One of our rescue dogs died and we had no place to bury him and couldn't afford to have him cremated (we had lost our old dog 5 weeks earlier after a long and expensive bout with cancer), so he went off for a mass cremation and scatter. We don't even have a picture of him. It's been almost seven years and I still feel terribly about that. Somebody else neglected him for nine years--we should have done better by him for his last week.

The next rescue we got, we took a zillion pictures of her in her ugliest Starving Rescue Dog stage, just in case. I've learned--no matter how bad they look, take a picture. She's 12-ish now and shows no signs of slowing down but I can't stand the thought of losing her.

I can't read the Rainbow Bridge poem. I've read it a million times and I've never gotten all the way through.