My dog has cancer

It's okay if you don't want to read this one <3

My dog has cancer. Inoperable, incurable cancer. There, I did it, I ripped the band-aid off. That’s where I’ve been. In doggie chemo. Which sucks.

Grief is so weird, and it’s even weirder when it comes at the wrong time. It’s not time yet, for the grief, but I’m choking on tears and she’s staring at me and I can’t help but think Well, at least, when it’s the end, she won’t be surprised if I can’t stop crying.

It is so brutal and so painful and I don’t blame you if you stopped reading a million sentences ago because I don’t want to write about this and I don’t want you to hear it because I don’t want it to exist.

I’m a writer, and I have this place to write, and I don’t want to write. Not about my own life. I’ve been tearing through a screenplay about somebody else, somebody who can actually control and defeat their demons, somebody who can, in the span of only 90 pages, go from fuck up to Mr. Fix It. Isn’t that why we love movies and TV? They make us feel like we can control our lives, like if we’re heroes, if we get up and wipe our dirt-stained faces enough times after getting kicked in the teeth, we can win.

But I don’t know if you can win against mortality. Maybe the only way to conquer it is through stories.

My therapist asked what I think happens after we die. I think the world tells us that energy doesn’t simply stop. There is a cycle, everything drives everything else. Maybe other people are right, it would be nice if they were, that there’s some beautiful world up in the clouds where everything is loving and simple and exactly what we’ve always wanted and every dog we’ve ever loved is there. Maybe that’s why their life spans are shorter than ours, to give us time to accrue enough dogs or cats or turtles on the other side to make it less terrifying when we have to cross.

But human beings are such curious creatures. We need to be challenged. We can see that in the listless, stupid, destructive violence of the rich and coddled. They have not been challenged enough, and they have become broken as a result. I’m not saying everything should be hard all the time, but humans love to strive, we love to achieve. So how could we be happy in heaven? In a place where everything comes easily?

Maybe it’s just as beautiful that when we die, we live on in all the love we gave. Maybe it’s just as beautiful that heaven is in the hearts of the people we loved, people we liked, people we were nice to at the grocery store. Maybe when my dog goes to heaven, it will be inside my chest. And when I go to heaven, it will be inside other people’s chests, and she will live in there with me forever, like Russian nesting dolls of love. That the grace and love she has shown me will translate to the grace and love I give others, and they will turn that into grace and love they give to someone else. That instead of ascending, we radiate.

I’m not ready. I’m bursting into tears on our walks and I’m holding my breath at the vet and I’m begging her to eat and I’m not ready. We don’t know when it will come and I beg for hours and then burst into tears at the grocery store.

For now, she’s sitting next to me, breathing in and out, digesting the salmon that has gone from a treat to a daily meal, maybe praying like me that it doesn’t turn into diarrhea and we can just sit here together next to each other all night watching Gilmore Girls. My husband will come home with Taco Bell and she will look at me curiously, too tired to beg, and I will rip off a little piece of my tortilla against my better judgement and feed it to her, indulgently, so that wherever she goes, one day that I hope is far away, she knows how much I love her. Maybe if I love her hard enough, she will be able to find my heart when it’s time to live there.

My good girl lately <3

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