By Evan Falchuk

Yesterday, I was sitting on the floor about two feet away from where I am now.  I was holding our wonderful chocolate lab, Hooper, in my arms as he died.

He had been sick, so it wasn’t a shock.  A short time ago, he was stricken with an aggressive cancer.  He hadn’t suffered much, even though he was declining.  The day before yesterday he was as happy and playful as I have seen him in months.  Maybe he knew something was going to happen.

I went to work but half way through the day my wife called to say I should come home.  I found him lying on the ground, right over there, where I had last seen him in the morning.  His breathing was labored, but he looked at me in the eye when I walked in.  As I went over to him and started to hold him and pet him and talk to him, his breathing started to change.  It was as if he was no longer trying to breathe, but it was just happening, reflexively.  It kept getting shallower and shallower, until, after maybe five minutes it faded away completely.  I couldn’t feel his heart beating anymore.  He was gone.

Dogs don’t live long enough, and so they bookend parts of your life.  In our case, when Hooper was born 12 years ago my wife and I were single lawyers who wanted to be married non-lawyers.  We did both of those things, and much more.  Hooper showed us that we had a responsibility to make these kinds of choices in our lives.  Choices that would fill our lives with the kind of joy that Hooper experienced every day, just by being alive.

Dogs are such pure beings.  Their love and spirit are uncluttered, unfettered, unconditional. They don’t do the “right” thing or the “wrong” thing, they just do the whatever involves taking care of those they love.  They are so undemanding, so selflessly caring, such….friends, that they bring some of that out of you.  I know with my family, my friends, my work – that if I can do for others even one percent of what Hooper did for us, well, I will have accomplished something meaningful with my life.

And so the truth is this.  Hooper died a few feet from here.  But what is important is not how he, or any of us, die.  What matters is how we live.  The choices we make to be sure our lives are in service of something greater, and more everlasting than our own.

Now, our home, filled as it is with three wonderful children, is strangely empty.  I know that will pass.  We will take Hooper’s ashes and spread them by the ocean near where he and I played fetch.  And I hope that as the pain of his loss fades, the memory of what Hooper means in our lives becomes even stronger.

Rest in peace, my friend.