Here’s the weird thing about dogs—they are so much themselves that when they leave us, they take a part of us with them. If you’ve lost a dog before, then you probably get it. Losing one feels like losing oxygen for a moment.

A loss that hit me hard was my dog Daisy, my yellow lab. She was 12, with a love for table scraps, and a personal vendetta against squirrels, when I lost her suddenly. One day -just like that—she got sick out of nowhere and then she was gone. No fanfare. Just this big, gaping hole in a house suddenly too quiet.

And just when I thought my heart couldn’t take another crack, it did. Shadow, my black lab and my very first dog, passed a few years later at age 16. Shadow wasn’t just a dog; she was the foundation of my childhood. Saying goodbye to her was like closing the last page of a book I didn’t want to end.