In general, I don’t mind getting older. I feel like I get a little smarter — or, if not that, wiser — every year. Consequently, I feel little real trepidation about closing in on 40 next March. There is, however, something really awful about this particular time.

Most of my friends are pet people. Lots of them didn’t get their own animals until they left the chaos of college, so put the average puppy or kitty adoption date at around age 22.

Now, not quite 20 years later, they’re all dying.

In the last year or so, I’ve seen an inordinate number of these faithful companions pass away. Joy’s Katya was probably first, but Frazer’s 20-year-old cat Christine passed just this summer, and then dear Bob, and Laura Sneed’s 19-year-old Tigger slipped away just yesterday.

At lunch, just now, I got an another awful email. In 1994, when I was making friends with the Rice crowd and, eventually, moving over here from Tuscaloosa, one of the Rice folks was also moving back after a grad degree at Georgia. Jamie had a young dachshund named Annie who was smart as a whip and completely delightful. She was ever-present at social events starting even before I actually moved here, and remained so until the late 20s happened and people got old and less drunk and, in some cases, moved away to Austin or the Woodlands.

Annie’s been having a hard time, the mail said. She was hurting a lot, it said. So today she had bacon and roast beef for breakfast, and then they went to the vet to say goodbye.

I haven’t seen Annie in years, and I know this is hitting me harder than it should precisely because it’s so close to the loss of Bob, but it sure seems like there’s been a bit of an epidemic of this lately, and I for one am not at all pleased about it.

Dear science: Please make longer-lived pets. KTHXBI.

And cheers to our forever-loved four-legged friends. They are, to a person, much better people than we are. Hug ’em if you got ’em. It turns out 20 years happens way faster than you realize.