I dreamed recently that Rowley was pregnant. It was a secret we had to hide from people, as boy dogs aren't supposed to get pregnant, so I hid him in a dorm room and watched his elephantine belly until he gave birth to a litter, smiling the way he always did when he caught a particularly beatific whiff of air, and I decided to keep one. I called it "our" puppy. Ours.

I might get a puppy. Two litters were just born to a breeder and I put down a deposit. They will all be the same astrological sign as Rowley -- Cancer -- as he was born in this month eleven years ago.

I talk out loud to Rowley when I feel him here. I tell him we might have a puppy. I call it "our" puppy. I tell him he's the father and I'm the mother and we're going to have a baby together. The breeder sent me pictures of two wiggling little black puppies, two days old, slick otter-like blobs of onyx, nibbling at each other beside a folksy ornamental rooster. They were the only boys from the first litter -- the second litter has eleven of them. I thought of getting another rescue dog but then had an awful dream, a dream that I adopted a dog who was strange looking and emotionally damaged and couldn't love. His face was all wrong and he had a skittish amphetamine smile and he wasn't Rowley. In fact, I'm pretty sure none of these dogs are going to be Rowley. I look at pictures of the mothers and fathers of the new litters, and their noses aren't aristocratic enough. The breeding looks Americanized, like someone was trying to Meg Ryan their long noses out of existence. I'm sure they don't have Rowley's wonderfully snobbish taste. He ate raw sea scallops on lucky days but wouldn't touch bay scallops. He crossed one front paw over the other and splayed his back legs out like a turkey. On a videotape my sister and I made before he died, she described the ways in which Rowley and I look alike -- big noses, dark hair, dark eyes. Some people tell me I have an aristocratic nose.

I weigh the pros and cons on my immune system. I'm too sick to get a puppy. I'll need enormous amounts of help. I might train the dog to pick up things, fetch drinks, open doors, turn off lights, pull me in a wheelchair. Everyone has read the studies about pets and stress. They don't talk about how much the heart needs splinting, how broken it is all the time, how much we are the rescued dogs who can't love. When I look at the puppy pictures, I feel like a mother -- quite unlike how I feel around human babies. I don't want to pick up human babies at all. The talcum smell is repugnant to me, and they look too breakable, like someone else's valuables thrust into my shaking hands. I see the puppies, though, and I want to cuddle them, love them, feed them, grow them.

Providence was hazy with April Fools' Day snow, light flakes that turned to sleet, and I was going to therapy to talk about Rowley's death for the first time. This particular snow is God's joke here, where the weather -- being so entrenched in history -- is old and predictable. I had been sleepwalking for days, battle-worn, still in shock over his death, but the sting of cold woke me up as I drove, reminding me to brake, look, turn. Suddenly, I saw an old black dog on the sidewalk, a wanderer who seemed to have strayed from home. A senior black lab mix, sway-backed, paunchy around the middle, tags on his collar, his eyes darted in fright as I stopped my car to check him out. "Hey old guy," I cooed, and he wagged his tail briefly then skittered away, running into the street so that I had to jolt out too, hand in the air to stop traffic. Since I'm sick, I couldn't keep pace, and he hurried around the block, stopping to glance over his shoulder. He seemed indecisive about my intentions. "Come here pup," I said. "C'mere old guy." I was using my Rowley voice, squatting down, but the dog's eyes were far away. I hopped into my car so I could follow him better. I drove down the street where he was still standing. As the door clicked shut, the wanderer darted behind a fence that surrounded some ritzy apartments. Behind that brick building, there was a labyrinth of fences, looping around the ally to surround a giant manse and its tailored greens. The manse itself looked like a vision of doggie heaven, with forbidding gates I could not cross. But the swaybacked black dog was still near. He paced back and forth behind the fence in front of the apartments, and I walked to the sidewalk that abutted the fence. The gate was open. He was just on the other side, wagging to goad me on, but just as I walked in to where he had been, glancing to make sure I didn't catch my clothes on the gate, he escaped behind the tall fence and ran toward the mansion. I thought I would just follow him there, but oddly, I could see no way through the second fence from where I was standing. I walked up and down the fences, looking for how the dog had gotten through, but there was no explanation. There were no gaps, and the dog was far too wide for the holes between posts, and the fence was a good seven feet tall. There were just tall thin fenceposts and "no tresspassing" signs. I blinked my eyes. The dog was some kind of ghost dog. I couldn't see any entrance to where he was, not by road or sidewalk or ally, as it all was surrounded by fences, even when I drove around the block to try and find a road entry. The swaybacked wanderer was gone, and I began crying. When I returned home later, I received an e-mail from a friend who had seen a ghost dog of sorts in a field after her dog was hit by a train. "I grieved the fact that I didn't have time to love my dog enough," she wrote. "You loved yours every day." The swaybacked dog reminded me of night-blind tarred roads I used to thrill down late at night, full of faith that I would land on the other side of the electric fence that invisibly separates the constrained from the free. I knew Rowley was trying to talk to me.

