My friends in Denver had to put down their little Scottie named Annie on Saturday.

Annie was 15, a good, round number for a dog’s life, but not long enough. My friends and everyone else who knew Annie will miss her.

I have had too much experience losing dogs, as have my friends. It’s never easy. I always feel guilty, not just in the cases where I had a vet end a dog’s life, but in every case. We are completely responsible for our pets’ live, and when their lives end, I feel like I haven’t done enough; I have failed them.

On the night back in 2000 when my father died, I felt as if I could step back and look at his life from beginning to end, a perfectly contained living history, separate from his current state and from me. His life was like a pearl on a necklace, and like a spherical pearl, it had no beginning and no end — a little bubble of existence floating away from us.

I can’t accept that my father, my mother, and my brother no longer exist. I don’t believe in god or in an afterlife, but I am incapable of accepting not that they are dead, but that their existence is gone. I feel like they must be back “there’, somewhere in the past, still existing as I remember them, and they would be there if I could somehow go into the past.

I feel that way about the dogs I have lost, and I feel that way about little Annie. She’s still back there, out of reach for us, but still sticking her head out the window to see the sights and catch the scents

Goodbye, little Annie. Hope to see you on the other side.