He Was Just the Old Dog Under the Piano—Until We Learned Who He Really Was (2 of 3)

I started working at Brookside Hills about six months ago, fresh off a heartbreak and needing something—anything—to distract me from the mess of my life. I wasn’t planning on forming attachments. Definitely not to a dog. But something about Teddy made me pause. He didn’t ask for anything. He didn’t whine or beg or bark for attention. He just was. Present, but invisible.

Until the morning I found the clipping.

I was cleaning out one of the old filing cabinets in the office—nobody had touched it in years—and there it was: a yellowed piece of newspaper from 2009. The headline read, “Therapy Dog Teddy Brings Joy to Children’s Ward.” There was a picture too. Teddy, impossibly young and golden, wearing a little red vest with a patch that said Official Therapy Animal. A girl was hugging him so tightly her cheek squished into his fur.

My heart stopped. This was our Teddy?

The article went on to talk about how he’d spent years visiting hospitals, comforting terminally ill kids, calming veterans, even making weekly rounds at the local elementary school to help children with anxiety. He’d been on the local news. Twice. He’d mattered.

I marched down to the nurse’s station, clipping in hand, and said, “Did you guys know about this?”

They looked up from their paperwork. One of them squinted. “That Teddy?”

“Yeah,” I said. “That Teddy.”

By lunchtime, we’d made a plan.

We didn’t have much. Just some streamers, a leftover cake from the freezer, and a lopsided balloon bouquet from the Dollar Store. But we made it work. I printed the article and pinned it to the bulletin board. Someone found an old red vest in the supply closet—it wasn’t his original, but it looked close enough. I slipped it over his bony shoulders while he blinked up at me, confused.

“It’s your big day, old man,” I whispered.