A Second Life for My Beloved Dog

A simple iPhone feature unexpectedly changed how I grieved.

Peggy was my first dog—the dog I waited 28 patient years for. I finally met her on August 15, 2015. She was eight weeks old, covered in filth after a 14-hour ride from Georgia to New York, and inexplicably still adorable. Floppy ears. Jet-black muzzle. Meaty little forepaws. We didn’t plan it this way, but my partner and I rescued her on the same day we moved in together. Peggy represented a new phase of my life: the beginning of my chosen family.

As soon as I brought the chubby, squirming ball of fur home, I felt compelled to capture, however clumsily, the joy she brought into our lives. You can see the change in my iPhone’s camera roll: Two-thirds of the way through 2015, the mosaic of images shifts away from the drab tones of a poorly lit Brooklyn apartment and is infused with a new vitality. She was a junkyard dog—a stubborn scrapper that loved eating garbage off the street, and one that had a supernatural ability to charm humans. Once, in South Brooklyn, I left her tied up for an instant to purchase a coffee and came out to find she’d seduced an old Italian pastry chef to procure some breadcrumbs. People remarked that her face felt familiar, like an old friend was in there somewhere. Her mystique was compounded early on, when an unfortunate accident left her with three legs, for which she compensated by becoming comically muscular. Of course I was obsessed with documenting Peggy’s life.

She was a constant, as any dog would be, through cross-country moves, quarter-life crises, career changes, new presidential administrations, and a pandemic. Then, one day last May, quite unexpectedly, she was gone.

We let her go in the middle of the night, so quickly that we weren’t able to say goodbye. Until then, I’d been lucky enough to avoid this type of tragic, sudden loss. My grief in those early moments felt like the emergency exit on an airplane had opened mid-flight, the sudden loss of cabin pressure violently sucking everything out of the hull that isn’t bolted down. For days, my fuselage was empty, the contents scattered and falling from the sky. I went on walks, laughed and cried at random, and tried to stay busy. But all I really wanted to do—the only thing that felt appropriate and sustaining—was look at pictures of Peggy on my phone. I lost hours inside my camera roll staring at her reddish-brown fur centered in the frame, while watching us become a family in the background. My device, normally a wasteland, became a refuge.

On the day she died, I set my phone’s wallpaper to my favorite photo of Peggy—appearing to smile on a ridgeline trail in Missoula, Montana, the bright-yellow balsamroot flowers in bloom behind her. But a month later, I told myself that it was time to stop wallowing. Instead of a memorial photo of Peggy, I opted to try a newer, “dynamic” wallpaper feature called “Photo Shuffle.” Every so often, my iPhone would change my wallpaper and home screen to an image it had grabbed from my camera roll. To help it along, I could offer parameters for the photo choice. Knowing that Apple’s Photos app uses image-recognition software to identify cats and dogs in the camera roll, I chose a “Pets” filter.

Grief is not linear, and neither is Photo Shuffle. Over the next few months, I watched the photos change in and out at random—always with a dog in focus. Many of the stills were pictures I didn’t remember taking, ones I’d passed over or missed in my melancholic, late-night scrolling. So many were chaotic, blurred streaks of fur and tongues curiously sniffing a lens or bounding out of frame; a lot were objectively bad photos, which I found made them especially funny as iPhone wallpaper. Peggy wasn’t the only subject—our other dog, Steve, a winsome and serious-faced cattle dog, shared screen time—but being First Dog meant that Peggy had been photographed much more. She took on a starring role: Peggy wet from a beach swim, regal Peggy posing under the Christmas tree, puppy Peggy, manic post-fetch Peggy with a yard’s length of tongue sticking out of her mouth. Sad photos inevitably cropped up: Peggy in the hospital, Peggy’s last car ride, Peggy and Steve side by side on our lawn, enjoying what would be their last sunset together.

My partner turned on Photo Shuffle, too, and we developed a new ritual. Look at this new Peggy, one of us would say, holding a phone up to the other’s face. We’d usually laugh or smile; occasionally one of us would tear up. Sweet girl. Miss you, Pegs. Mostly, though, we’d take a moment and orient the photo in our lives, remembering a trip or a random ordinary Wednesday on a trail or at the dog park. The photos opened up little windows of reflection and a moment to express some gratitude—for Peggy, and for our lives together.

Devotees of note-taking apps such as Notion and Evernote have a term for the mass of musings, links, documents, and projects they store on the cloud: the “second brain.” If you organize your data the right way, these programs will allow you to recall an extraordinary amount of information, in the same way your mind might. I’ve never been very good at using these apps, but I’ve found that my camera roll functions similarly. It is like a digital appendage of my mind, functioning in a complementary, Proustian way—triggering and dredging up memories that have been long filed away. My camera roll is a diary, a mood board. Thanks to the ability to screenshot, it is also a place for sundry notes and clippings. When I scroll through my photos over a long enough period, I find they are a pretty decent archive of my life.

The dynamic wallpaper, however, adds a new layer to this experience. It is a curator, maybe even a biographer. And, however inadvertently, the feature has become a counselor, allowing me to grieve on my own timeline. Right now, Peggy is the dominant face on my screen, but, over time, I imagine the ratio of Peggy pictures to others will change. I will get older, get new dogs, do new things, and take more pictures. Peggy will still be there, popping up when I least expect it, but her presence will gently recede as I learn to live without her. This complex universe of grief and moving on is playing out on my phone screen, but also in my own behaviors. This summer, we added Beverly, a new puppy, to our family. I’m not sure why but, since the pandemic, I’ve been less inclined to take photos than I was in Peggy’s halcyon days. But recently I’ve found myself consciously pausing and grabbing my phone to document Bev’s adolescence. My renewed interest is simple: I need photos of Beverly so that she may join the wallpaper rotation with frequency.

Peggy resting in Missoula

The more I scrutinize this small feature on my device and the way it became a load-bearing part of the past year of my life, the more I encounter some resistance from myself. There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to think too hard about what this all means, because doing so forces me to wrestle with just how important this brick of ceramic glass really is. We can snark about being addicted to our phones or worry about inflated screen-time numbers or the way we pull out our cameras to document moments we should instead be present for, but acknowledging the positives is equally disorienting—to do so suggests a certain unknowability about a technology we live with every day. What are our phones doing to us? A lot, it seems. Perhaps more than we realize.

So much of the information I consume through my phone is jarring, presented in an overwhelming, intrusive fashion—via push notifications and design tricks, all vying for my attention. The dynamic wallpaper offers something else: quiet moments in my day that stop me in my tracks and promote reflection, rather than engagement. My phone’s operating system has taught me how to grieve.

That doesn’t mean it’s been easy. It’s always the little things—the memory of the crimped hair behind her velvety ears, the image of her panting softly while sunning herself on the porch on a crisp summer morning, or the phantom feeling of the heft of her body, pressed against mine as I read before bed. These memories used to be painful; now they bring gratitude. Perhaps that’s because they’re not static—they’re alive, both in me and on the silly little device I take with me everywhere. There’s a three-legged hole in my heart, but I see Peggy every day.