Please light a candle for Rowley on Monday nights for the Petloss.com candlelight ceremony.

Grief. Grief is deceptive. A funnel cloud in the distance I am watching, umbilical and feeding me, reminding me of my love, then turning my home into rubble, reminding me of my smallness with such totality. The days have some sense of normalcy, but the nights are grueling without Rowley. I print out his picture, hug his elephant pillow -- the one he kissed in the days before he died, and thus is filled with his kisses, and I weep. Rowley is the blue elephant. The blue one stands tall behind the others, sad and serious, separate. I'm realizing now that Rowley preferred to lick that one to tell me who he was -- not dog, not pillow, not elephant, not limited. I feel almost formless now myself, not wanting to eat or sleep, feeding the skin recede around my hipbones. The days are soundless, a white noise without the thuds and sighs and grunts and occasional barks. Occasionally, I think of how lucky Rowley made me feel. Never before in life had I felt so strongly that some divine presence decided I was worthy of the greatest love. Soundless days, formless nights, we are all just an inversion of the kind of love pets give. We are hollow and spinning, trying to wear the cloak of landscape around us. How lucky we are to be guided by the animals, to the formless, wordless place where emotion can exist in the smallest elements, the grooming of a stuffed friend, the passing of air over scented skin. Even without Rowley, I now know this place, and I know that we still inhabit it together.

In the last months of Rowley's life, writing in this blog was not a priority. I wanted to seize every precious minute with my dog. Below is the letter I sent to friends about his passing. I hope it will give comfort to others who are dealing with the loss of a pet.
____________
My beloved dog Rowley held on for six months after his cancer diagnosis, and subsequent amputation, before finally succumbing to a virulent cancer, which started in his bones and eventually metastasized to his lung. By March 26th, he was unable to stand up, leave the house to pee, or breathe properly. He had stopped eating and was making it clear to me it was time for him to go. After a day of many kisses, we took him to the veterinary hospital, who euthanized him in the back of my car while I stroked his soft fur. He died on March 27, 2003 around 1:15 am. He was 10 1/2 years old.

I am glad that he is free of pain, but respecting my best friend's wishes was the hardest thing I have ever had to do. He would have held on forever just to bask in the love we shared, and I knew it. Without euthanasia, he would have starved to death or stopped breathing within the next couple of weeks. I prayed to the Big Dog to release him to a place where he could run freely again. He and I grabbed some private time in the open-aired back of the car, before the Kevorkian Vets arrived, and we looked at a nearby barn and its misty blue-grey sky. Rowley just stared out. He knew where he was going. We talked about barns and open fields and longing all the time.

I often told Rowley he was the love of my life, and he was. It was the most satisfying relationship I have ever had. I liked him more than any person I have ever met. He was a magnetic spirit, converting those who insisted they didn't even like dogs, winning the hearts of veterinarians, compelling strangers to stop on the street to comment on his handsomeness. Being out with Rowley was always like being out with a rock star. His amputation last fall, instead of detracting from his incredible good looks, only allowed people a clearer view of his personality and courage. Rowley's eyes were like the most soothing mutable sky. If you stared at Rowley long enough, you would start to see things in him, other forms, a startling wisdom.

He was my right hand man. Quirky, introspective, dapper, distinguished, thoughtful, kind, gentle, soulful, hardworking, loving, loyal, Rowley was ultimately referred to by just about everyone as "the most perfect dog in the world." And he was. He was so many things more than a dog -- as if a dog has fixed parameters anyway. He sought me out. He brought light. He saved me from so many kinds of danger. Mostly, he loved me with such ferocity I felt lucky even in the most empty days of my life.

There was always a quiet that echoed around Rowley, so it's hard to believe he is gone, even in the deafening silence of his absence. He carried with him more calm than the most practiced Zen master, and despite his large sturdy frame, he walked softly around everything, emanating a gentle transcendence around him like a fog that lifted slowly throughout his years, as his gray fur darkened to nearly black.

