BARBARA WALSH: “They kept saying things to me, like, you know, Emma, who loves Sammy, Sammy was her best buddy, she was…’Can he come back?’ And, and you know, ‘Where did he go?’ And Nora, who was younger, and, you know, she would look up in the sky and say ‘Sammy you come down here.’ She’s like, ‘He’s bein’ a bad dog.’ She was scolding him, and then she’d say ‘If Daddy gets a really">really tall ladder maybe he can go get Sammy.’ And so while they spoke I wrote these things.”

For six years Barbara Walsh wrote and rewrote, and rewrote again. She read her words to groups in Maine - the state where she lives with her family. Veterinarians, teachers, parents and children all cried when they heard her read about Sammy’s death. And they loved the book, especially the children -- from the early versions to the final work. They said it was needed. It was

real

. Crying, they said, was OK. It was part of life.

(MUSIC)

Ms. Walsh says feeling sad about the death of a pet is “a natural, inevitable process.” She says “if you feel grief, you must have at one time felt love, and that love needs to be honored and remembered.”

But publishing companies did not want to publish her book. Their agents felt it was too sad. They said people would not buy it.

BARBARA WALSH: “The agents weren’t willing to take a chance on it. And I, I bet they’re sad they didn’t now.”