I will miss you, doodle dog," Ethan said to me.

You can usually tell that a man is good if he has a dog who loves him.

I wondered briefly if cats also came back after death, then dismissed the thought because as far as I had ever been able to tell, cats do not have a purpose.

My purpose, my whole life, had been to love him and be with him, to make him happy. I didn’t want to cause any unhappiness now—in that way, I decided it was probably better than he wasn’t here to see this, though I missed him so much at that moment the ache of it was as bad as the strange pains in my belly.

God invented love, and it is therefore perfect, and dogs are better at celebrating this perfection than we are. When in doubt as to how we should feel, we could do far worse than trying to live life like the dogs.

My advice to anybody, including myself, is if you're going through a bad period, and you just can't see the world's on your shoulders and no day is a good day, you're missing the whole point of the experience. And that's something dogs know from the moment they come bounding up to you as a puppy.