It makes sense to me that Rowley would die during wartime. His breed, Bouvier Des Flandres, was almost extincted during WW2 by the Nazis. Bouviers were not fighters but pacifists, trained to sniff out the wounded in battle, to help bring them to safety, and the Nazis considered them so ferocious they were ordered to shoot the dogs on sight. Rowley was sometimes mistaken for ferocious, but he was a true carrier of peace and salvation, and he dealt with my own wounds with loving care. Though I have so many imperceptible symptoms, so many ineffable concerns, Rowley always knew just what to do to find my places of pain, to heal me as much as he could.

We were so simpatico. We spent almost every day of the past six and a half years together minute-by-minute, as Rowley struggled to be the most loving companion he could be to a very isolated and disabled mom -- and to his other mom, Rachel, who lived with him for many years and helped nurse him through his cancer. For most of that time, I was too sick to be around other people, and Rowley's smiles and kisses and sweet soulful gazes brought so much joy to my days. We loved the parts of each other that were awkward. I loved his matted fur and disabilities, his neuroses, his phobia of oven mitts and his tendency to drool like a rabid raccoon. He loved the salty taste of my tears, the way I would pine for people and for health. He would always come into my bedroom when I was writing a good poem, drawn in to the pull of connectedness. He was a cool and contemplative fellow. When he went to the ocean, he just sat up staring at the waves with the most beatific grin on his face. Rowley prized his collection of pillows, including the one from Thailand with elephants on it that he liked to lick as if they were his pets. He loved every simple detail of the world, every sight and smell. He taught me most of what I know about gratitude.

Rowley was a worrier and an over-thinker, and he carried many of my burdens for me. He fretted when I was very ill, kissed me when I cried, licked my forehead when it was warm. He had plenty of jobs -- guard, caretaker, nurse, friend, Brahman, writing critic, music aficionado, crisis counselor. Rowley gave the best kisses in the world. I know he had a great life. I told him every day how loved and perfect and wonderful he was. I know how much he adored his life on earth because he put up a valiant fight to stick around, starting with a battle woof in the emergency room as he awaited amputation surgery and ending in his struggle to stand, walk, breathe, just one more time.

Right now, I don't want to stop crying, even though I smile every hour or so with thoughts of what a lucky dog I was for six and a half years. I can't spit at what he has taught me, about loving when it's hard, reaching out when I want to isolate, interdependence and the pack. I have to celebrate him and also recognize how much he drew out the once ignored and imperceptible beauty and love in my life. There is at least one good animal behind every person worth her weight in marrow bones. "He did a great job taking care of us," Rachel wrote. "We didn't turn out so bad."

For many years, Rowley has been a character in my dreams, frequently morphing into a horse who takes me on adventures or saves me from peril. One time, Rachel saw a New York psychic who said I was a wild philanderer who rode horses in my past lives (I think I was a cowboy). I'm pretty sure Rowley has always been with me, as my dog, horse, friend, soulmate. If I could ask one thing of the Big Dog, it would be that Rowley and I could ride again someday, through a dusty lost West that exists somewhere outside of this limited plane.

I loved him like no other. I will miss him forever.

_________________________
Rowley
"Big Handsome" "Mr. Perfect," "Big Dude" "Rowster" "Bunny Bear"
Born July 17, 1992 on Barbados
Adopted from the New England Bouvier Rescue League in September of 1996
Passed over on March 27, 2003

Goodbye, old pal. I will always love you.

Rowley can barely stand up these days, even though the cancer hasn't recurred. He's an old man, the vet says. His back legs have atrophied. On damp nights, like tonight, his breath sounds like a rock tumbler. He calms down when I open the window. His favorite hobby in life is sniffing. I liked it when the Pet Psychic compared sniffing to reading a good piece of mail. I think that's what it's like for him. He's lonely because he can't take walks now, and only goes out in a pained, utilitarian sort of way, and doesn't get to read good mail. A lead blanket of junk mail presses against his chest, and he can't do anything to remove it. I sometimes wonder about how many days, how many weeks, how many hours. The first thing I do when I wake up is see if he's still breathing. If he is, that's good enough for me to declare it a good day.

