Our friends and neighbors Mike and Mary Lou Delaney with their usual graciousness, gave us a harbor of love and understanding. “You don’t want to be alone this evening,” Mike said. “Come on down, nothing special, pizza and wine.”

In the past, for the five of us, Mike planned short vacations in Rancho Santa Fe, at a splendid resort that was friendly to dogs. He arranged every detail, including searching out restaurants to which we could take Trixie. He’d recently planned a longer autumn excursion to Yosemite, though it would not happen now.

To simplify things, Mike prefers to drive every mile of the trip and to pay for food and lodging and everything else with his credit cards. After we’re home, he copies receipts, gives us an accounting, and we send him a check for half. This is unbelievably convenient for me and Gerda. In fact, I now know what a kept man feels like-though in my adolescent fantasies, my sugar mama more resembled Marilyn Monroe than the rangy specimen that is Mike Delaney.

Mike is retired from a life in lubricants, which isn’t half as racy as it sounds. The Delaneys owned a company that made a wide range of petroleum-based lubricants for industry. These days, Mike manages investments, worries about his grandchildren’s future, and tries to keep Mary Lou out of trouble. The investments and the grandchildren get about 10 percent of that time.

Mary Lou was once a cheerleader back in the day, and I mean back in the day when the football was a rock and when the game had to be halted every time a mastodon ambled onto the field. She and Gerda became friends before I met Mary Lou, so there wasn’t much I could do about it except commit suicide, to which I have moral objections.

Only a month before, my novel The Good Guy appeared with this dedication: “To Mike and Mary Lou Delaney, for your kindness, for your friendship, and for all the laughter-even if a lot of the time you don’t know why we’re laughing at you. With you. Laughing with you. We love you guys.”

So that Friday evening, after receiving Trixie’s grim prognosis, we took her with us to the Delaneys’ house. Our girl especially loved Mike and Mary Lou, and roamed their home as though it were her own. We sat at the patio for a while, and Short Stuff explored every corner of their yard and garden, giving herself as fully as ever to the wonder of all things. Repeatedly, she came to us for a pat or pet, then returned to her explorations.

Mary Lou cooked a special chicken breast for Trix, and Trix found it delicious, along with other treats we had brought for her. She was as happy as we had ever seen-and that is a happiness of the highest order.

At eleven o’clock, we went home with the hope of two weeks of our girl’s company. The crisis, however, came before dawn.

We woke to the sound of Trixie having breathing difficulties. She had wanted to sleep in her bed again, and now she sat beside it in a state of high distress. She labored for breath-but did not whimper.

We thought the moment had come, that a piece of the blood clot on the wall of her heart had traveled to one of her lungs. We dropped to our knees and held her, trying to comfort and reassure her.

During the following terrible half an hour, I feared for Gerda because she was shaking so violently with the prospect of our loss. Not merely her hands shook, but also her entire body, as though the temperature of the room had plunged below zero.

Having survived a rotten childhood, having survived a near-thing knife attack when I was forty-four, having seen a man shot in front of me and having looked down the barrel of that same gun, I had known what it felt like to be helpless in the face of mortal threat, but I had never before felt a fraction as helpless as I felt with Trixie wheezing in my arms. Here was the truth of our condition in this world, which we strive so hard to deny every day: Each of us, each living thing, lives by the hand of grace. I did not want to see our beautiful girl die in this manner, not with fear or suffering, yet I had no power to spare her.

I did not weep, and neither did Gerda. We would not distress her with our tears while she struggled to breathe. We prayed for strength, and strength was given.

After half an hour, Trixie abruptly recovered. She began to breathe normally. I dared to hope the blood clot had not traveled after all.

I asked Trix if she wanted to pee, for it was nearly the hour of her usual morning toilet. She responded at once, rising to all four paws. When she followed me from the bedroom, her tail was wagging.

We rode the elevator down to the ground floor. Walking the long hallway to the terrace and the terrace to the lawn, Short Stuff put on a brave show at my side, pretending to be free of all distress. As soon as she had finished peeing, however, her legs went wobbly, and she had no strength. Nevertheless, she made her way shakily from the lawn to the covered terrace, to the couch that was arguably her favorite place on the property.

This time she could not spring onto the furniture. I lifted her.

We often sat there for an hour at a time. Trixie liked to watch the birds and the wind in the trees and the roses swaying on their stems, while I petted her and rubbed the oh-that’s-good spots behind her velvet ears. There were times she seemed willing to sit on that terrace for half the day, merely observing, marveling at the wondrous nature of all ordinary things.

Gerda brought a bowl of water in case it might be wanted, and we sat on the couch, with Trixie between us, from five forty in the morning until one o’clock in the afternoon. Our golden girl was listless but neither in pain nor afraid. The first time I offered her food, she wanted none. But the second time, she ate a dish of kibble and a tablespoon of peanut butter.

She wanted to be stroked and held, and to hear us tell her how good she was, how beautiful. Dogs come to love the human voice, which they strive all their lives to understand. In better days, when we sat in that same place, I made up silly songs about her, impromptu odes sung to some of my favorite doo-wop numbers. She grinned at me when I sang, and her tail thumped when she heard her name embedded in a melody.

Now it was clear that she had ridden down in the elevator and had found the strength to walk to the terrace because this was where she wanted to be when the end came. We expected her to pass at any moment, but she held on for hours, raising her head from time to time to look out at this place she loved: the broad yard and the roses and the sky curving down to the sea.

This was not only a Saturday, but also the first day of an unusually long Fourth of July holiday, and we worried that Trixie might have another seizure later in the afternoon or evening, when we wouldn’t be able easily to get help. If it was not her fate to die suddenly, we could not let her suffer a prolonged passing. Shortly after one o’clock, I called Newport Hills Animal Hospital, and discovered that both Bruce Whitaker and Bill Lyle were off for the weekend; another veterinarian was covering the office. When I shared our situation with the receptionist, she told me that Bruce was at a tennis game and that she could reach him.

He called back within minutes. When I told him how Trixie had struggled for breath and described her current condition, he wanted to come to the house to see her rather than frighten her by having her brought to the office. Before one thirty, he arrived.

Trixie raised her head, grinned, and twitched her tail when I led Bruce out of the game room, onto the terrace. She submitted to examination with her usual grace. Bruce said she would probably die in the night or on Sunday at the latest. Although she was currently in no pain, she was weak, with low blood pressure and perhaps with internal bleeding.

“When it happens,” I asked, “will she be in pain?”