I am so grateful for all the support - I am so new here, and you have all been so overwhelmingly kind. It’s morning here in Hong Kong, still sunny before the rainy season descends upon us, and the beautiful ToLo harbour and mountains that we overlook from our apartment are sunlit, with a black kite soaring over the sparkly water. There is a small, white hole in our lives, a small white dog missing from our home. Grief is such a strange thing - lurching from emotion to emotion, not just each day, or each hour, but sometimes within each minute: “I miss my little dog” to “Did I do the right thing?” to “Should I have done something different?” to “I couldn’t have done anything different” to “I miss my little dog”; uncontrollable tears one moment at memories that hurt so much, then memories that provoke joy again, despite the pain. Round and round. C.S Lewis said, in “A Grief Observed” that ‘grief is so like fear’; I’ve never found that to be the case, in too many grievings now. For me, I’ve always found that it has been so exhausting. I feel so terribly tired, alongside the terrible sadness and sense of loss. I’m so grateful still to have Cuba, my other small companion; Thoreau said that the wonderful thing about sharing our lives with an animal is that, when you go out and come back home again, they have ‘stirred the dead air in the room’. Our dead air, and our hearts, are still stirred by our little Havanese.