The lesson of loss The weekend after Christmas, we were visiting my brother and sisterin- law in their suburban Boston home. Posey and Bee had made the trip with us, but our grown-up son Xerxes stayed home so he could hang out with friends who were home from college, as well as watch after the house and the pets.

Saturday night, we had just finished supper when he called. Our Sheltie Sassy had gotten out, and he couldn’t find her. Now, it has happened before that the drafty front door of our mid-1800s house has blown open, and our dogs have taken themselves on a little walk. But they’re confirmed homebodies, so I fully expected her to show up on the doorstep any minute.

An hour later, he called again. A neighbor found Sassy. She had been hit by a car. She was gone.

Pets add so much to the life of a family. When I was growing up, we always had pets. My very earliest memories are of crawling across the kitchen floor with our marmalade tabby cat, inspecting the world from our shared vantage point.

We always had at least one dog and a couple cats to care for. As a parent, I’ve always thought it was important for my children to have pets.

Pets teach responsibility in a way that nothing else can, with the possible exception of children. They need you. They depend on you. They don’t eat if you don’t feed them. (Unless they can find their way into a tasty trash bag, that is.) And to be honest, pets can be a pain. They wake you up early with requests for food or walks or trips outdoors. They bark at menacing things such as chipmunks, passing cyclists and falling leaves and snow.

They scratch the furniture, pee on the carpet and try to smell your boss’ backside when you throw that promotion- seeking dinner party.

If there is any lesson worth teaching your children - or learning yourself - it’s the rich value of caring for something that does not have the capacity to either appreciate or reciprocate that care. It’s called altruism, unconditional love (or if you’re not a pet person) the psychosis of animal lovers. At the same time that pets teach altruism, they also teach trust. So many of the messages we give our children go against the notion of trust as a virtue. We teach them to be wary of strangers. We teach them to protect themselves from bullies. We teach them to compete with their peers. In our house, we teach them an active mistrust of advertising and media sales pitches.

But trust is also a virtue.

Trust is essential for healthy relationships be-tween friends, spouses and families. Parents can teach trust by being trustworthy, but throwing a dog into the mix can reinforce the idea that trusting someone is okay.

Don’t try to teach your children trust with a pet cat.

Cats don’t trust their people - they tolerate them.

But the most important thing a pet can teach a child is also the most difficult lesson to watch a child learn. Loss. Grief. Mortality. Posey and Bee have an intellectual knowledge of loss of a loved one. They’ve begun to try to connect family members, so they understand that their dad’s father - their grandfather - died before they had a chance to know him. And they know from photographs what my mother looked like, and also that she died.

Bee understands death first and foremost as a union with God. ``Grandma Mary is with God,’’ she will tell me. I agree with her because I think that’s not a bad way to understand death.

Posey is 3, so death seems - like everything else - something temporary and malleable. Like the rule against standing on top of the table.

When we got home from Boston, we gathered the girls in the den, along with Xerxes, and told them that we had some sad news. ``Sassy got out and she was hit by a car and she died,’’ we told them.

They repeated those words, but it was unclear just how well they understood the meaning.

We buried Sassy in the backyard, just next to a young lilac tree. Afterward, we stood around her grave and recounted the things about her that made us happy and made us laugh. We expressed our gratitude for the time we were able to spend with her. We laughed about the way she loved apples, and would even root through a grocery bag and steal one if she got the chance.

We remembered the way she tried in all her nervous, instinctively herding, utterly maternal way to take care of all of us.

We remembered the way she would try to lick your feet if she thought you were sad. Creepy, yes, but unbelievably sweet and kind.

Since then, Posey and Bee have been processing the loss in different ways. Posey has been learning the basics of loss, and will tell me a couple times a day that Sassy died from a car and that we miss her. Posey has expressed a 5-year-old’s grief, talking about how she wishes it had not happened. They have not broken down in tears, being maybe too young or not quite attached enough to what was, undeniably, a rather neurotic dog.

But they are experiencing this loss, this grief, this feeling that there is someone missing from our home - someone who cannot be replaced.

Elizabeth Trever Buchinger misses her dog. You can connect with her by emailing VillageWordsmith@gmail. com or visiting my website.