At 14, this big dog has now surpassed his life expectancy, but he is not the oldest dog in our house. We are also the custodians of my late mother’s ancient miniature dachshund, Emma, who is seven months older. She obliterated any thought of vet-bill caps in her first three months under our care. Emma has survived countless trips to the emergency clinic because she is the most accomplished food thief her canny breed has ever produced. She dragged an entire pound of dark chocolate bonbons under the guest bed and ate them before anyone noticed a lone fluted paper wrapper in the middle of the floor and wondered where it had come from. Rummaging through visitors’ purses, she has consumed whole packages of gum, pouches of dusty Tums and, once, a zip-lock bag full of prescription medicine.

There’s no room here to tell the whole story of the time Emma ate a tray of rat poison at a rented fishing cabin on Kentucky Lake, but it involves a manic drive down a twisting highway as the whole family peered through the trees for a sign of any kind of store that might sell hydrogen peroxide. You don’t know the real value of the human community if you’ve never poured hydrogen peroxide down an eight-pound dog’s throat in the parking lot of a Family Dollar store with half a dozen rural Kentuckians offering advice. Let me tell you, country people know what to do when a dog eats rat poison.

That bottle of hydrogen peroxide cost 78 cents, but the three months of professional treatment that followed made a trip to the emergency vet look like a trip to the dollar store.

Other people make health care choices for their pets that we could not afford for Clark and Emma, but we will always give them anything that’s within our power to give. Clark, our children’s canine sibling, and Emma, who gave my grieving mother a reason to get out of bed every morning after my father died — these dogs are our family.

Clark is now under the care of a young hospice vet. On his first visit — a terrible day two weeks ago when suddenly Clark could no longer stand up — the vet worked a miracle. Now on a new combination of medications, Clark is wagging his tail again and begging to be taken on walks. But time is still time, and always unfolding. On the hospice vet’s next visit, he will most likely be coming to help us say goodbye.

Clark understands that he is old and weak and vulnerable, and it’s hard now to leave him alone with his fears. I watch sometimes from the next room when my husband leaves the house and Clark thinks he has been abandoned. Standing next to the door, he folds himself up, lowering his hind quarters gradually, bit by bit, until his aching haunches touch the floor. He slides his front feet forward, slowly, slowly, and he is down.

A moan begins in the back of his throat, lower pitched than a whine, higher than a groan, and grows. His head tips back. His eyes close. The moan escapes in a rush of vowels, louder and louder and louder, and now he is howling. It’s the sound he made in his youth whenever he heard a siren passing on the big road at the edge of the neighborhood, but he can’t hear that far any more.