Of all the animals in the world, only the dog has chosen to share his life with man, and while the dog may have benefited from the arrangement, man has gotten the much better end of the deal.

With one notable exception: the dog mercifully has no foreknowledge of his own mortality.

Even more mercifully he has no knowledge that he and the person he loves won't be together forever.

Man, for all the gifts he has been given, for all his cleverness and adaptability, his ingenuity and imagination, has been cursed with the knowledge of his own mortality and, perhaps even more painful, the knowledge that his best friend will leave him behind.

To Absent Friends is a collection of stories of dogs told by those they left behind.

Most of the dogs in these stories were good dogs; some were what we may politely describe as eccentric, some were mischievous, some were just plain bad, but all were loved, and all are missed.