Our dog Rosie died on Saturday. She lived much longer than anyone expected after we found a raspberry-sized bone cancer in her leg in December. To anyone who knew her, the word lived will be a gross understatement that can only be justified in comparison to what she did before she was sick. All creatures have a certain tenacity of life that can be positively shocking to people who believe their happiness depends primarily on their material condition. Perhaps this tenacity springs from an unawareness of time: from a more immediate existence in which concepts like income, social standing, and security, do not exist and thus cannot substitute for simple experiences. Rosie never once lost a game of frisbee: you could never wear her down enough, never bore her enough, to make her not want to chase it (or a stick, a ball, a rope, or anything else capable of extended flight), and every time you threw the frisbee she tore after it as enthusiastically as the first time.

But there was something more than stubbornness and vivacity to the ecstatic leaping that ensued whenever you started looking for the leash or a toy, or to her absolute refusal, there at the end, to go to sleep. Chasing a frisbee, unlike her Labradorian fondness for water, was something more than atavistic. It was fun for her because it was a game she could play with the people she loved. She sensed emotion, and sympathized with it. I don’t know how many times she found me when I was sick at heart and gave me sloppy kisses or offered to let me pet her.

We are well aware of the human mind’s tendency to see its image in nature, in the society of bees, the play of dolphins, or the inscrutable predilections of cats. The word love is perhaps not valid here, since it marks a thing in our brains that is at once emotional and highly conceptual, and the word itself, which no animal possesses, is a potent element of the phenomenon. But the regions of the brain in which our emotions reside were also present in Rosie, and so she was deeply capable of feeling what we call love.

She was so full of love. Those of us lucky enough to know her never doubted it. But now that the house is so quiet I find I need these explanations, this defending of her existence. The cancer must have been extremely painful at the end, but she never gave in to that, either. As recently as a few weeks ago she hopped up to the park on three legs, chased frisbees, and splashed around in Cordonices Creek, the happiest dog on earth. On her last day she tried to scare a cat out of the back yard, and with double the normal dose of sedatives in her she refused to close her eyes but looked back and forth at Tom and the friends who were with her. When the final dose of pentobarbital hit her I had her in my arms, and her death was as sudden as a shot. She stiffened, exhaled, and then something was gone. No: everything was gone, and we are left to miss her.