For several years I was that most pathetic of creatures, a human who walks into the veterinarian's office without an animal. "Beau?" the woman behind the desk would call, and I would rise. Dr. Brown would usher me back into an examining room kitted out with a bottle of preserved heartworms and a model of the canine knee and send me off with a prescription refill and the promise of a house call when necessary. The house call would be for the purpose of euthanasia, but neither of us ever said the word.

The object of our discussion, a black Labrador retriever with the ridiculous AKC name Bristol's Beauregard Buchanan, was at home sleeping on an oriental rug in the foyer. The rug smelled. So did Beau. At this late date there was not much reason for him to appear at the vet in person. His sight and his hearing were mostly gone. But he had retained the uncanny ability to know when a certain phony lilt to my voice as I snapped on the leash meant we were headed to that place where his prostate was once examined. After that memorable visit, when he emerged from the back of the veterinary office with the fur on his spine raised as though he was a Rhodesian ridgeback, he had made me a figure of fun on crowded New York City streets. "You're really pulling that dog," a man once said, stating the obvious near a bus stop on Broadway. It was true; Beau's white-coat syndrome took the form of systemic paralysis, so that he turned himself into a solid seventy-five-pound block at the end of the leash, like one of those wooden pull toys for children, but bigger and more obdurate. When we finally made it to the waiting room, he would begin to shake and shiver and shed his coat, so that the other patients and their people were enveloped in a haze of fine black fur not unlike a cloud of gnats.

I did not miss those forays, although I mourned the increasing infirmity that made them impossible. As Beau grew old there was no way, other than the dog taxi that advertised on the vet's bulletin board alongside the cards for homeless kittens and lost mongrels, to travel those few blocks. He moved as though his back legs were prosthetics to which he had yet to become accustomed. The very last time he sensed we might be heading to the dog doctor, he lay down on the front stoop and refused to budge. He wasn't going to make that mistake again. Neither was I. I've put in my time around people whose bodies were failing, who were clearly marooned in some limbo between illness and death. I hated the way the medical profession felt obliged to continue to poke, to test, to treat, even when cure or comfort was not in the cards. With people, it's assumed you'll do everything; with animals you have the luxury of doing the right thing. A Supreme Court justice once said that one of the most important rights is the right to be left alone. After nearly fifteen years of loyal companionship, Beau had earned that right.

It's a shame that obituaries and eulogies come only after people are gone and unable to appreciate them. How many times after a memorial service have you said of the deceased, "She would have loved it"? Rumor has it that certain celebs, knowing The New York Times writes important obits well in advance, have tried to get a peek at their own. Their expressed rationale is fact-checking, but I suspect it has more to do with self-esteem. How many inches of type? What sort of coverage? And, in the world of the preeminent and the prominent, the big question: Will the story run on the front page with a picture?

Beau, of course, will have no idea what I say about him, although he always seemed to understand that a laptop in its case near the front door meant a trip to the country, which, even in his old age, gimpy as he was, sent him into a fandango. Besides, when I talk about him I'm really talking about me, about us, about our family, about our life together. Dogs provide many services in the lives of human beings, even human beings who don't need a dog to lead them through their daily routines or to keep predators away from their sheep. In dog shows, the class of dogs who do those kinds of jobs are still called working dogs, but most of them don't work anymore in those particular ways, nor do many hunting dogs hunt. (The classification of certain animals as toy dogs, however, remains accurate.) The job so many dogs really perform is to allow us to project our feelings upon them, to assume they are excited or downhearted or lonely when we are. "He's so much happier when he's out in the country," my husband always liked to say about Beau. And maybe he was right. But I suspect it is he who is happier in the country, and he liked the idea that he and Beau were of one mind.

People do this with their children, too, trying to use them as a mirror or a foil, which is how you come to have otherwise sane men screaming instructions on Little League fields or women allowing preadolescent girls to wear just a little lip gloss, just a little blush. Most parents come to their senses sooner rather than later, so that their sons and daughters are not forced into a declaration of independence and individuality by leaving home or marrying young. But any woman who has ever lain in a birthing room and watched as, in violation of all laws of physics, an entire human being emerged from her body, can be forgiven if she has a difficult time seeing the resulting person as utterly and irreversibly separate.

For a long time I thought of myself, rather smugly, as quite good at this separation stuff. Then one evening I was providing what, it developed, was some heavy-handed help on a high school essay. In an even tone of voice, our daughter said, "Mom, I am not you." Along with "Will you marry me?" and "You're pregnant," those words are a flag flying in my subconscious from here to eternity.

Dogs, however, do not talk, or talk back, which is part of their charm in a hyperverbal age, and so they lend themselves effortlessly and endlessly to this sort of projection. So does their essential open-faced affect. It would never occur to me to assume that the cat and I have two hearts that beat as one; with his narrowed amber eyes and scarred upper lip, his prevailing mode is either contempt or indifference. When he curls around my ankles, it suggests hunger, not affection. I like this about cats; they're the Clint Eastwoods of companion animals. A dog who sits by your side craves company; a cat is doing you a favor. This is why when you say "Sit!" a cat rises and stalks out of the room. Most dogs will fall back onto their haunches, vibrating slightly, their liquid eyes locked on yours.

Human beings wind up having the relationship with dogs that they fool themselves they will have with other people. When we are very young, it is the perfect communion we honestly believe we will have with a lover; when we are older, it is the symbiosis we manage to fool ourselves we will always have with our children. Love unconditional, attention unwavering, companionship without question or criticism. I once saw a pillow that said I WOULD LIKE TO BE THE MAN MY DOG THINKS I AM. That about covers it.

So the traits we ascribe to our dogs, the stories we tell ourselves about them are, at some level, our own stories. When Beau tottered down our block, passersby saw a very old Lab with a white muzzle and a tail that seemed vaguely broken, as though all those years of wagging had worn it out. But I saw a dog whose entire life, puppyhood to adolescence to middle and old age, was inextricably entwined with those of two little boys with high, piping voices and their younger sister, who spent her formative years trailing her brothers around. I remember the three of them squatting next to a roly-poly puppy and allowing him to gnaw on their fingers. "He has really sharp teeth," the eldest said. "You're right, Quin," said the second. "His teeth are really sharp!" "Really sharp," their sister repeated.

Copyright © 2007 by Anna Quindlen.