Friend,
Please accept my condolences. It is a heart-break when we must let a dog family member go. All of us who have shared this life with a dog know your sense of loss. Remember, life is way too short to live without a dog. Take time to grieve but remember the most profound statement of what your dog meant to you is recognizing that life without one is unacceptable, and get another.
I had to give my pal, Ollie, back to God last year this time after 12 1/2 years together. But I had come to realize that I was prolonging his suffering on order to postpone mine. He deserved better than that. But I cried like a baby as he got the needle and the last words he heard as he slipped into sleep were "I will always love you".
As it turned out, the week that I first noticed the symptoms that led several weeks later to a diagnosis of terminal bladder cancer, a litter of buhund puppies was born. Seven weeks later I visited that litter and one, a male, just could not get enough of me. I wrote the check. A week later I brought Dusty home, turning my life totally up-side-down. God works in mysterious ways!
Life is too short to live without a dog.
JMC