A dog is a whole way of living. Mark Twain once said that if heaven went by merit, our dogs would go in and "very few persons" would follow them. That line lives in my chest now. It fits Jessy better than any collar ever did.

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Groucho Marx joked that "outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend; inside of a dog, it's too dark to read," but the part that matters is that the dog comes first. Books, work, plans—they all waited for Jessy. Her needs were simple: food in the bowl, a hand on her head, an evening walk just long enough to let the day fall off both our shoulders, and waiting for anyone who is not home in our library, peaking outside that big window. Yes, that's her day—happy day. Is that all she wanted.

My son said after she died—"she went god's home"—being sad. He is just seven but death might taught him something too. James Thurber said if he believed in immortality at all, it was that certain dogs would go to heaven, and very few people. When Jessy died, that stopped sounding like a witty line and turned into something closer to a map. And I believed that Jessy is in heaven too. If there is a door somewhere beyond all this, it's not guarded by saints or angels in white; it's guarded by dogs, tails going in slow circles, deciding who loved enough, at least I want that.

Jessy came into our life 15 years ago when I was in Nepal, the way important things always seem to arrive—unplanned, and instantly necessary. We were young, me and my brother, we were not looking for a dog. Life already felt crowded with broken things: a few dreams gone sideways (because our previous dog, Bhunte, had died year ago), the usual pile of small disappointments. Then there she was. Me and my brother went to our neighbor and brought her home and it was going to her home for 15 years.

Let me remind you, there's a quote from Thom Jones: "Dogs have a way of finding the people who need them, and filling an emptiness we didn't ever know we had." That is exactly how it felt. Jessy trotted into our days like she'd read the script and knew her cue. She didn't fix our life. She just moved in and made the sharp edges less dangerous. Gave the bark of joyous. Her happy tail was like an unspoken-tongue sent by God.

We built a routine together. Mornings started with the sound of her claws on the floor and that full-body stretch only dogs can do, like they're trying to touch both ends of the world at once. Evenings ended with her curled somewhere close enough to hear me breathe, mostly, I still remember, on the corner of that couch. In between there were walks, muddy paws, shared cucumber, and the kind of quiet companionship that doesn't need a single clever word. I still remember when I start chopping potato in the kitchen, as soon as she hear the sound of knife hitting the chopping board, she would run to the kitchen and stay behind me quietly, and I would not have to guess, but to fling around her and give raw-dice-potato to her, she loved that. Now, who would wait for that potato or would anyone hear the sound of chopping board and run behind us!

John Grogan wrote that a dog doesn't care if you're rich or poor, smart or dumb; "Give him your heart and he'll give you his." Jessy lived that line. And one thing, I would look into her eyes without hesitation, she would never judged my doubleness. I could look at her like a blessing fur. She didn't care how well we were doing in the world. She cared if I sat on the floor with her and stayed a little longer than necessary. That's all she wanted.

One of the quiet cruelties of loving a dog is knowing from the beginning how the story will end. Loving a dog is joy with a clock on it. Someone online once wrote that loving a dog is ten years of joy, and a lifetime of grief. It sounds like cruel joke, but when you're sitting in a waiting room with a knot in your throat, it doesn't feel funny at all. She had a tiny operation years earlier and I was already far away, too far, thousands of miles away. In those fifteen years I might have seem her closely (not on a video call) three times but before that we had a great time together for years and years.

Her hair around her eyes started to turn gray year ago and I felt for the first time—that faint feeling of her getting old. Jessy's muzzle went grey gradually, like winter edging in around the corners of a warm room. Her run turned into a trot, then into a careful walk. She stopped going up to the top floor (we call it Kausi; the top of the house). Agatha Christie said dogs are wise; they crawl away into a quiet corner and lick their wounds until they are whole again. Jessy too, tried to lick her wounds away but she couldn't lick her death away. She wanted privacy for the hurt parts of her, but she still wanted us in the same room. My mother, father, brother and my son kept her in the very same room until the last day of her life.

The vet always talked about kidneys and numbers and options. My brother might nodded and pretended language was helping the day he took her to the vet and doctor said "it's not gonna fix her". It wasn't. What helped might be the weight of Jessy's head in his lap when he got home, the way might she sighed, the way might her eyes said, I'm still here. For now. Dogs never need charts to understand time. They feel its edge in their bones and carry on loving us anyway. Yes, she loved all of us, me, my wife, my son, my brother, my parents in her own way, the silent way and we understood her silence too.

At night, when the house was quiet, might be all of my family watch her sleep and think of that anonymous line: loving a dog is a bargain you make with the universe—and I was here, thousands miles away, thinking, I will break my own heart someday, on purpose, for this joy now. How I missed those shiny eyes of her. She used to watch me, and asking my permission to climb on my high-bed, her eyes always seemed, those moments, like diamonds offering her all shine-ness. Who would say no to her? Right? Then she climbed and curled herself on my bed, all night. But, now if I will be at my home (god knows when) now, there would be no one waiting for to climb my bed and sleep all night.

The last day came without asking permission. She wouldn't eat her food. Denied to drink either. She walked a few steps, then lay down with a kind of heavy surrender. My mother video calling and showing her, her declining health. That sunny day when I was watching her on my tiny screen, she lied there, silently, barely opening her eyes. There was no drama, no big gesture. Just a soft letting go of the small routines that had held our lives together. She lied there, I kept watching, my mother letting me watch, holding her phone.

