[image error]I look at you, and I savor.

You are alive on your thirteenth birthday.

We weren’t so sure.

You remember, don’t you?—you don’t, the science says—when I curled up to your body like a comma and whispered into your ear, “You are good to go.” I meant it. You are a good dog. And it was okay if you needed to be a gone dog, too.

That didn’t make it easy. For a whole three weeks, while you were on your hunger strike, I cried. I stayed home. I dry heaved grief at four a.m., every night, season four epi...