The hospital room was quiet and dim, lit only by the soft glow of monitors and the fading rhythm of a heart—steady, then slowing, then slipping away.
In the bed lay an 82-year-old man, his breathing thin, his skin delicate as paper. The cancer had spread too far. Treatment was over. The doctors said he had hours, maybe a day.
But what weighed on him wasn’t death. It was the thought of leaving behind the one soul who had never left him.
Every morning, while the nurse adjusted his IV or straightened the sheets, he would glance toward the window and murmur, “Ritchie… where are you, boy?”
Ritchie was his dog—a scruffy, aging mutt with more gray than brown left in his fur. Fifteen years earlier, the man had found him shivering by the roadside and taken him home. They’d been inseparable ever since. Together, they’d buried a wife, mourned a son, and outlived nearly everyone they loved. Ritchie had become his shadow, his comfort, his reason to get up each day.
