The one habit my brother Chris could never kick was cigarettes. I admonished him one day, near the end of his too-short life, to stop smoking. He knew he was dying, neither of cancer nor emphysema, and he replied with a raised eyebrow and his dark Irish wit, “It’s not gonna kill me.”

I thought of that moment as I was trying to get our beloved dog, Aengus, to eat last week. His usual food no longer appealed to him. I took to poaching chicken with a little thyme and chopping it in the food processor. For a while, he liked it. But in his last week, even that was refused.

Finally, on the day before he died, I remembered how he used to love to search out pieces of bread the neighbors left for birds. I would pull him away, afraid of upsetting his stomach. He was hospitalized twice as a young dog, once after eating fat that had been discarded, and again after a box of holiday chocolates went missing. Now, I looked at the sandwich roll on the kitchen counter and thought, “It’s not gonna kill him.” He took the soft roll gratefully, looking up at me with those deep brown eyes. “Oxytocin eyes” we called them, after reading an article about the effect dog’s eyes have on the human brain, stimulating a chemical that produces feelings of well-being.

Aengus was our dog for all of his 11 years. We brought him home at eight weeks. Now, it seems he was always with us. He took care of me as much as I took care of him. The summer we got him was the first summer both of our children were away at the same time. I woke up one day in our little bungalow near Monticello and thought, “I need a dog.” To my surprise, my husband agreed readily. Serendipitously, a friend arrived that afternoon exclaiming about a litter of Schnauzer puppies in Port Jervis. That weekend, we brought Aengus home. He was the runt of the litter and darker than his siblings, but he was the one who sank into my breast when I held him. He was the one.

He got me out in the world after a few years I spent hunkered down after 9/11. We went for long walks by the Hudson River, past the battered shell of the World Trade Center, down to the Battery and back to our old neighborhood in Lower Manhattan. Many times we explored Central Park together, arriving well before the 9 a.m. off-leash curfew to play with the uptown dogs on the hill behind the Wollman rink. Then, he loved to chase and tumble and run. Later, when we moved to Brooklyn, he ran in Mount Prospect Park with a burgeoning population of Schnauzers, which he seemed to prefer to other breeds. He liked to bark as much as or more than to play in recent times. He was known as the “referee” for his tendency to monitor others’ playtime.

In Narrowsburg, we walked the Flats every morning greeting friend and foe alike. Maggie, his first friend in the neighborhood until her sister Pearl arrived, and Corky, who could hear us coming a block away and barked incessantly until we passed, and Gigi, the little Yorkie who once loved to run with him on the riverbank chasing sticks but now only growled at his approach, and Jake and Riley, local Schnauzers who barked ceaselessly when Aengus was near but accepted him in their yard.

Knowing his end was near with no hope for a treatment or cure, we made arrangements for a vet to come and put him down at home. It was not so much a hard decision as painful one. He was unable to walk or eat, could only rest his swollen belly on the cool porch floor, and his breathing was shallow and labored. A Shakespeare play I am studying gave me the instruction I required. “’Tis far better to sleep, at peace, in love/Than stretched upon this tortured rack of life.” I’m sure my brother would have agreed.