I have never had to decide when to say goodbye to a pet. For most of my life I counted that a mercy. I’m beginning to understand it was a poverty. And before anyone in my family objects: yes, there was Fluffy. I will get to Fluffy.

In her recent New Yorker essay, “When Should You Say Goodbye to a Pet?,” the palliative-care physician Sunita Puri rides along with Dr. Jessamyn Kennedy, a veterinarian who brings hospice care into people’s living rooms. Kennedy carries patterned fleece blankets in the trunk of her Subaru and chooses one for each pet “based on what I think they would like.” She tells one owner, “It’s always better to let them go on a good day.” Near the end of the piece, a Labrador named Julio spends his last morning eating two slices of chocolate cake, some watermelon, and bacon. He is still chewing when the sedation begins.

I read that paragraph twice, and then I sat with something I never expected to feel about a dog I have never met: grief.

Here is my confession. I was the child who could not have a pet. My allergies were serious, the kind that turned an afternoon at a friend’s house into an evening of misery. Dogs, cats, anything with fur or feathers. My body treated them all as intruders. My sister’s allergies were so much worse. So we were a petless family, and I made my peace with it the way children do, by deciding I hadn’t wanted one anyway. While my friends buried their faces in fur, I stood back, eyes watering, and concluded that I simply didn’t care for animals.

I carried that conclusion for decades, and I said it out loud more than once: I’m just not a pet person. What I understand now is that loving animals is not only an instinct. It is also a fluency, and fluencies are learned young, usually with your face pressed against a warm flank you are not allergic to. I never got the lessons. I mistook the missing vocabulary for a missing feeling.

I should say my record with animals is not entirely blank. There is one entry, and it is terrible. When my son Alexander was five, he had a pet rat named Fluffy, the rare pet a boy could keep in a house governed by his mother’s allergies. One laundry day I gathered an armful of dirty towels off the floor and loaded them into the washing machine, not knowing that Fluffy was nestled somewhere inside. I can still hear Alexander’s scream. It has been decades, and I can still hear it. I never had to decide when to say goodbye to a pet; I made the goodbye happen without deciding anything at all, which may be worse. And I learned something I was not ready to learn: a child’s grief for an animal is total. Fluffy was, to me, a rat in the towels. To Alexander, he was a friend and a confidant, a warm body who asked nothing and understood everything. I had not yet learned to love animals. My five-year-old already had.

Then my sons grew up and did what grown children do: they made choices I had no vote in. They got dogs.

Which is how I became a grandmother to Lyla and Patty Pan.

Nobody warns you about grand-dogs. There is no baby shower, no announcement suitable for framing. There is simply a moment when you realize you have rearranged your day around a creature who greets you like the liberation of Paris, and that your phone now holds an embarrassing number of photographs of animals who are not, technically, yours. I love these two to bits. I say it without apology and with some astonishment, the way people describe a language they picked up late in life. My accent may be imperfect. The love is not.

The cruelty of this late arrival is that I now understand exactly what Puri’s essay is about. I have spent years of my working life in the country of grief, writing about it, producing plays about it, insisting that we talk about death out loud instead of in whispers. I have listened to playwrights render the loss of animals with a tenderness that used to impress me from a polite distance. The distance is gone. Lyla and Patty Pan closed it.

Puri quotes a therapist, Laurie Levine, who specializes in pet loss: when an animal dies, others “can’t understand what it is that we have lost.” Grief experts call this disenfranchised grief: sorrow the world declines to recognize. I recognized myself in that line, uncomfortably, as one of the decliners. For years I heard “we put the dog down” and offered the brisk sympathy we reserve for losses we assume are small. I know better now. The love between a person and an animal is private, wordless, and physical, and when it ends, something wordless is exactly what’s lost.

Someday (years from now, I insist) my sons will face Kennedy’s question. They will look into a beloved face and try to determine, as she puts it, whether their dog is enjoying life or just existing. I will grieve twice then, in the particular helplessness of grandmothers: once for the dog, and once watching my child carry a sorrow I cannot lift. My childhood allergies excused me from that kind of loss for most of my life. They also excused me from everything that makes the loss worth it. I no longer consider that a bargain.

Puri writes that “the certainty embedded within all love is loss.” She’s right, and I have decided the arithmetic still favors love. So I intend to show up for as many of the good days as I can get: the tail-thumping, treat-begging, entirely unremarkable good days. Kennedy is right that we should let them go on a good day. But first, and for as long as possible, we should let them love us on all the others.

Lyla, Patty Pan: your grandmother was late. She’s here now.

Whether you are late or have known along that there is an amazing human-animal bond, then please join us in San Francisco Thursday – Sunday, October 15-18, at The Marsh SF or on Thursday – Sunday, October 22-25, at The Marsh in Berkeley.

For more information, visit https://www.griefdialogues.com/our-loving-companions/