Bo, the Portuguese water dog that was President Obama’s first pet who loved playing in the presidential suites, died on Saturday.

On Instagram, Michelle Obama revealed that Bo, who was 12 years old, had cancer. President Barack Obama said the family had lost “a great friend and trusted companion.”

Bo “was a regular, loving presence in our lives for more than 10 years – happy to see us on our good days, our horrible days, and every day in between,” Mr. Obama said on Twitter.

He put up with all the chaos that came with living in the White House, had a big bark but no bite, loved to swim in the pool in the summer, and had great hair. He was calm and collected among kids.

In April 2009, Massachusetts Senator Edward M. Kennedy and his wife Victoria sent the first kids, Malia and Sasha Obama, a 6-month-old dog as a gift.

In honor of artist Bo Diddley and partly because one of their relatives had a cat with the same name, the children named the dog Bo. The dog quickly became the focus of media coverage around the nation.

The White House was free of pets for the first time in decades after President Donald J. Trump’s administration.

In January, President Biden resumed the routine with his two German shepherds, Champ and Major. Major was recently sent for training following multiple bite incidences.

Bo was well-known for entertaining the White House press corps while playing on the South Lawn, barking during news conferences, and receiving messages of sympathy from young folks all around the country.

A kid’s book about him is titled Bo, America’s Commander in Leash and was authored by Naren Aryal and Danny Moore. For a formal White House picture, he also sat with his tongue out.

In 2013, Sunny, a second Portuguese water dog, joined Bo in the White House after Mrs. Obama stated that Bo needed more interaction with other dogs.

Originally meant to be a buddy for Malia and Sasha, Bo turned out to signify much more to the Obamas, according to Mrs. Obama.

The dog entered their offices “like he owned the place, a ball clenched firmly in his teeth,” she claimed, describing him as a “continuous, soothing presence in our life.”

He allegedly attended both the pope’s visit and the traditional Easter egg roll on the South Lawn, according to her.

After Malia and Sasha departed for college, Bo helped the couple acclimate to life as empty nesters, according to Mrs. Obama in a post on Instagram signed “Michelle, Barack, Malia, Sasha, and Sunny.”

Bo was the happiest dog last year when everyone stayed at home due to the pandemic, according to what she wrote. “Everyone was back together under one roof, just like the day we bought him.”

With a father’s heavy heart and empathy, Obama again consoles grieving families

President Obama traveled to Orlando, Fla., for the latest round of mass consoling, days after a gunman killed 49 people and wounded 53 at a gay nightclub in the deadliest shooting in U.S. history.

ORLANDO, Fla. — The wrenching ritual has become all too familiar to President Obama.

His armored limousine deposits him at a nondescript building big enough to hold a large number of families whose loved ones have died in a mass shooting somewhere in America. Away from the news cameras that normally track his every interaction, he enters rooms thick with grief and the hushed voices of people in shock.

He grasps for words of sympathy, comfort and condolence and offers long, tight embraces that the mourners will remember far more vividly than his words.

Obama traveled here Thursday for the latest round of mass consoling, four days after a gunman killed 49 people and wounded 53 at a gay nightclub in the deadliest shooting in U.S. history.

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Accompanied by Vice President Joe Biden, the president entered the Amway Center, about two miles from the club, and spent roughly two hours talking privately to scores of families who lost sons, daughters, siblings and partners, trying to make sense of a tragedy and to offer the condolences of a nation still reeling.

“Their grief is beyond description,” Obama said after meeting with the mourners for two hours and laying bouquets of white flowers at a makeshift memorial nearby. He said he and Biden had held grieving parents and told them, “Our hearts are broken, too.”

The encounters, he said, underscored his determination to change the debate over gun restrictions that might have prevented the tragedy.

“Those who defend the easy accessibility of assault weapons should meet these families,” Obama said.

The trip was a moment for the president to play the somber official role of consoler in chief. It was also the setting for a deeply personal and private set of encounters in which Obama, better known for his cool and unruffled temperament, dispenses with the trappings of his office and becomes an emotional father identifying with parents who have lost children.

As Obama comforted the mourners, his critics in Washington were blaming him for Sunday’s tragedy. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., told reporters on Capitol Hill that Obama was “directly responsible” for the carnage because he had failed to thwart the rise of the Islamic State group. McCain later said in a statement that he was referring to Obama’s policy decisions, not Obama himself.

Obama has called visits like the one to Orlando among the most difficult duties he performs. Visiting with families who lost young children in the shooting rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in 2012, was the “hardest day of my presidency,” he said afterward.

“And I’ve had some hard days,” he said.

So one by one, the president grasps the mourners he encounters in tight embraces, according to people who have attended the sessions, relying on body language almost more than words to convey his support.

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“He hugged each one of us individually — and I mean hug, so that I was able to smell his cologne,” said Sharon Risher, 57, who lost her mother, Ethel Lance, and two cousins in the shooting in Charleston, S.C., last year, and met privately with Obama the next week. “It was not a little pat on the back. The intimacy of that hug is what I’ll always remember.”

Obama spends time with each family, listening to details mourners are eager to offer about their lost loved ones. It is at once intimate and awkward; he is aware of how disorienting it is for people to be meeting the president of the United States at the worst moment of their lives. Many of them forget they are talking to the president.

At a high school in Newtown in 2012, Mark Barden, whose 7-year-old son, Daniel, was among the 28 killed at Sandy Hook two days earlier, decided, in what he now calls a fog of shock and trauma, to lecture Obama on the importance of spending time with his children.

“He looked me in the eyes and said, ‘I’m coming from a recital right now,’” Barden said, adding that he now finds the episode “horrendously embarrassing.” But Obama could relate, he said.

“He was looking at this 100 percent as a father,” Barden said. “He feels it in his heart as a human being, and it transcends his role as the leader of our country.”

Obama does not come to these duties unprepared. Staff aides who have readied the meeting rooms with water, snacks and tissues brief him before each encounter about each person he is about to meet and who they lost. Joshua DuBois, a former special assistant who headed the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, recalls worrying about the toll the Newtown meetings were taking on the president.

“After each classroom, we would go back into those fluorescent hallways and walk through the names of the coming families, and then the president would dive back in, like a soldier returning to a tour of duty in a worthy but wearing war,” DuBois wrote in his book, “The President’s Devotional: The Daily Readings That Inspired President Obama.” “The staff did the preparation work, but the comfort and healing were all on President Obama.”