A Lass Unparallel’d After almost 15 years of giving my family unmixed and unreserved joy, our older dachshund, Katy-May, passed away over the weekend. She was my friend, sidekick — and, not infrequently, taskmaster — for the last third of her life, and my wife’s constant companion since she was a puppy. As is so often the case, the sadness is mostly for us, the ones who have a little sausage-shaped hole in our family, rather than for Katy, who had an excellent life and who, though elderly, spent her last years mostly undiminished except for a few short days at the very end. She was still going up and down stairs on her own — a sign of real vigor in a creature who was by the conventional measure about 98 in human years and who possessed legs that were about four inches long. Katy traveled the world, romping through Central Park in her early Upper West Side days, trotting along the boulevards of Paris and the beaches of California and Costa Rica, hiking in the Swiss Alps and the Rockies, a natural tourist and happy to go wherever life took her, on airplanes or trains or boats. On a trip to Aspen, we made a point of hiking up Smuggler’s Mountain every day, which Katy was happy to do — until she wasn’t, at which point she would sit down, definitely, and no amount of cajoling or persuasion or leash-tugging could convince her to take another step. Then she would go into the backpack, poking her head out at times or curling up and going to sleep, napping being her second-favorite activity, behind breakfasting. Her gift for marathon napping was such that she could make the whole of an international flight unnoticed by her fellow passengers. The first few minutes of a car ride always made her a little nervous, but, once she had settled in, a sunny spot in the passenger’s seat (or in the passenger’s lap) contented her very well, as did the necessary closeness of automobile travel. I don’t know how many times she crossed the country, but it was more than a few. Her last long road trip was to pick up our other dachshund, Pancake, whom Katy approached in her characteristic way with strangers — initially with skepticism bordering on positive hostility and then settling into aristocratic indifference — until it became clear that the puppy was part of the family, after which she taught the younger dog about important things such as yogurt, pushing open the back door, and the all-important 5 a.m. reveille. It was clear to me that, from her point of view, I filled two roles in Katy’s life: leader of the pack and full-time live-in butler. If she saw any contradiction or incompatibility in those roles, she never indicated it. She preferred to take her morning nap in sunny spots and, if the sun moved into an inconvenient position, she would nudge me and complain about it, apparently believing that I had the power to move the sun. If I could, I would have. It is easy to make too much of the love we have for dogs. But it is also easy to make too little of it. The Stoics believed that the world has an ineffable and incomprehensible perfection in it, and that most human unhappiness comes from our inability to perceive — or to accept — the necessities of that perfection. Christians, in a similar way, believe that God has a plan for us, individually and together, and that we do well to depend on Providence when the complexity and subtlety of the divine plan and its requirements are beyond what we can know. I take it as a token of His omnipotence that the Architect of Universes can put a full measure of His grace and goodness into small, simple, short-lived things. I am not saying Katy never misused a rug, which she most certainly did, or that she was particularly generous when it came to sharing treats, which she most certainly was not, but what she was, she was a perfect example of. I cannot think of any way in which she could have been improved. Good dogs are good to us, but what really attaches them to our hearts is that they give us an opportunity to be good to them, to care for something innocent whose uncomplicated needs we can meet in an uncomplicated way. Katy never lacked for a warm, soft place to snooze, was never hungry, never afraid, never lonely. (Never legitimately hungry; she always thought she was hungry.) Beyond the occasional bit of invasive grooming or a trip to the dentist, she never really suffered any stress or anxiety. People were instinctively good to her: Once, when we had to board her for three weeks during a trip we could not bring her on, one of the people who ran the kennel took her home at night to give her a little extra attention and comfort — she was that kind of dog, and she knew it. Sometimes, when she was let off her leash for a romp and roll in some lovely green place, she would glance over her shoulder with a little look of astonishment and gratitude, as though to say: “For me?” Yes, I like to think that it was. Kevin D. Williamsom National Review journalist https://www.nationalreview.com/author/kevin-d-williamson/