Next week, I’m meeting Robin Gibbons at the Cambridge Valley Vet to see if Gus’s mother, Hannah, is pregnant. I suppose it’s another a big day in my life with dogs. I’m just assuming that Hannah is pregnant, as her mating sessions with Knox – they call it “getting tied” – went well.

Hannah and Knox seemed to have some fun together. If Hannah is pregnant, the puppies are due in mid-July, roughly 60 days after impregnation. If the birth goes well and the puppies are all okay, then our puppy could home home in mid-September, a few weeks before our October Open House.

I’m eager to resume the small dog experiment that began with Gus, and I want to write about it, on my blog, and in my next  book, as yet untitled. If Hannah is not pregnant, or the birth has trouble, then we will have to step back and rethink things. I am focused on getting another Boston Terrier, and I am hopeful it will be one of Robin Gibbon’s dogs.

And this is turning out to be just the way i love to get dogs – I see the mother, the father, the breeder, we all get to see and meet one another. I know the medical history for five generations, I talk to the vet, the breeder gets to know me and see what i am like.

There are all kinds of good ways to get a dog – rescue, shelter, breeder – but writing about dogs the way I do, and doing the therapy dog work that I do – I find the more I know about a dog, the better we do together, the more I can trust him or her, the easier it is to communicate.

It has worked well for me most of the time. I have had some wonderful dogs, and still do.

I get a lot of e-mails from people who tell me they are still crying about Gus and mourning his death deeply, and this always causes me some pause – when people mourn my dogs more than I do. For their sakes, I wish that were not so, I suspect the grieving is not just about Gus.

Caroline wrote me last week,” I loved Gus so much, I still haven’t stopped crying about him, he was very special to me.”  She said she couldn’t bear to look at my blog for weeks. I told her I was sorry she felt that way. I told her I did not feel that way. I hope she moves on.

It takes some  heart and soul to love animals, they die often and of many things. This kind of love is not simple, or easy to get do.  It was a great shock to me and Maria to lose a puppy to the dread megaesophogus, and by our own hands. It is a rare and mysterious disease, especially rare in Boston Terriers. The luck of the draw, the wheel of life.

The breeding line on both ends – Hannah and Knox – is very healthy, and the vet says it’s as likely to be healthy as a puppy can be, no guarantees. Life has no guarantees either, I think of our friend Ed Gulley, pulling  calves out of big cows one week, struggling with brain cancer two weeks later.

It is never good to take in someone else’s loss and pain, there is too much of it in the world. The boundaries of our life tell us to protect ourselves, we take in our own and empathize with the rest and we seek out the kind of people who can affirm us, and not bring us down.

I loved Gus dearly and worked hard to help him and save him. We couldn’t do it.

I got the inevitable hate messages scolding me for not doing more for him, but I am hopefully too smart and certainly too old to pay attention to people who do things like that. Sending hate mail to somebody who has lost someone or something they love is one of the lower forms of life, and shame on anyone who pays attention to it or enables it by responding.

In a sense, it is quite liberating to get older. I have a lot to share and nothing much to lose or prove. I like that. The time for apologies or explanations is long past.

I look forward to the ultra sound next week and am grateful to Robin for inviting me to come along. My idea is that there is another dog heading our way this September and he or she (we might go for a female) will bring  us great joy, and teach us many things, as Gus did.

Gus was quite a character, I am not expecting this new dog to be Gus.

That would be cruel and unfair. He or she will be herself, and will reveal him or herself in time. Every dog is different.  My job is to love and support the dog and capture her evolution and entry into our family. I will train the puppy in a positive and spiritual way.

We didn’t want Gus to be a small dog, we wanted him to be a  dog. And he was. We raised  him that way. We’ll do the same thing next time.

Training for me is not about obedience but communication, although the two are often linked. I want him/her to learn to be gentle with people and safe in a complex world. My mission is for this dog is for  him to be a therapy dog, and I will ask Robin for help in making sure the dog is handled and socialized in a particular way in the litter, if we get that far.

So Gus, a powerful presence for me, is fading a bit, I am thinking of this new dog. That is the wondrous healing power of dogs, you can get another one when you lose the one you love. For me, nothing is healthier or more healing.

I feel sorrow that there are people out there weeping for Gus when I am not. But i can’t really do much about that but live by example, I don’t spent too much time grieving for what I lost, I’d rather celebrate what I have and may receive in the future.

Gus was not about joy or misery. When I think of him, I always smile. I hope the people who loved him can see their way to do the same.

Hopefully, next week brings another rich chapter in my life and work with dogs.