Traveling is a skill, one you have to develop over time. It teaches you a lot about yourself and constantly pushes you beyond the edges of your comfort zone. There’s so much unknown, and you have to learn to roll with it—to stay calm, think clearly, and solve problems as they come. But if you keep an open mind and stay attentive, you start to see that every place has something to teach you—about the world, yes, but also about yourself, and about the many people who call this planet home.

It’s impossible to name all the ways pets touch our lives. Even the term ‘pet’ as it’s defined in most dictionaries seems too unremarkable a word to fully capture the relationship that many of us have with our fur babies. Pets, in many regards, come to know us in the most genuine sense. They see all we are behind the scenes of life, when the doors are closed and the shades drawn. But how do we navigate the tide of grief that comes when our time together inevitably ends?