The Best Day, The Worst Day.

For Morris.

I’m sorry if this one’s a bit much. I’ve been writing it on and off for a few days, and I still don’t know if it makes any sense. I just need to hit publish and retreat to my drawing board.

Columbus, Ohio
Friday, 7th August 20206

I was in a tuxedo at the door of the pre-dinner reception in the ballroom when I took a call. It was my ex-wife. Morris -my French Bulldog, my shadow, the dog at the bottom of every post I’ve ever written here- was in New York in an emergency room at the animal hospital, frightened. A seizure, then a series of them the vets couldn’t get ahead of. They’d sedated him. He’d be staying in overnight for observation. Stable, sort of. She’d been taking such good care of him. She did everything she possibly could for him.

I put the phone back in my pocket, took a deep breath, and walked into a room full of people congratulating me on my nomination. I was numb.

The Reuben Awards are the National Cartoonists Society’s annual honours, named for founding president Rube Goldberg and voted on by the entire membership. Not a small anonymous panel, but over 300 people who do this for a living, some of them for their whole lives. This would be the 80th year they held the awards.

I’ve been a cartoonist for 24 years. It’s the only job I’ve ever had. This year I was nominated for Best Book Illustration, for a book I dedicated to Morris. He’s in it, on several pages. I was up against two of the best book illustrators I know, and I’d made complete peace with living in the nomination phase. Which is, let’s be honest, the fun part anyway.

The universe doesn’t check your calendar.

Within the hour, five minutes before showtime and somewhere between the chicken and the fish, a message from her lit up my phone. I stepped out and called her back.

“He passed away,” she said.

My ears started ringing. My mind went blank. A brain tumour, it turned out. Inoperable. He had to be euthanised.

My lungs collapsed. A wave of disbelief, unimaginable grief. fury. misery. He was seven years old.

I was directing the awards show that night. So I went back in, and I ran it.

At the end of the evening, the category was called: Best Book Illustrator for 2025, presented by Patrick McDonnell, creator of Mutts, a man who understands dogs better than almost anyone alive. He opened the envelope and read my name. Twenty-four years, and I’d never won one of these things from any organisation. The whole room stood up. I don’t remember walking to the podium.

I thanked my co-author, Scott Dooley. I thanked my publisher. And then I told the room the truth: that this book was a love letter to my boy, that two hours earlier I’d found out he was gone, forever. That the award was his. It will only ever be his.

He sat at my feet every single day for months as I inked every page of that book. Spurring me on. Farting loudly. Posing for drawings without knowing it.

Patrick hugged me when I came off stage. He knew; more than anyone on this earth, he knew. And I’m glad the news found me where it did, surrounded by the family I’ve found. It didn’t make it any less excruciating. But I wasn’t alone.

I never had kids. Morris was mine. I know it isn’t the same thing -please know, I really do- but when people say a child is your heart walking around outside your body, that is precisely how I felt about him. He wasn’t just

a dog. He was a person. He was my person.

I work from home, so he was never the dog I came home to. He was the dog who was always just there, at my feet. 24-hours of every day for 7 years. There through the pandemic, asleep next to me on the bed while I self-isolated with the Alpha strain of the coronavirus in 2020, the closest I’ve come to dying. There to nudge me with his wet nose the day my dad died. I looked him in his big yellow eyes in the face of all of that, and you know what he said?

“I need to pee.”

He was there when my marriage ended, and it became just the two of us alone, in a new apartment, in a new life, walking through Hell’s Kitchen every morning. Morris in Manhattan. A city dog. He never left my side. He was the best thing that ever happened to me.

The day we met.

The grumpiest face on the happiest dog you’ve ever met. He never barked, except sometimes at the door, and even then he’d lick whoever came through it half to death. He’d ignore other dogs on the street entirely and sidle up to their owners’ shins for a belly scratch. He flunked out of puppy school. They gave him a little hat anyway. I’ve never been prouder of anyone.

I keep trying to untether the two things -the honour and the grief. Maybe one day I will. Right now, I can’t.

To everyone who has ever commented to ask about Morris, who enjoyed the photos at the bottom of every post, and the stories, who flipped straight past my writing to find him at the bottom of the story (fair), the way you flip past a 9-page New Yorker article to get to the cartoons: I understand completely, and thank you.

He was the best part of every post because he was the best part of every day. I’d been thinking about retiring the tradition after this week. I’ve decided the opposite. He stays at the bottom of every post, for as long as I’m writing them. Forever the last word.

‘til then.

Your pal,

“I need to pee.”