Jennifer Finney Boylan, "Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs"

In the years since then, I have come to understand that this is exactly what happens: you get used to a certain way of being in the world and then it changes. The people you love move away, or die, or something else happens -- sometimes you just fall out of the habit of friendship, and the friend who you once saw almost every day becomes someone you track distantly -- through Facebook, or Christmas cards, or not at all. I've had children of my own who've grown and moved away, and now I understand that feeling those pangs of distance and change is far more normal than any reliable routine. But in November 1979, this was all new territory. Sometimes the passage of time feels terribly personal, as if mortality is something they came up with just to hurt your feelings.