced by that same ton of bricks, I have learned to sense when he touches the bed and adjust in relation to his circling for a landing.

He’s grown up with our son. Guarded him. Shadowed him. Matched his growth with his own quiet, almost instantaneous evolution from playmate to protector. And now, as we age, we find ourselves watching the watcher. Wondering if he senses the same things we do, the passage of time, the shifting roles, the ache of love that deepens with every goodbye.

There’s a strange symmetry in it. As parents, we begin to worry, not just for our children’s safety, but for the shape of their lives when we’re no longer with them. We worry. We grow anxious. We grieve in advance for the looming separation. We imagine the horror in the silence of their absence, while hoping the weight of our love carries forward in memory. And we hope that they’ll feel it, even when we’re gone.

It begs the question: as the Doberman enters his senior years, his muzzle greying, the boy no longer so small, and becoming more independent, the looming separation seems to haunt the Doberman as well.

Or maybe he feels it from me, not in words, but in rhythm. In the way he becomes anxious when we leave, before bed, or when he moans and sighs when sent to his own bed. In the glance he gives me when my wife tells him it’s time for bed, not to defy her, but to confirm the emotional truth of the moment. Do I really have to go?

I say yes, he sighs, and he goes, because he trusts me to make the hard calls. Because love, for him, is obedience wrapped in ritual.

He’s a brat. He’s spoiled, but he is also the sentinel who fearlessly watched over the most valuable treasure of all, that boy. A creature of habit and heart, potentially riddled with the fear of what will become of his boy without him, I don’t know the answer.

I’ll stay with them both for as long as I can, as they are both keepers of the highest order, yet I know when the time comes, it will still be too soon.