If you are not a pet person, not a dog or cat person, you may not understand the role that these fur babies play in other people’s lives. I didn’t for a long time. As a young child, pets were limited to goldfish. Time and again, my brother and I, with the best of intentions, fed those poor fish to the point they ended up floating upside down. I had a “pet caterpillar” once, whom I still fondly remember. Its lifespan in a jar was just what you would expect and one that I, at about 5, did not.

Dogs were foreign to me and there was absolutely no question that dogs and cats were neither in my parents’ life experience nor on the list of things they would accept into our household. Period. My one vivid encounter with a dog was, at about 8 or 9, walking to religious school and being knocked to the sidewalk by a big dog. I now suspect that he or she was trying to be friendly but I was terrified. I, more or less, kept my distance from dogs after that.

When my kids were young, there was a lot of discussion about dogs and, without too much fight, I gave in. We had our first dog, a red Golden Retriever, who, as I have often said, was really “a person in a dog’ body.” Even people who were afraid of dogs fell in love with her, she was sweet and sensitive and impossible not to love.

From there, some years later, we ended up as a two dog household and then, for about a year recently, as a three dog household. Our dogs are, as any pet lover will attest, part of our family. We worry when they are ill, we fuss over them, we count on them as being part of our daily lives and we miss them when we are away. They don’t judge, they don’t talk back, they don’t question—they just love and comfort and, often, make us laugh or shake our heads.

Our first dog, Cinni, was aging and became ill one morning. It was about 5 a.m. and we raced to get up and take her to the vet. I said, “Let me take a quick shower and we will go.” I ran in and did just that and, when I came out, she was lying on the tile floor of our bathroom with my husband crouched beside her, gently stroking her. He looked at me and shook his head, no words possible. I knelt down quickly and stroked her fur and she looked up at me. Then she closed her eyes and was gone. “She waited for you,”he said. I would not accept that she was gone and we loaded her into the car, seeking help for something that could not be changed.

There have been other dogs since that time, four of them. Some have come from breeders, some have been rescues and some have been dogs that others had and could not manage. Each personality brightened our lives and each held onto our hearts.

Just over two years ago, a service person who was in our house to give us an estimate on something, started talking to me about dogs. He showed me a picture of his dogs on his phone, two English and two French bulldogs. I told him I had always wanted a French bulldog and he gave me the name of his breeder. While I didn’t use his breeder, I did, just days later, find a French bulldog puppy, from a highly recommended source, whose photo spoke to me. After some agonizing over “who needs three dogs,” she was set to be ours. We waited the requisite time and, then, Nettie joined our family.

Nettie was unlike any other dog I had ever had. A little dog was a first for me and she proved to be full of mischief and as stubborn as they come. For a long time, if I sat at the stool at our kitchen island, my toes were her idea of a teething toy. I finally took to spraying bitter apple on my socks until she finally stopped. She fell completely in love with her “older sister,” our Golden Retriever and, whether Honey liked it or not, Nettie was often all over her. Nettie would nip at her until she would play. She would grab a toy and stick it in Honey’s face until Honey, finally, gave in. She’d stick her tush in Honey’s face and then her nose in Honey’s tush. She was an irrepressible handful, no question, and a source of both laughter and head shaking.

Nettie had to be in contact with you all the time. She would sit on laps, curl up beside you, snuggle with our grandkids. Every night that I sat on the couch, Nettie would tuck herself in beside me and rest her head on my thigh, happy to sleep (and snore) there until we woke her up to go to bed.

And this week, for reasons unknown, at just over two years old, our little nutty girl stopped breathing. My husband was in the room and realized that her usual noisy breaths weren’t there and that her chest was not moving. He tried to rouse her and then rushed her to the vet but there was no hope, it was over. When I spoke to him on the phone, when he had to share this terrible news, he couldn’t speak, just sob. Even now, days later, I know that both of us see her everywhere and still cannot grasp that a presence, so full of life, is gone.

I have often thought that loss, and how we deal with it, defines our lives. It may not be loss of life, always, but change and loss are synonymous, even when the change is a positive one or a choice. There is always something we give up and it shapes us. In the case of traumatic loss, of loss of those we love, we go from acute grief to an ache that endures. We learn to live with it but it never goes away.

All the ways in which we give and receive love are ones for which I try to be grateful, to hold the gifts more tightly than the grief. I try to remember that memories preserve lives forever and that each, human or canine, has impacted my life in ways that have meaning and value. Each, unquestionably, has and does, play a role in filling my full heart.