Humans and animals think very differently. Animals seem to accept death, as they accept the weather. Although people like to think animals mourn and grieve, I haven’t seen that. The animals in my life, move on, go foward, they seem to intuitively know that death is as much a part of life as breathing or eating, and they seem to adjust, and move right through it.

I’ve learned in hospice work and elsewhere that human beings are not like that. They deny death, avoid it, treat it as a taboo, are stunned by it. I’ve sat with people whose 98-year-old mother died after a long illness, and they simply couldn’t believe it. They were in shock. I see the same thing with people and animals. Even though we know intellectually that our pets will die before us, and do not live long, nothing in our experience seems to prepare us for the shock of losing them. I wonder if that is inevitable, or if it can be softened. I wonder if we can come to see life and death as different parts of the same thing, each a gift in its own way. Death makes life possible, and clarifies it, and it is a gift for me to miss something. It means that I loved it, and how sad my life would be without things to miss. In the next years, all of my dogs will die, all most likely before me. I like the Quaker idea. I hope to celebrate their lives, even more than I mean to mourn their deaths.

And there is, I think, a choice for me. We’ll see.