I’m losing my best friend, my Murry Girl. Today is her last day.

Our friendship goes back, starting when we found her on Highway 16 years ago. Mike and I were driving home from a weekend family visit, listening to a book on tape and talking intermittently when — just for an instant — everything was quiet enough to hear a small bark through our slightly lowered car window. I turned to see this little brown dog trying to stand up.

Mike turned the car around and we drove back. She allowed me to pick her up. Since there was no house close by and she was injured, we took her home. Our dog, Gus, welcomed her without a second thought.

Dr. Jim Moore at Apple Tree Cove Animal Hospital was a godsend, as was PAWS of Bainbridge. They helped us get her mended at a cost we could actually afford.

Murry’s left hip ball had been shattered and her right femur broken by some unknowable rear-ender. What a sight she was afterward — shaved from her tail, down her thighs and forward to the ribs with a white leg cast.

Dr. Moore judged her to be about five months old and of no particular breed. In fact, he said, you could go to any Third World country and find dogs that looked just like her — brindled out. We’ve considered a coyote may also be on one limb of her family tree.

I visited Murry at the vet’s clinic postsurgery. I sat on the floor in the closed off room of cages filled with animals recuperating from their own traumas and gently sang.

My singing voice is not one I readily subject others to, but the sound seemed to ease Murry and her fellow patients — or perhaps they were being politely silent in their amusement. I have no idea what the veterinary techs thought as I sat outside her cage singing Marlene Dietrich’s “Falling in Love Again (Can’t Help It)” over and over, using my own rhyming words for the crowd’s entertainment.

Hey, love isn’t always as pretty as it is in the movies.

Thanks to Dr. Moore, she mended very well after a few months, gained another 20 pounds and ended up matching the stature of Gus, with whom she could almost outrun.

Murry was an incredible comfort. She was there in bed with us every night. She was there through the ups and downs of life — through cancer treatments, rides to ICU visits, through good and bad financial times, through book-buying trips or vacations to the beach. She was there when the world felt cold. She understood me completely, without need for words.

Murry is one month shy of 17 years. She outlasted old Gus, our “almost” Portuguese water dog adopted from the Humane Society; he died at 14 years. And she outlasted our gentle giant Sam, our “just-about” Greater Swiss mountain dog left by our mailbox when not yet fully weaned; Sam died at age 8 years.

Her sole canine survivor will be Hanner B., our “more-or-less” white shepherd, found in a litter along our road in January seven  years ago at 3 months of age.

Murry’s trying to sleep next to me at my desk while I tap away at keys, her head on a pillow, a shawl laid over her. I’ve given her extra pain meds now as palliative care, per the direction of Dr. Julia Atwood, our local vet who does house/barn calls. She has attended some of our other end-stage animals over the years.

It’s part of life, dying. But when it happens to someone like Murry, it somehow feels like payback time, paying back for all she’s given, for all the blessings.

This evening, Dr. Atwood will give her a little shave on her front leg in order to insert the needle that will bring the drugs to her small body to put her to sleep, for the last time. No more pain for Murry.

How do you say goodbye to such a loved one who’s given so much in her short life? I say thank you, thank you, thank you. And hope to see you again.

— Marylin Olds is an opinion columnist who appreciates emails at marylin.olds@gmail.com, as well as letters to the editor. Thanks to Joe Cook for helping with M’s grave preparation.