Ella Fitzgerald plays from an old CD in a secret hobbit hole in the foggy autumn hills of San Francisco. Leo, a one month old baby asleep, stirs on Auntie Snelly. Quiet, calm, grief is in the scented air. Grief drools in the cold fog clamoring over the hills, stumbling on boxes of people nestled on the slope. Stillness is in the eyes. It touches the blue sky, hidden behind the blanket of low cloud cover.  Cold. The end of summer. The start of fall. Sadness. Sadness drenching the air like the thick fog. Sadness scraping its bones across dirty streets that reek of hot pasta and human piss. There’s the aura of a vibrant presence here. It’s already fading to a ghost in our hearts. The earnest purity of a friend that you can’t let down.  When we care for beings that can’t care for themselves, it grows our hearts. There is something special in a relationship that traverses boundaries of language, intelligence and even objective world we call reality. Furry animals other than us don’t see a world of this and that. They don’t autocomplete story of the chicken that crossed the road.  Life, even for this advanced human species, is a cycle of endless suffering. We’re doomed to repeat our mistakes, and maybe worse, we are doomed to believe we are above them. This is the microcosm we find in the animals we care for. We see their whole existence as a playground we made for them. We have rules, training, leads, and halters; all to keep them safe. And yet, we cannot. We cannot keep our dear little friends safe.  Fate, time, sickness, chance, the name is not important, “it” grabs them and yanks them from our arms. No warning of the quickening. A skeletal hand reaches from the other place, and drags our friends from our lives. Like lightening without thunder, they are gone before we see them going. What we stacked on this little thing comes toppling down then. Not so fragile, it would seem, if the bond we shared could hold up a whole heart. It could even hold up a whole life, one of shared struggle.  Is it true then, that this is just a fiction we make? Do we simply imbue meaning to a beast that works on social cues to earn its bits and kibble? Are these feelings just projections of our shattered  psyche, that we protect by hiding in these furry faces? Or could it be an even deeper, sadder truth?  There is no distance between the hand that feeds and the muzzle that eats. We are in the same ecosystem, in the same houses, in the same universe; we are made of the same stuff.  Though we seem to be the melancholy demi-gods of many poor species, we are not the protectors of life we would hope to be. We, with all our power, are sloppy gods. Our sweet subjects are at our mercy, and more faithful than even the most itinerant of the righteous.  We love, but we are clumsy. We are heavy handed and flawed. We bite back in our own way when we are bitten. We are wrathful titans when when we feel scorned. How proud are we to think our power over life extends to the spirit of the animals we keep?  No. The relationship between us, the keepers, and them, our cross-species companions is not simply a calculated salve for our loneliness. It is a reminder that we couldn’t be alone if we tried. These little creatures are a reflection of what we are. They are us as much as we think we control them. In many ways, they are better at being human than we are.  In this way, it is not a self-serving para-social psychodrama. That implies much more license than we actually have. The universe sends a being for us to develop, nurture and guide. In return, the being develops, nurtures and guides us to be more like them: kinder and more pure.  It is a dignified relationship grown from our shared understanding of what we truly are, deep down inside.  Their innocent resilience and their love without restraint is what we build our hearts on. That is what falls down when they leave, always too soon.