Family & Relationships · A Decembers list
Every animal that ever shared your life
The dog who slept at the foot of the bed. The cat who owned the windowsill. The goldfish you won at a fair and kept alive longer than anyone expected. You still know their names.
This is the list for all of them, first to last. One line names a name; a few more bring back the whole animal.
Free to start. Private from the first word.
Where this list lives
This is a list in Decembers — the place a life gets written down one question at a time.
Decembers asks the questions no one thought to ask, keeps the answers in one permanent Chronicle, and holds them on one Timeline that reads in order. You answer. Decembers does the writing.
- Lists
- A list for every kind of life, and every turn one takes. Pick one and start answering.
- Timeline
- Your answers arrange themselves in order. Seeing a whole life laid out this way is something else.
- Inner Circle
- Not social media. The few people you name are the only ones it is ever shared with.
Begin with one list. The rest follows.
One line is enough
Write down one name and the rest come with it "the vet's waiting room, the leash by the door, the way they turned three circles before lying down. One pet pulls a whole decade back into the room.
No record keeps this. There's a rabies tag in a drawer somewhere, maybe a photo with a dog half out of frame, but nothing tells you how she used to steal socks and bury them in the yard, or why you called the orange one Waffles. The vet's file has a weight and a birthdate. It does not have the fact that this animal got you through the year you moved, or the winter you lived alone for the first time.
A whole book about your pets would sit unwritten forever. A list gets started because it asks so little. You put down a name, a breed if you knew it, where they came from. Next time you remember the quirk that drove you up the wall and would now bring you to tears. Line by line, without meaning to, you've kept the ones who were always there and never got a word said about them.
How it works
- 01
Pick this list
It’s waiting, already written. There is no blank page to face.
- 02
Fill in what comes
A year, a line, a photograph. Five minutes or an hour.
- 03
Invite who was there
They add what you forgot. You decide what stays.
- 04
Share it, or don’t
One quiet page for your Inner Circle. No link, no feed.
The ones that end up on this list
The strays who chose you
Nobody went looking for these. A cat that showed up thin on the back step and stayed fourteen years. A dog trotting down the median that you couldn't drive past. You didn't pick the name so much as it arrived, and you have no idea how old they really were.
The family dog
The one the kids grew up alongside, who learned the sound of the school bus and the crinkle of the treat bag. Who was in every Christmas photo whether you meant him to be or not. When he went, the whole house felt the size of him.
The small and the short-lived
Goldfish from the county fair. A hamster named after a cartoon. The parakeet who learned two words. They didn't stay long, but a child learned something from each one, and you still remember standing at the little grave in the backyard.
Where they came from
- The shelter
- The one you drove to on a Saturday and came home with more than you planned, papers in a folder and a nervous animal in the back seat.
- A stray
- Showed up, stayed, and became yours without a single decision being made out loud.
- A breeder
- Chosen from a litter in someone's kitchen, the pick you'd circled in your mind before you ever got there.
- A litter at home
- When your own dog or cat had a litter, and for a few weeks the whole house smelled of milk and warm fur.
- Passed along
- A friend was moving, a neighbor couldn't keep him, and the animal came to you already grown and set in his ways.
- The pet store
- A fishbowl or a cage on a whim, the fair-prize goldfish that outlasted every prediction.
Other lists you may like
Start with any one of them. Every answer lands on the same Timeline.
Begin
A record of the animals who were there for all of it
They asked for so little and gave back more than most. Start with the first one you can picture, and let the name bring the rest of them home.