I think of Steinbeck's words: "I've seen a look in dogs' eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts." On that last day, Jessy, maybe, didn't look at anyone with contempt. But there was something in her eyes that said: You make everything so complicated. This part is simple. I'm tired. Am too having hard time to say goodbye. Alas! She might come back again, waggling her tails. Making sounds of her tiny feet on the marble floor.

Now I can just imagine that my brother, son, father and mother lay on the floor next to her that night, their hand resting on her side, counting each rise and fall of his ribs like someone afraid of losing track. Outside, the world went on—neighbors, faint glow leaking through curtains—but inside, time narrowed down to the space between one breath and the next. God, I was not there to see her. How inhuman human being we are.

There's a dog poem called "Waiting at the Door" that imagines a dog speaking from heaven: thanking you for setting its spirit free, promising to wait for you. Those lines felt differently when you're there, when you're the one who has to make that final call, sign that final form, nod that final nod. It doesn't feel like setting anyone free. It feels like betrayal with a fate's signature on it. I was not there (for my previous dog too) to final nod of love.

She died quietly might be. No big last bark, no dramatic last look. I am just thinking of her now. Imagining her last day. I was not there. Might be there was just a soft exhale and then an absence where there had always been presence. For a long time after hear the news of her death, I kept thinking hand on her fur, as if warmth might come back out of stubbornness. It didn't. We lost her.

The next morning, my brother or father, I didn't dared to ask even, who dug the hole. I am sure the earth didn't want to move, but grief gives us a strange strength. He might wrapped her in her blanket, tucked in one worn-out toy for no logical reason, and laid her down under the same sky she used to watch. Oh god, it gives me pang all over my head now. I had a dream the other night and I saw that Jessy was frolicking here and there, waggling her tail, and running to the door after she heard the bell chime on the door. But no one called us that day so we had a premonition of something bad, and it was true. My wife quietly texted me from her work "I got news from home, Jessy is no more". I was working too, I went to the toilet and cried.

Alexander Pope once said that history has more examples of the fidelity of dogs than of friends. Standing over that fresh mound of earth, my father would have think that. That sounded less like old wisdom and more like a brutal fact. Dogs don't leave because they're bored. They don't drift away because you're difficult or distant or not who you promised to be. They stay until their bodies won't let them any more. They try hard to love you and you love them like no one could love anyone like that, without reason, with no explanation either.

After the burial, the house might felt wrong. The bowl on the floor. The leash hanging by the door. That her pink-dog-cloth, the last medicine she took the night before. The worn patch on the rug where she always slept. Everything might looked the same, and none of it was. That chair—where my mother sit and watch the day go by the window, underneath it she used to sleep quietly, now no one is there—even that place might miss her. Grief is not just sadness; it's disorientation. It's walking into rooms that your heart still expects to find occupied. I try to imagine my brother, father, my mother and son how they had walked to the house ever after burying her with heavy heart, empty staires, where she usually used to wait for us. That cold-white-marble might even felt her absence. I was trying hard to remember when was her last bark. When she had her last loud healthy bark. It makes me more sad not to remember even her last bark. But if only I could hear her bark once more, two paws scratching on the ground, mouth open—that mighty bark. That theology of the purest love of bark.

There's a poem called "Four Feet in Heaven", god knows how I remember this now, that talks about hearing silence where paws once were, and wondering if there's a place in the beyond for them. That's what the first weeks might felt like: listening for a rhythm that had been removed from the soundtrack of our life. Even I am hundreds miles away—I looked for her paws and eyes and that whimper dog gives you when they saw you—that lovable sounds of low bark.

People write entire libraries trying to define faith, love, devotion, meaning. Dogs live it in a body that fits on the backseat of a car. Mark Haddon wrote that dogs are faithful and do not tell lies "because they cannot talk." That's one way to see it. Another way is that they don't need words to tell the truth.

There is something almost religious in that consistency. It's a small, sturdy gospel: I am here. I am glad you are here. That is enough. I remember the first time I cried watching movie was the Hachiko. Me and my brother were watching it for the first time (that time we had our very first dog) and both cried, like we might had a look, 'don't look at me, but let me cry out loud'.

When I think about God now, I don't imagine a throne. I imagine something more like Jessy on that marble round table outside balcony at dusk, head on his paws, eyes half-closed, utterly present, forgiving everything without making a speech about it, which now I have no chance to see it again.

Colleen Fitzsimmons wrote that the bond with a "heart-dog" stays unbroken, even after they are gone, that they keep watching, waiting, loving from somewhere just out of sight. Whether that is metaphysics or just how memory works, it feels true. Jessy is gone, but she isn't gone-gone. She's in the way I instinctively used to check the gate, in the way I still sense twice before stepping on my bed like maybe she is their waiting for my permission to get on my bed. In the way my hand sometimes curls like it expects fur. I want t feel again that fur.

If immortality exists, maybe it isn't some shining city in the clouds. Maybe it's this: the way a dog rearranges a life so much that even after death, the pattern of the days keeps their shape. James Thurber's hope that certain dogs go to heaven feels, to me, less like theology and more like justice.

One day, someone will ask if we are ready for another dog. The answer will be complicated. Love after loss always is. But somewhere under the grief, there is this simple truth: the years with her were worth the years without her.

When my time comes—and it will, as it does for every living thing that has ever dared to love—I like to think of that "Waiting at the Door" image again: a dog, my dog, hearing my footsteps and racing toward me with a joy that has been building since the day I heard the news of burying her. Just that full-body wiggle, that shining look, that old, familiar eyes: says—

You're here.

I knew you'd come.