I am spending Christmas with Rowley. He broke up with naughty Lucy, the retriever, who was annoying him with her demonstrative flirting, and now we are -- as always -- each other's best company. My family is on the other side of a thousand fields of snow. I am waiting for the Nor'easter that is due to arrive tonight. The windows are being teased by sudden gusts. It is a quiet Christmas. Rowley hasn't had any more chemo due to an extremely bad reaction to his last treatment, and the suspicious shadow on his lung x-ray remains a scary mystery. His legs are tired from compensating for the lost leg. I tell a bad joke about the foot of snow we're supposed to get -- "Rowley hopes it will be a leg," I say. But really, we both hope it will be a big blanket of erasure.

The second chemo was rougher than the first. He pukes, he poops, he looks like hell. He won't eat. He is trying to go all skeletal and greyhound on me. I try to tempt him with yummy food. For days he eats nothing, then only eats treats and a few bites of cheese, then he barfs. He is most partial to the treats. I tried to trick him into eating treat peanut butter sandwiches. They looked like Nutter Butter cookies to me, and I wanted to eat one. He wouldn't be fooled by these, but ate a few treats and then broke out into a one-man band of flatulence.

A week after the last chemo session, he felt great. The blonde dog across the street has fallen in love with him. This has caused quite a rivalry between Rowley and the other dog across the street, but Rowley fights for the blonde. Like a determined postman, he makes a little delivery on the rival dog's lawn every day. The blonde dog is utterly smitten by him. She is beautiful and perky, like a Southern California girl, and thinks Rowley is totally charismatic and unique with three legs -- a war hero. I looked at him with Lucy -- the blonde -- as she tried to engage him in some covert grass-eating, and I thought that he has never looked more happy in his whole life. In the space where his leg used to be, Rowley is blooming.

Once an hour or so, I look over and think he's not breathing. I feel the way a new mother feels. He had his first chemo treatment on Tuesday, and some days he seems better, and some days he vomits up his dinner. When I think he's not breathing I say, in the tremulous voice I use when I want to wake up someone without seeming like I'm trying to wake them up, "Bunny?" Then his eyes twitch and he looks at me with glazed, half-asleep, barely cocked eyelids and he stretches out his remaining front leg and I feel enormous relief. Ah. One more minute, one more day.

Late at night, I talk to other Dog People, or sometimes Cat People. We feel crazed, like addicts, by our level of devotion and need. I ask my friend about reincarnation, which she believes in. "Do you think that dogs come back as dogs and people come back as people?" I ask. "Yes," she says. "But why is that?" I ask. "Isn't that unfair?" "Well," she says. "I believe that animals live in a constant state of bliss. They are the lucky ones and we are the ones who feel tortured." Her statement carries me through the week. I rub Rowley's belly and soothe him and pat his nose and listen to his sometimes jagged breathing. I dream about him swimming in a vast lake, dog paddling with his three legs, big smile on his face. I wake up and look at him and wonder what he's feeling in his suspended moments -- paddling through the blue with held breath -- and think, yes, he feels nothing but bliss.

The three incisions form a divining rod on his left side. They are impossible to ignore. I think he is depressed, even though he finally smiled yesterday and today. Often, he will just stare blankly into space. Humans are crazy to think that animals don't know their predicaments. Rowley knows. He knows he is sick. When I cry, he immediately assumes that it is about him, and he will mope for awhile. It happened tonight when I was watching Philadelphia on TV. I was crying about the AIDS epidemic. None of us have been able to feel things the same way since the onset of AIDS. I had forgotten until watching it that history -- in one of its forms -- is a retelling of the gradual shedding of layers of innocence. History hardens us. It turns matter into rock.

Tumors are just the body's way of shedding unwanted matter, of cells that got lost on the outtake, says the book I am reading. Tumors are history turned into a choked riverbed. I look at Rowley pressed against a pillow beside me, scar-side up. The three incisions form a divining rod.

I don't know if he learned this from his Mama or what, but Rowley is very in-your-face about disability. He wants to lie on the porch all day with the incision side up, to show the brutal crater where his fate has landed. He wants to pull across the street to see the other dogs, though he has never been that social with canine compadres. In fact, I think he is slowly working his way up (or down) to humanness. I told him today, as I watched him put most of his weight on his back legs to walk, that he is practically homo erectus.

The effort of this evolution is exhausting him. I hear him panting through my dreams. I see the way he tries to run in his own dreams, with one leg moving and the scar twitching, the nerves shooting at the phantom limb. We both miss the leg. It is the first hard evidence to us of the corporeal taxman, the one who takes the body piece by piece until there is nothing left. We know we are sick. We want the world to see the brutal crater, the place where our ice age began.

