
A dear friend of mine recently lost her canine companion of many years. I understood her grief as I’m sure many of you do also. The sad, sad news made me seek out my fur family and cling to them. It also created some reflection on words that are not mine but in which I have found solace.

“Not the least hard thing to bear when they go from us, these quiet friends, is that they carry away with them so many years of our own lives.”
John Galsworthy

“Dogs’ lives are short, too short, but you know that going in. You know the pain is coming, you’re going to lose a dog, and there’s going to be great anguish, so you live fully in the moment with her, never fail to share her joy or delight in her innocence, because you can’t support the illusion that a dog can be your lifelong companion. There’s such beauty in the hard honesty of that, in accepting and giving love while always aware that it comes with an unbearable price. Maybe loving dogs is a way we do penance for all the other illusions we allow ourselves and the mistakes we make because of those illusions.”
Dean Koontz, The Darkest Evening of the Year

“It is a fearful thing to love what death can touch.“
Anonymous

“I have sometimes thought of the final cause of dogs having such short lives and I am quite satisfied it is in compassion to the human race; for if we suffer so much in losing a dog after an acquaintance of ten or twelve years, what would it be if they were to live double that time? The misery of keeping a dog is his dying so soon. But, to be sure, if he lived for fifty years and then died, what would become of me?”
Sir Walter Scott

“You think dogs will not be in heaven? I tell you, they will be there long before any of us.”
Robert Louis Stevenson

Dogs’ lives are too short. Their only fault, really.
Agnes Sligh Turnbull

“If having a soul means being able to feel love and loyalty and gratitude, then animals are better off than a lot of humans.”
James Herriot

“We who choose to surround ourselves with lives even more temporary than our own, live within a fragile circle; easily and often breached. Unable to accept its awful gaps, we would still live no other way. We cherish memory as the only certain immortality, never fully understanding the necessary plan.”
Irving Townsend, The Once Again Prince

“If there is a heaven, it’s certain our animals are to be there.
Their lives become so interwoven with our own, it would take more
than an archangel to detangle them.”
Pam Brown

“The one absolutely unselfish friend that man can have in this selfish world, the one that never deserts him, the one that never proves ungrateful or treacherous, is his dog.”
George Graham

“It came to me that every time I lose a dog they take a little piece of my heart with them, and every new dog who comes into my life gifts me with a piece of their heart. If I live long enough, all of the components of my heart will be dog and I will become as generous and as loving as they are.”
Anonymous

Go give your fur companion some special attention!
Diana Davidson