I Found My Dog in the Wood.

From Grief to Grain: How I Carved a Lifesize Loki and Found My Dog in the Wood.

You know the hollow feeling. The one that starts in your chest and echoes through every room of a too-quiet house after you lose a heart-dog. After my first husky, Loki, passed, I was a sculptor drowning in silence. My workshop, once a place of creation, felt like a tomb. The chisels were just cold steel; the wood, just dead weight.

I tried to move on. But how do you “move on” from a soul that was your shadow for over a decade? The answer, I discovered, was not to move on, but to move toward. Not to say goodbye, but to say, “Welcome home.”

And so, I embarked on the most terrifying, sacred project of my life: not a portrait, not a bust, but a full, lifesize statue of Loki.

This Wasn’t Sculpting. This Was a Séance.

I didn’t start with a sketch. I started with a memory. I chose a massive block of claro walnut, its grain wild and unpredictable, just like his spirit. The first cuts were the hardest—defining the space he would occupy in the world again.

The process became a daily ritual of remembrance:

· The Legs: Carving the powerful curve of his haunches, I remembered the explosive joy of his run, the way he’d kick up snow like a celebration.

· The Chest: Shaping the broad, deep chest, I recalled the steady, rhythmic thump of his heartbeat under my hand during thunderstorms.

· The Pose: I carved him sitting alert, head slightly tilted—his classic “I hear something fascinating” pose. It wasn’t a majestic stance; it was a living one.

For weeks, it was just me, the mallet, the chisel, and a mountain of wood shavings that smelled like grief and hope. I sanded for what felt like an eternity. Not to make it smooth, but to make it soft. To replicate the exact feel of his thick, agouti fur under my palm.

The Day the Silence Broke

The final step was the eyes. I used pieces of polished blue river stone. As I set them in, carefully bevelling the wood around them, something shifted. I wasn’t looking at a carving anymore.

I was looking at Loki.

The statue didn’t just capture his likeness; it captured his presence. The hollow feeling in my chest didn’t vanish, but it was suddenly filled with a warm, solid certainty. The other huskies, Freya, Valkyrie, and Hella, noticed immediately. They didn’t bark or startle. They walked over, sniffed the statue’s base calmly, and then lay down beside it, as they always had with him. They felt it, too.

The Truth in the Grain

This statue taught me the single most important lesson about love and loss: We cannot hold on to what is gone, but we can build a new place for it to live.

Grief isn’t a void to be filled with distraction. It is raw, potent energy. That energy can destroy you, or it can become the driving force to create something monumental. I chose to channel every ounce of my love, my pain, and my memory into my hands and into that block of wood.

Loki’s statue now sits in the living room, in his favorite spot by the window. He is home. And in making a permanent space for him in my world, I finally made peace with his absence from it.

If you are holding a similar silence, know this: your love is not a burden. It is your most powerful tool. You don’t have to carve a statue. But create something. Write the story. Plant the garden. Donate to the rescue. Build a new place for that love to live, and you will find, as I did, that they never really left.

They were just waiting for you to build the door.

Inspired by Loki’s enduring spirit, the Loki’s Howl Legacy Fund supports animal welfare.