What can one of Smiley's people say at a time like this? I look in my own dog's eyes and know the same future awaits me.
My mother is a life-long dog-lover who has never, with the exception of a brief time in nurse's training, not lived with a dog. She says that Heaven is where you get reunited with all your dogs, so this isn't the end -- just a different beginning.
Agnes Sligh Turnbull, who was a popular novelist at the turn of the 20th-century, was a dog lover, too. She wrote: "Dogs' lives are too short; their only fault, really."
Too true...too true.
@robx is right -- don't carry this load. Whatever else the circumstances of one's life, the perfect M or the perfect D, this is something everyone should be allowed to carry in their own way. As Smiley himself once said, the only reward for love is having loved.
So take your reward. You loved, and your dog loved you.
