Beautiful Old Dogs: A Loving Tribute to Our Senior Best FriendsEdited by David TabatskyPhotographs by Garry GrossSt. Martin's Press, 2013 The 44 lovingly detailed photos of senior dogs by the renowned late photographer Garry Gross are of course the main reason to buy Beautiful Old Dogs. The 41 essays, excerpts, and poems that make up the written portion of the book - done by contributors from Marlo Thomas to Anna Quindlen to Dean Koontz to Doris Day - mostly register somewhere in the narrow wavelength between treacle and tripe, as you might expect from a book about old dogs. But there are recurring bits of truth here as well, the knuckle-bruising truths that are well known to anybody who's ever accompanied a dog into old age. These are essays and excerpts about failing health, failing senses, irreparable losses, final surrender of trying, and then the end. Writer Susan Seligson sums it up about as well as it can be summed up:

The last years and months we share with our geriatric dogs are among the most bittersweet times in a dog lover's life. We know, from the moment we choose these guys as puppies or meet their limpid stares at the animal shelter, that our hearts will be torn apart some day. What makes it so much worse is that the older they get, the sweeter they get, and when they reach absolute critical sweetness - when you simply cannot love them any more than you already do - they grow completely exhausted and die.

Her main contention there is the important thing to remember when reading through the kitsch and the heavenly "signs" and all the rest in many of these pieces: if owners do their job right, their dogs slowly, gently pass through a kind of refiner's fire that purges their lungings and their cluelessness and even their cravings and makes them creatures of pure, gentle gratitude and affection. Any dog owner who's ever managed to get their beloved friend safely to that stage will immediately nod in recognition of what Seligson is talking about: they reach an "absolute critical sweetness" in which the only thing left they can do with your heart is break it wide open.Gross' photos uncannily capture what those last months and years can be like, the eerie combination of serenity and worry on the faces of old dogs who've become comfortably assured in their owners' care but who simultaneously feel they themselves aren't as capable as they once were. Dogs know just as well as humans do when they've grown old and infirm, and it background-frightens them just as much as it frightens humans. That background fear is clearly visible in the eyes of most of Gross' subjects, and the most important duty of any human caretaker in those final years is to do everything possible to calm that fear.Hence the particularly sharp hatred deserved by the human caretakers who decide that those old age infirmities are good enough reason to dump their pets off at the nearest animal shelter; the fear of that last and most callous betrayal hovers around many of the entries in Beautiful Old Dogs, which also contains an appendix of organizations devoted to helping discuss, adopt, and rescue senior dogs. Those listings are vitally useful - although it's unlikely that anybody buying and reading this book will need them. No, this book is for those best of humans who've already opted to love old dogs - the human caretakers who've already resigned themselves to the aches and pains, the weak legs, the leaky bladders, the heartbreaking moments of confusion, and the even more heartbreaking moments of transcendent joy. Those final months and years are the price such caretakers pay for having laughed so hard at the rock-climbing, the lawn-digging, the furniture-chewing, the stocking-stealing, the face-licking and the lap-snuggling that filled every day when exuberance seemed like it would never end.The fact that this book's editors and contributors so strongly advocate paying that price - who, in fact, volunteer to pay it again and again - speaks quietly but quite brightly in mankind's favor.