In October of his last year, Cooper’s oncologist used the phrase “comfort-focused care.” It was her gentle way of saying we’d moved past treatment and into something…

I want to tell you about the eighteen months I spent explaining away Cooper’s symptoms. He started drinking more water around age nine. “He’s always been a drinker,” I told…

Cooper wasn’t anxious about most things. But thunderstorms — and to a lesser extent, fireworks — turned him into a different dog. He’d start pacing about twenty minutes before I could…

I noticed it on a Tuesday morning. Cooper was about nine years old, and I was looking at him in the backyard sunlight — the kind of low, angled morning light where you really see a dog’s face….

The first time Cooper slipped trying to get onto the bed, I laughed. He was eight years old and had always leaped up with no problem — it just looked like a clumsy morning moment. The second time he…

Cooper had his first ear infection when he was four years old. Then another one at five. Then two in one year when he was seven. By the time he was ten, we were at the vet for ear infections so…

When I brought Birch home — a scrappy little mixed-breed pup with floppy ears and an underbite — I swore I’d do things differently than I did with Cooper. Cooper was my 13-year-old Lab who…

I remember the moment a vet first told me Cooper was overweight. He was six. The vet did that thing where she pinches the ribs — I’d seen it done before but never really understood what she was…