It is exactly one year ago this very day that the final catastrophe overtook our miniature poodle, Button. Our deep-seated sorrow in her absence has hardly abated. We shared over nineteen years of our lives together. Losing her, although it was inevitable, was a blow we have yet to recover from. We miss her presence in our lives.

We met her personal adversity in aging and the journey toward death with as much care and consideration as we could muster. To aid her in navigating space when she became progressively more blind. To have patience with her when she could no longer hear us. To entice her to eat by removing restrictions from her diet and allowing her to have whatever she wanted. To anticipate when she would have to evacuate because she no longer signalled us. To carry her to places where she desired to go, despite no longer having the ability to trot up stairs or leap onto places she had formerly favoured. To be mindful of her whereabouts and careful to aid her in negotiating spaces when we harnessed her to ensure she had daily exercise for walks she still enjoyed and where what was left of her sensory skills still gave her pleasure.

When she was young she was an inquisitive, sometimes boisterous, adventurous little dog on long, long legs. She was happy to challenge any other dog to a running contest and she won every one of them. She loved the water, and would retrieve stones that we would toss into lakes for her, diving determinedly to sniff them out and return them to us for yet another throw.

She was a determined little mountain-climbing dog, accompanying us on our summer holiday trips to mount as many mountain tops as we could throughout the period of intense outdoor activities that brought us as close to nature as was natural for dogs and humankind alike. The adventure of seeing new places and responding to new opportunities and challenges called to her as it did to us.

She loved the adventure of it all, from our daily ravine walks that took us to nearby forested areas sublimely coated in snow during our long winters, to strolls through those same trails, meeting the excitement of spring, the return of wildflowers and migrating birds, and the presence of raccoons, foxes, and partridge until encroaching housing drove them away.

On that dreadful day, everything seemed normal. Reflecting what had become normal for us, having her on a one-week antibiotic protocol monthly to ward off the dreadful infections she had become susceptible to, maintaining a disciplined schedule that suited her temperament, reflecting that she had lost all sense of ordinary routine and required gentle guidance. She had been asleep in her place on the sofa in the family room around ten that evening, when suddenly she was catapulted into the air as though electrified, and rapidly proceeded into a series of physical contortions, unaware of what was happening, a victim of some deranged cross-wiring in her brain.

We rushed her to one of the city's two veterinarian emergency hospitals that never close. And were there with her for hours, cradling her, comforting her, and ultimately bidding her adieu.