my office recently and happened upon a notepad listing every funeral I’ve ever done. I conducted my first funeral at the age of 22, for my landlord’s dog, Laddie. My landlord was a mortician who had spent decades burying his friends in the small town where we lived, but was too grief-stricken to inter his own dog, so prevailed upon me to dig its grave in his garden. Then he asked me, rather shyly, if I might say a few words. I had never liked the dog, who had bitt en me twice in the short years of our association. But I spoke of the dog’s nobility as if he were Rin Tin Tin, and I mentioned how