By Marjorie Blain Parker
Jasper the golden retriever has cancer that can't be cured, so his family gives him one last good day before Dad drives him to the vet to be put down.
Riley wakes up and it's Jasper's Day, and everyone in the house knows what that means. Jasper is old, he has cancer, he's in pain, and the family has decided: today is the day. So they make it a good one. Jasper gets a special breakfast, the kind a dog is never allowed. They take him to the park. They drive out to Grandma's so he can see her and her dog one more time, and there's cake, and photographs, and Jasper lies in the sun. It's shaped like a birthday, and that's the ache of it, because everyone at the party knows how the party ends. Then they come home, Dad puts Jasper in the car and drives to the vet, and Riley and his mother stay behind. Riley says goodbye to his dog in the driveway and cries. Later they bury Jasper in the back yard, wrapped in his blanket. The last thing Riley does is make a collage of the day's photographs, and the last thing he tells us is that it was the hardest day of his life.
If your family is facing this, there's nothing else like it in print, and it may be the most useful book you read all month. It gives your child a picture of the day before they have to live it: that they get to say goodbye, that there's the park and the cake first, that the grown-ups have already thought it through, that a day can be a happy one and a terrible one at the same time. A child told only 'we're taking Jasper to the vet on Saturday' fills that silence with something far worse than what's here. And the book doesn't pretend it away. Someone explains the shot to Riley in plain words, and then, at the end, gives him a job — the photographs — so his hands have something to do.