The dogs in our lives find us in mysterious ways but they always come along at the right time. Whether it’s a lost one who ends up in your backyard at dinner or one that calls you back after you’ve passed them up at a shelter, they know way before you get there that they are yours and more importantly, that you are theirs.

About a year ago my favorite dog, an Australian Shepherd named Katie, was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer on a routine check up. Though her last visit six months prior had been clean, the cancer had appeared in the interim and when we discovered it, had already won. The last three days of her life were spent with me in my office, with her companions Roxanne and Zack, and sitting quietly on a deck drenched in spring sun that we would never see together again.

I had a business trip at the beginning of the next week that would’ve taken me away for several days. On the night before she died I remember looking at her and saying, “If you are going to go you have to do it now. I cannot be gone when you leave. “ She crawled up on the bed beside me and we drifted off to sleep curled against each other . The next morning she began bleeding from the incision and we both knew it was time. On the way to the hospital she sat in the backseat and had her paw on my hand as if to say, “Don’t worry. I’ll be waiting for you at the door when it’s your time to come home…it won’t be long…it won’t be long.”

I wept openly in my vets office as she and one of her assistants prepared the syringe that would end her suffering and my time with her. I held her in my arms and her face in front of me and looked into each others eyes until hers could look no more. We left each other just like we had found each other..totally in love with one another. I grasped like never before the impact of the poet Emily Dickinson’s words, “Parting is all we know of Heaven and it’s all we need of Hell”

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