James Lileks says good-bye to his beloved Jasper, and as someone who still remembers fondly the dog of his youth (McGee, Bane of Moles, Scoffer at Chain-Link Fences), I was moved beyond the capacity to write anything useful in response. And what’s the point anyway? Everyone who’s had a dog understands; no one else could fathom. So I’ll let C.S. Lewis do it for me:

Is that not how the higher thing always raises the lower? A mother teachers her baby to talk by talking to it as if it understood long before it really does. We treat our dogs as if they were ‘almost human’: that is why they really become ‘almost human’ in the end.

Mere Christianity, Chapter 7