On Tuesday, they will remove the staples. He will soon be starting chemotherapy. I don't want to talk about his prognosis. It is all written in the surgical heiroglyphs, there, on his cavernous wound. It is a story, I suppose, about dimunition. And yet a tiny neural voice is screaming, fast as light, just run, just run. And phantom pain or not, we will.

I don't want to see the way that we are meat. I don't want to see the staples on his skin, the blood caked around them. During this whole time, I have been obsessively constructing things. I dusted -- literally dusted -- my old sewing machine and started making pillows, luscious rich pillows from organic cotton and hemp fabrics. I made pillow after pillow and then I did something I have never done before, because I don't really know how to sew at all -- I decided to design and make a halter top to fit my particular curves. I made the most beautiful top out of a design I sketched on lined paper. It holds me in place like a sling.

Some sort of ancestral Midwest coping mechanism is kicking in. "Idle hands make idle minds," my Grandma always said. In the East, people tell long, seafaring yarns. In the South, people trump each other with humidity metaphors. In the Midwest, we have sayings. The rigid stitch of axiom gets us through.

The pillows are mostly for Rowley. Rowley may have to make some sacrifices, but goddamn it if he is going to give up his pillow fetish. He hugs a pillow with his remaining front leg, annoyed that he can't use the phantom limb to fluff it. Rowley has more pillows than any dog I know. He has a silk pillow with elephants on it that my friend brought me from Thailand. He has two sage and white striped Calvin Klein pillows from some discount homegoods store. He has a shiny silver pillow I made him out of Halloween costume fabric. He has a plum faux suede, and two plum velvet pillows. He has one with tassels. And then there's his favorite, an odd combination of orange, eggplant, and yellow, woven together. He is sighing now on the sage striped pillow. He may fall over when peeing now, and the other dogs may question his manhood, but damn it if he doesn't have good taste. Even convalescing, he looks fabulous.

I thought I would be all macho about seeing Rowley disabled, but it has been hard. He looks downright Frankensteinian. Staples forming three intersecting lines over the reddened, lumpy spot where his leg used to be. Weird patches of hair shaved off in inexplicable places -- his butt, his other arm, his back. Blood stains where the IV must have been. The lack of a leg is easy enough, except for the fact that it looks like someone ripped it off and stapled him back together; he looks like he just stepped off of a MASH set. His eyes are distant, scared. I am not sure right now if he is grateful or if he hates me. He wouldn't even eat raw scallops, a delicacy he loves, when he got home. But the amazing thing is this -- despite the fact that our local hospital wouldn't operate on him, saying they thought he would never walk, he is walking like a pro just three days after losing his leg. He walked up the five stairs to my apartment. He jumped on the couch by himself. He is more ambulatory than he was when he was in excruciating pain just over a week ago. And even mutilated, he is beautiful.

My veterinarian friend from high school said there is no way to psychologically prepare for seeing a pet with three legs. But I have been looking at websites of disabled pets and want to adopt all of them. There is an Argentinian deaf dog who is as white as absence with a lolling pink tongue. There is Rexi, the idiot savant autistic dog who wrote his name on the windshield with his nose. There is the dog who dribbles pee all day, likely because of some kind of emotional trauma, and needs a place where he can live outdoors and leak pee. There are several dogs in wheelchairs. If I could, I'd open up a big home for all of them, with rolling fields for dribbling pee, with wheelchair ramps and doggie spelling bees.

Let's face it -- animal-obsessed people are a little bit weird. As much as his shorts are Fully Loaded, I don't want to think about the Crocodile Hunter having sex ("Isn't she a beauty?" he'd exclaim in Annoying Aussie. "I call 'er Papa's Canyon Snake"). His wife could give birth to a hundred little Croc Hunters and I would still insist it was immaculate conception. Animal-obsessed people are sort of like Moonies at the airport, right? Not exactly the kind of people you'd want to invite to a dinner party, unless it was a PETA fundraiser. So what do you do when you realize you are One of Them? I showed signs at a very young age. I amassed a gigantic stuffed animal collection and would play with them, shades half drawn, in my bedroom. I would make up stories about them with elaborate plots, ensconsed in my jungle animal wallpaper. My dad brought me stuffed animals from his travels -- he called them my Kids. When we went on family trips, I packed an extra suitcase full of them. And my Kids didn't just have tea parties -- they led exciting lives. They did Stuffed Animal Extreme Sports. I would make them parachutes out of garbage bags and string and throw them out of the third-story windows. I would ask my grandmother to sew them clothes. I would take them into my treehouse. They certainly taught me more about living than Betsy Wetsy could have done.

