Sharon and I get home from work at different times and we often leave notes for each other on the kitchen counter.

Often these notes are about what we’re going to have for dinner or what the dogs have been up to. Here, I swear, was how one of them ended not long ago: “Zoe didn’t eat breakfast. She threw up thumb of oven mitt. Love, Sharon.”

Zoe, our 5-year-old greyhound-beagle mix who came to live with us about six months ago, is afraid of thunder and had had a storm-related freak-out the day before. Sharon and I had been away from home at the time and Zoe was so discombobulated that she had taken an oven mitt from the counter by the stove and eaten the thumb. Predictably, this do-it-yourself dog roughage didn’t stay down, and I’d have to say that Sharon’s chronicling of this canine digestive event made for one of my favorite kitchen counter notes of all time.

Some of our counter notes have been sad over the past year or so, because it has been a period of dog transition for us. Since last fall, both of our terrier mixes, Sugar and Stella, reached the point where the illnesses of old age had sapped their lives of pleasure, and we made the difficult decisions, a few months apart, to humanely end their lives. During that time of sickness and decline, the notes tended to deal with what kind of day our elderly dogs were having.

We’ve gone through the end-of-life process with a few pets now over the years, and it never gets easier. When it comes to the end, knowing you are doing the kind thing helps—but it still hurts to let a creature who has been such a part of your life go.

I’ve sometimes heard people who have just lost a beloved pet say that they will never get another one. The lifespans of dogs and cats are such that most of us will outlive a series of them in our lives, and—stop me if I’ve made this point before, possibly in the previous paragraph—losing a beloved pet hurts.

Here’s the practical advice I give to those of you who have a dog and you’re concerned about the pain of loss. Get another one. Now. A vice dog, a backup dog, a dog who will be there when you most need a dog.

And when the time comes, as it will, to help one of them go from this side of the veil to the next, take it from me: there is no function a pet can provide that is more valuable than to greet you at the door after you’ve made the long drive home from the vet’s office. You don’t need a new dog that day, you need a dog you know and who knows you.

Which brings me, again, to the pair of hounds Sharon and I are left with: Jake, the three-legged beagle, and Zoe, the hound mix. Jake came to us from a rescue organization, Zoe from a shelter. As Sharon pointed out one night when they were curled up asleep and lovable, they had both been abandoned—thrown away—by previous families. Although things have turned out well for them—the truth is they’ve pretty much won the Dog Lottery—it is sad to think of all the dogs who are just as loving and for whom things don’t turn out so well.

Jake and Zoe are quite a pair of goofballs. We open the back door and they charge insanely out into the yard, completely convinced that this is the one time out of the thousands they’ve done this that they are going to teach one of those pesky squirrels or rabbits a lesson. Lately they’ve even been making life miserable for, of all things, a lizard which has taken up residence under the foundation at the corner of the garage.

After a few minutes of sniffing around, barking, and accomplishing pretty much nothing hunting-wise, they come back with their tongues lolling in big happy grins. Foiled again! But they don’t seem to care. Jake and Zoe, like most dogs, provide vivid examples of what the exuberance of life looks like.

Life lessons from hounds on a hot summer afternoon.

And if a storm comes up later, here’s another life lesson: I’m going to make sure the new oven mitt is out of reach.