09/02/2026
🐾 WHERE ARE THEY NOW WEDNESDAY 🐾
Adopted 2016 - Hailey (Hazel) and Hilda 💗💗🌈
GRAB THE TISSUES 🥹
Apologies in advance for this long email - we are really missing her right now, but we did want to respond to share our story and let everyone at Speranza know how meaningful their animal rescue work is.
We may not have all the details, but we remember hearing that Hilda and Hazel (formerly known as Hailey when she was at Speranza - our daughter renamed her) had previously lived with a family with young children, who could no longer keep them due to a divorce and moving. We brought our daughter, who was two at the time, to meet them and they were a great fit. This was in October 2016 and we had just lost our previous rescue dog that summer. We definitely wanted to do a rescue and we were interested and able to provide a home for two, so we were very happy to find a pair that were good with kids and ready for a family.
Hilda and Hazel brought so much joy and were such an important part of our family. They were endlessly gentle and patient with our young daughters and also made us laugh. Our youngest was born about a year after we adopted them, and our girls are 11 and 8 now - Hilda and Hazel were their first best friends. They learned to read by reading to them, and endured the pandemic and doing school from home with them. Both girls learned responsibility and how to take care of dogs as well as compassion and how to be gentle with them. Mostly, they just loved them.
We lost Hazel in 2023. She was probably around 13-15 years old; we never knew their exact ages. Hilda was probably 13-15 this year. We were sad to lose Hazel and wondered if Hilda would struggle with the loss; however, Hilda instead just soaked up all the attention, toys, and treats for herself and carried on very well.
In the last few years, especially after we lost Hazel, Hilda became my constant companion as I worked from home. At first she was just settling for being with me while our girls were at school, but she grew to love her lazy days hanging out with me as she got older. Every morning she waited eagerly to go with me to the room where I work.
Then, just about a year ago, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. It was caught early, but my treatment plan involved surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, and a full year of continued infusions. Hilda was still in good health then and I hoped we would get through the year of my treatment together. I have just one infusion left at this point but she did make it the full year from my diagnosis and surgery, and she was such a comfort to me through it all.
We will always think of her asking for belly and ear rubs, chewing her tough chewer cheeseburger toy vertically instead of horizontally, and wiggling her way into everything we did - laying right underfoot when I worked or in the kitchen when we cooked, or in the middle of the pile of Christmas presents, or squishing herself on top of us all on the couch until no one could be comfortable except her.
Unfortunately, she developed kidney disease and we kept her eating and interested in things and feeling okay with anti-nausea medication for as long as we could, until her quality of life suffered and we knew she needed us to let her go last week. We miss her dearly and will always remember how much she and Hazel meant to us, and how much of our family's life they saw us through. They are the first dogs our daughters will remember, and brought us all so much joy through so many ups and downs.
Our oldest daughter has been thinking about this with us and also wanted to share a few words:
My name is Lila. Hilda and Hazel were the first dogs I remember having, and so they were and still are very special to me. It was a very devastating loss for our family when we lost Hilda, Hazel too, though I was very young when she passed away. Hilda was with me for ten years of my life, and I will never forget her. She was a very funny dog, she would eat pretty much everything, she even tried to nibble on rocks multiple times. Eventually, because of her habit of eating random things, we had to buy gates to put in our house so she would stay in the living room, where we moved pretty much everything she could fit in her mouth out of reach. She loved pillows, and she would rest her head on them like a person would, and sometimes we would see her grab them in her mouth to rearrange them. She loved to lay in front of the woodstove, grunting happily. We've been doing some renovations on our house, and we were all excited to see what she would think of the new fireplace, however she never got to see it. Hazel, from what I remember of her, also had many quirks: she loved to lay on top of the back of the couch, and she would always sit like a human, with her back legs out and her front legs around them. She was always (somehow) dominant to Hilda, and if Hilda was sitting somewhere and Hazel wanted to sit there, Hilda would either move or Hazel would just sit on her. They were both very important to me. I hope this shows you how much Hilda and Hazel meant to us.
