Over the past two days I’ve learned about the loss of two dogs that have had a significant impact on my life. The first is Bishop, a Schipperke that originally belonged to my in-laws and later became a hearing dog for another individual. Bishop was quite a dog. I think the Wikipedia article about Schipperke’s sums him up perfectly: “They are small in size, but big in character.” That totally describes Bishop. Why did he impact my life? Simple. He lived with my wife and me for more than 18 months during a break in his career as a hearing dog. That story itself is another blog entry, or maybe even a podcast episode. Bishop died this weekend at the age of 14.

The other dog was a Labrador Retriever named Eva, who was the mother of Holly, the dog that my wife and I were training to be a service dog, that ultimately ended up living on our friend’s farm. Eva apparently died suddenly of something like a ruptured brain aneurysm. She died within a matter of minutes. She was young — five or six years old if I recall correctly. She left us way to early.

I have pictures of both Eva and Bishop on print film somewhere. I’m going to try and scan them and put them up in my gallery or in the blog here sometime this week.

–Pete