This worries me. There's a dog prominently featured in my novel, and someone does kill it. But the whole point of that scene is that one of my two main characters thinks of the dog as a stand-in for his daughter who was killed (the entire book is about the aftermath of his daughter's death), and so when the dog dies he performs a ritual to resurrect it, killing himself in the process. The point is that he dies happily having saved the dog (that's not the end of the novel, btw. He isn't gone completely, and anyway he's only one of two main characters).

The problem I have now is that there are about twenty pages between the moment the dog is killed and the moment it's revealed that she's alive again. I'm worried I'll lose a lot of readers in those twenty pages.