‘She had a good run:’ On the difference between accurate and true

The most comforting thing anyone said to me wasn’t a fact. It was a feeling.

My dog Evie died recently. She was a 15-year-old pug who was diagnosed with a breathing condition around age 7. It’s safe to say she lived a lot longer than we ever though possible. By any measure, she had a good run. She lived a full life.

And every time those words came out of my mouth, something in me recoiled.

Because what I actually wanted was five more years. Ten more. I wanted her to follow me into the kitchen one more time. I wanted to snuggle her and bounce her up and down to try and coax a burp from her belly as I carried her up the stairs to bed. I wanted her on the couch, snoring and dreaming, which she did regularly and without apology.

“She had a good run” is what you say when you’re trying to make peace with something you’re not ready to make peace with. It’s accurate. It is not the same as true.

My husband Mike said it too. We both did. And we both immediately knew it felt wrong. The way it hung in the air after we said it made us feel heavy and even more sad. Yes, Evie lived a long life. But something in the way we were acknowledging it wasn’t right.

Key takeaways

• Technically correct statements can land completely wrong, especially when people are grieving, afraid or in crisis.
• The instinct to reach for the accurate, defensible thing is nearly universal. It is also nearly always insufficient on its own.
• What people in crisis actually need is acknowledgment. They need to feel seen, not just informed.
• “Thank you for sharing her with us” lands differently than “she had a good run” because it centers the loss, not the numbers.
• The best communication sometimes doesn’t try to explain anything at all.

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When accuracy isn’t enough

I’ve spent much of my career in crisis communications. I’ve written statements in the middle of the night, coached people through the worst moments of their professional lives and tried to answer questions when there were no good answers. And I can tell you that the instinct to reach for the accurate thing — the defensible thing — is almost universal, and almost always insufficient.

We take this matter seriously.
Our thoughts are with those affected.
We are committed to transparency.

All true. All hollow. All written by someone who was trying to say the right thing and ended up saying nothing at all.

The problem isn’t dishonesty. The problem is that accuracy and empathy are not the same skill. One answers the question on paper. The other answers the question the person is actually asking, which is almost never the one they said out loud.

When people are in crisis — whether they just lost a colleague, a community, or a 15-year-old pug who had opinions about everything — they are not looking for information. They are looking for acknowledgment. They want to know that what they lost was real and that you understand why it mattered.

What actually helped

Some of the messages I received after Evie died were kind and well-meaning and landed exactly wrong. “She lived a full life” is a statement about output. It tallies the years. It does not touch the loss.

But a few people said something different. They thanked me for sharing her with them — through years of social media posts, photos of her skeptical pug face, updates on her latest demands. They weren’t doing math. They were saying: she was real to us too. We felt it.

That’s the whole game. That’s what every crisis communicator is chasing and most never quite reach.

One friend sent me a Will Rogers quote: If dogs don’t go to heaven, then when I die, I want to go where they go. No advice. No silver lining. No reminder that she had a good run. Just the quiet acknowledgment that some losses are worth grieving fully, and that the people and animals we love deserve that from us.

It was the most comforting thing anyone said.

The trust account

I teach a framework I call the Trust Account. The idea is simple: trust is built in deposits made long before you ever need to make a withdrawal. Evie never read the framework. She didn’t need to. For 15 years she showed up, she stayed close, she asked for nothing except to be in the room. She made deposits every single day.

That’s what good communication looks like. Not the statement you issue when things go wrong. The presence you’ve established long before they do.

She had a good run.

What I mean is: I would have taken more time with her. I would have taken all of it.