About fifteen years after my stuffed animal collection reached its max, my dad began accidentally calling his youngest dog by my name. "Peg's the nervous one," he would say, as Hattie cowered under the couch during fireworks. My dad is the one who loves through a microphone. I am the one who dreams through synthetic beasts. And, admittedly, we are sometimes hapless in our attempts to show love to other humans, but we are learning from our pets. I secretly tuck a newsletter about rescued potbellied pigs into a magazine, as if I'm reading porn. My dad gives our Christmas funds to the SPCA. My sister makes her cats talk to me on the phone, in their respective accents. My mom still grieves the loss of the one family dog who touched us more than any other. "I hit two cars with my leg," my sister's tough ally cat says to me on the phone, "and I'm just fine. I don't use that leg." "Two cars hit you?" I say to the cat. "NO," the cat says, getting riled. "I HIT two cars. And I'm just fine."

Resilience and love, say our furry angels. Carry on.

I don't know what it was about Squeaky Hedgehog and Squeaky Lamb, but Rowley has been indifferent to every squeak toy since the two of them. He is especially appalled when he sees those squeakies without eyes, the kind you buy for dogs with Chewing Problems. Talk about pets with disabilities. I might as well buy him a Squeaky Naked Mole Rat. It actually occurred to me last night to buy him a stuffed animal that looked like a dog, cut off its leg, sew up the damage, and give it to him as a homecoming present. Is that macabre or touching? I want him to have representational role models, naturally, but if the three-legged stuffed animal keeps falling over like a failed woodshop project milk stool, it will kind of defeat the purpose. I'm reminded of how Rachel and I used to do a thing with him called "sawhorse." He really hated hugs when he first moved in. He thought they were some sort of creepy ritualistic rite of the Cult of Humans, and didn't want any part in such things. He would slip out of my arms like a greased pig every time I tried to hug him. So then Rachel and I started doing sawhorse. We would stand on either side of him and lean in like a sawhorse, and hug him like that. It was like working with that brilliant autistic woman who invented the hug machine because she liked to be squeezed, but not by humans. Rowley started to like the squeeze of sawhorse. It was his first induction into hugs.

I am so relieved. The surgery went well. Rowley has one less leg. He is coming home on Saturday.

Surgery is in the morning. I am trying to be strong but I keep turning into mush. "Hemorrhage is the biggest risk," the surgeon said, as if she was discussing barometric pressure. "It only happens if a surgeon makes an error really. After that, we worry about infection." They send the whole limb to oncology. The limb. He is my limb. I am his limb. And we cannot be severed.

(These are hand-written entries from a journal, entered in here after I learned Rowley's diagnosis).

September 16, 2002. I told Rowley today he would bite the cancer in the ass, and this made him smile a big toothy smile. He DID have the urge to bite today. He especially likes biting children (part of why he was originally given up by his past owners). He started to lunge toward a cherubic boy outside my house. The boy had been standing across the street with his father admiring the old Volkswagon van for sale.

"A car like this," his father said, his poor defeated Yuppie slump perking up, as if he had finally taught his son the savage beauty of Grace Slick. "A car like this you have to baby, put some care into every couple of weeks. You can't just drive it."

The boy was captivated by thoughts of flower power and Woodstock. Rowley sniffed in the boy's direction and then pulled toward him, until my mom yanked on his leash. "He's sick," Mom told the boy.

"What's wrong with him?" the boy asked. "Did he hurt his muscle?" I could tell my mom was about to get overly confessional, so I cut in. "It's just old age," I said. "You know how it is." The boy nodded, knowingly, and smiled. He didn't know Grace Slick.

Rowley limped valiantly to the next yard to poop. "I want to live," his eyes pleaded. I am still awaiting the surgery. I am feeding him a concoction I call "healing fish." We are going to be two happy cripples, and I can't wait until it's over. I can't wait until I can nurse him back to health.

Let me talk Grace Slick for a second. Let me talk about the urgency of wanting and needing somebody to love. How the boy looked at the father -- with sudden respect -- and the father looked at the boy -- as if he had yearned for that moment of connecting his entire life. Or how my own mother fretted and buzzed around Rowley and me, more worried about our pain than her own.

