Meghan Markle has paid a moving tribute to one of the most important guys in her life.
In the third post on her new Instagram account — which has amassed more than 1.4 million followers within a week of being active — the Duchess of Sussex shared the news that Guy, the beagle she adopted in 2015, had died.
“Thank you for so many years of unconditional love, my sweet Guy,” she wrote on the post, titled In Memory of Guy, and which featured a slide show of images and video of Meghan with her pup over the years. “You filled my life in ways you’ll never know.”
In the lengthy caption, Meghan shared her story with Guy, starting with adopting him from an animal rescue while she was living in Canada filming Suits.
“He had been at a kill shelter in Kentucky and given a few days to live. I swooped him up ….and fell in love,” she wrote. “They referred to him as ‘the little guy’ because he was so small and frail, so I named him ‘Guy’. And he was the best guy any girl could have asked for.”
She then nods back to her pre-royal life — the way he was a feature of her old Instagram account, and a frequent character on The Tig, her former lifestyle blog — detailing the way he joined her on the rollercoaster her life turned into after meeting Prince Harry: “He was with me for everything: the quiet, the chaos, the calm, the comfort.”
The post — which I challenge you to read and watch without choking up — is fascinating on several levels.
It fills in some blanks on a mysterious accident that befell Guy just before he moved with Meghan to the U.K., one that Meghan describes as “terrible,” and that left him so injured doctors thought he might never walk again. For Canadians, there are the throwbacks to her old life in our city, and the name-checking of Queen West Animal Hospital, who treated Guy.
“I will always be grateful to Noel and his team, the team at Queen West Animal Hospital in TO, our vets now, and my friends and community: Thank you for loving him so,” Meghan writes. We also learn that after she moved to England, Meghan and “H,” as she refers to Harry, made late-night, “after-hours” trips to visit Guy at a facility outside London where he was still recovering. (A reminder, perhaps, of how there are so many parts of this story that we don’t know.)
The images and videos that accompany the caption are revelatory in their own way, too. We see what seems to be personal footage, taken on Meghan’s own phone, of her life with Guy. We see Harry encouraging Guy to run along a beach, more poignant now when you know his history; a toddling Archie holding Guy’s lead at a farm; Archie’s voice telling him, “Don’t fall” when they’re riding in the back seat together and the dog is standing on the middle console; Lilibet and Meghan picnicking, possibly in a professional portrait, with Guy next to them; and, at the very end, one of the children singing, “We love you Guy.”
What is most striking about this post, however, is the vulnerability with which Meghan writes about the very relatable loss of a beloved pet.
“I have cried too many tears to count — the type of tears that make you get in the shower with the absurd hope that the running water on your face will somehow make you not feel them, or pretend they’re not there,” she writes. “But they are. And that’s OK too.”
While it’s unclear how recent Guy’s death is, Meghan also signals her reasoning for sharing this information now, ahead of her forthcoming Netflix lifestyle show making its debut next week.
“Because many of you will now see Guy in this new series, I hope you’ll come to understand why I am so devastated by his loss,” she writes. “I think you may fall a little bit in love too.”
