See Ya died last Thursday morning. It was both a complete shock and not surprising. Last December she cheated death, as they say, spending days in ICU, receiving myriad treatments and coming out the other side. We have poked around at diagnosing what it was that nearly killed her then to no avail. This year it struck again and she did not survive.

She is far from the first dog of mine to die, this is part of the bargain we make the moment they are born, the moment we hold that warm wet body in our hands and feel life rushing through it. We know it will end before ours. She is not the first, yet I am stumbling in metaphorical darkness, as for nearly ten years, beyond being my dog, she also guided me through life. She was the piece that made me whole. The dog that took away my disabilities. When things were hard she was there, taking care of me, and things are really hard right now.

Last night I dropped my phone. It slid off the bed and onto the floor as it had dozens of times in the past. As with my glasses or pill bottles or anything that my less than coordinated hands struggle to hold, I am used to those things magically re-appearing. See Ya, even when she was sound asleep, would clock that something had fallen and pick it up for me. Last night my phone stayed on the floor and I thought about how we think about dogs and dying. We ask ourselves whether dogs understand death, but really, do we even truly understand? We can intellectually speak of it, and tell ourselves that this is the end of the being we knew as we knew her. Depending on our beliefs we can think about souls about heaven and hell, rainbow bridges, atomic particles, ashes to ashes, reincarnation. But our primitive self, the one that cries, the one that just wants to wind back the clock a day or a week or a month, still cannot take in that the dog we love is gone. We still hear them behind us, see their shadow in the yard, pick up their bowl to feed them. The particles of their memory drop off slowly.

Grief is a strange thing, somehow embarrassing. We each and all give lip service to the idea that it's a process, that there is no right way or timeline. Yet when it falls on us, we try to 'keep on going'. We feel ourselves starting to fall into grief and grab onto something to pull away. Don't cry. Put it aside. When she was a puppy she made me laugh and smile. That feeling was borne of love. These tears are borne of love too, and I will make just as much space for them.

Not only do we each grieve death in our own way. We grieve each death in its own way. If you find yourself in the position of losing a dog, know that the way you are experiencing it is part of the love you've shared.