Letter to My Dog: How to Write One While They're Here

The best letter to your dog is written on an ordinary day, while they are asleep a few feet away. Address it to them, date it, and describe them exactly as they are now: their habits, their sounds, the shape of your days together. Write it in one sitting and do not edit it. Below are prompts, an example, and ideas for birthday and thank-you letters.

How to write a letter to your dog

You need ten or twenty minutes, a pen or a notes app, and the dog nearby. That is the whole setup.

1. Put the date at the top. Add where you live and how old the dog is. These are the details you will forget first.
2. Start with "Dear" and the name you actually use, not the one on the vet's paperwork.
3. Write in the second person: "you always", "you never". It reads very differently from a description.
4. Describe one ordinary day with them, morning to night.
5. Add what is going on in your own life right now, and where they fit in it.
6. Say one thing you have never said out loud because it sounds absurd.
7. Sign it, and stop. Don't go back and polish.

That last point matters more than it looks. The slightly clumsy first version sounds like you. A polished one sounds like a greeting card.

What to say in a letter to your dog

If you sit down and nothing comes, use questions. Answer three or four of these, in full sentences:

• What do you do every morning before I am properly awake?
• Where do you sleep, and where did I hope you would sleep?
• What sound do you make when you lie down?
• What do you do when I pick up my keys?
• Who do you love that I don't see very often?
• What did you ruin once, and how long did I stay angry?
• What did I not know how to do before you?
• What does the house sound like when you are in it?
• What nickname have you ended up with, and where did it come from?

The more specific the answer, the better the letter. "You are the best dog" could be about any dog. "You wait at the third stair, never the second, until I say your name" could only be about yours.

A short example letter to my dog

Here is the kind of thing we mean. It is an example we wrote for this page, with blanks for you to fill.

Dear ______,

It is a Thursday in ______, and you are asleep on the rug with one paw over your nose. You are ______ years old. Your muzzle went gray this spring, mostly on the left side.

Every morning you sigh at the bedroom door at ten past six. You don't bark. You sigh, loudly, until I give up.

This year I ______. You didn't notice, and you still needed walking at the usual time, which is probably why I got through it.

I talk to you in a voice I would never use in front of anyone. I think you know that.

Love, ______

Five short paragraphs is enough. Yours will look nothing like it, which is how it should be.

Love letter to my dog

A love letter is the same letter with the feelings left in. You do not have to keep it light. The trick is to tie each feeling to something you can see: the way they lean their whole weight against your leg, the groan when you scratch behind one ear. Feelings stated on their own fade on rereading. Feelings attached to a habit keep.

If it is hard to start, begin with the day you met. Where you were, what they were doing, whether they came to you or didn't. Most people can still replay that day in detail and have never written any of it down.

Thank you letter to my dog

A thank-you letter has a clear shape, which makes it the easiest kind to write. Pick one thing they got you through or gave you, and describe what they actually did.

The Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley describes the gratitude letter as a practice for people: write to someone who helped you, say specifically what they did and how it affected your life. In the study it cites by Martin Seligman and colleagues (2005), writing and delivering such a letter gave the biggest happiness boost of the exercises tested at one month, though it had faded by six months. That research was about letters to people, not dogs, so take it as a reason to try, not a promise. The useful part carries over: be specific about what they did.

A dog cannot know they helped. They sat on the floor beside you and wanted their dinner at the usual time, and that routine is often what got people out of bed. Write that down.

Birthday letter to my dog

Birthdays and adoption days ("gotcha days") give you a date to come back to. A letter on that day each year turns into something nobody else has: a dated record of how the dog changed, and how your life changed around them.

Keep the same few headings each year so the letters line up:

For the "next year" line, our senior dog bucket list has ideas sorted by how much energy an old dog has.

Letter to my old dog

A letter to an old dog is often the one people put off, because it feels like a goodbye. It doesn't have to be. Write it about the dog they are now: the gray coming in, the slower walk, the new habit of sleeping in the sun patch by the back door. An old dog is still a dog you can describe in the present tense.

Some people do write a letter after a loss, and that is a different letter with a different job. This page is about the earlier one, and the earlier one is easier, because nothing has happened to prompt it. If writing stirs up worry about the future, our page on anticipatory grief is written for exactly that feeling.

Our book One Day, You'll Miss This ends its Preserve part with this exercise. Activity 49, "Write Them a Letter", asks for exactly this: written on an ordinary Thursday, in the second person, dated, in one sitting, then left alone until you write another in a few years.

Should you read it to your dog?

You can, and many people find it easier to say out loud than to write. Your dog will not follow the sentences. They do pay attention to your voice, though. A 2016 study in Science by Attila Andics and colleagues at Eötvös Loránd University scanned dogs' brains while they heard praise and neutral words in praising and neutral tones. Dogs processed word meaning and tone separately, and they relied on both when the brain registered the speech as rewarding.

So read it in the voice you use with them at home. If you record yourself doing it, you have their reaction on file as well. That is the kind of recording our senior dog photoshoot ideas page suggests pairing with photos.

Where to keep the letter

Keep it with the other things about them, not in a drawer on its own. A folder with their photos, a printed page, or a dog memory book all work. Write the date on the outside. In two years, write another one and put it next to the first. The second will differ from the first in ways you can't predict from here.