September 14, 2002. Yesterday, Friday the 13th, Rowley was diagnosed with bone cancer, osteosarcoma. I had written the night before, "the end of suffering is here," on my page-a-day calendar. I woke up in the middle of the day, while Rowley was at the vet, and thought "cancer." Still, I'm in shock. What does it mean to end suffering? I decided that, for now, it means amputation of his leg, and chemotherapy.

September 12, 2002. I cannot bear to rouse Rowley or kick him out of my bedroom. He is sleeping on a pile of clothes. He is angelic, and brave, and reassuring. We will pull through this, Ma, his eyes say.

There is the thick tarrish smoke of his fur, a miner's garment. I want to hug him until my arms turn black. I want to blink in the sudden light and startle the dew.

August 10, 2002. Rowley's mouth churns. He is lying on a pile of my clothes. The sound machine I use for sleep puts pretend crickets in my sterile room. The night froths slowly into black surf. It is horrible, isn't it, to love so much that you will be butchered by each loss? And yet, the sounds comfort me -- the real animal inconsistently pausing into silences that scare me, the reliable, annoying fake insects.

Words fail me. Words that once sat with the grandeur of spiders in the centers of architectural genius now swirl down drains, stunned by the quickness of death, stunned the eternal loom has stopped clicking.

Change is quick like that. The skeet of words explodes in air. The zoomorphic landscape shifts its mass.

August, 2002. Last night, Rowley scared me to my core. He got so sick he was whimpering and hyperventilating simultaneously and continuously. I felt so helpless, too sick to take him to the vet myself. Rachel drove an hour in the middle of the night to take him there. They diagnosed him with a degenerative joint condition, OCD. He needs surgery as soon as possible. I almost lost my mind with worry.

July 17, 2002. Rowley is ten today, I think. According to his birth certificate from the rescue society, he was born on Barbados. I discovered last year that his certificate said he was blonde, not gray, and thus have no idea if he's really an island boy or a dairy herder from Wisconsin, but I'm guessing the certificate is from the same litter. I tell him various stories about his birth and his adoption. He likes the lie that I gave birth to him myself -- out he popped, a little square puppy. A serious little square. Or I tell him about his real mama and the litter he came from, how he was the shy and serious little square -- a fur square, not a furball -- so different from the others. I also tell him his real adoption story. Rachel and I, nervous and fluttery, walked into the kennel where he was being fostered. We waited behind a counter until suddenly he bounded out, bouncy as a rubber toy. They call it the "bouvier bounce," but we had never seen it in person, that rubbery gait. I tell him how we fell in love from that very moment, how I held him in the back seat of the car when we drove him home. How he was wide-eyed and terrified and so afraid of his new home, though he had yearned his whole life for the word stay.

July, 2002. I sit outside with Rowley who seems to work as a translator of bird calls, some kind of spy. Even with one ear flipped back, he looks regal. He is wearing a robin's egg blue bandana. As usual, I am cognitively impaired. The cumulonimbus sits on the shelf of my skull, above the glossed ship's ladder of my cervical spine. My dog understands this. He feels the weight of illness in my body as if he is carting me to and fro. His kisses are as kind as doves are to air.

I have never loved like this, the way I love Rowley. I love to bury my nose in his fur and to inhale him. He smells like moss. He smells like a world netted together by delicate ground cover, like clean gauze over a nearly-healed wound. His paws are big bear paws. His nose is sturdy, square, like the hard edge of a rowboat. His cropped tail is a stump that remembers great branches but can never tell their secrets. We inhale the fresh and stale. We talk the breath of the weary.

My other disabled friends have helper dogs. Dogs who take the laundry, piece by piece, from the dryer with their mouths. Dogs who lug tanks of oxygen. Dogs who open the refrigerator to get soda. Dogs who are legal in the passenger cabin. Dogs who live like people, the way disabled people live like dogs.

Rowley isn't like those other dogs. I tried to train Rowley with a clicker, a plastic implement that makes an annoying click each time the dog does something right. Rowley thought the clicker sounded like a disapproving relative with very strong dentures and a steel tongue. In two days, I had trained him to have an aversion to all treats. He scurried away from pieces of cheese. He ran from bones. He hated the click the way I hate to be on hold.

When I first adopted him, at age four, he was terrified of oven mitts. He would see one on the side of the kitchen table and freeze, and stalk it for hours. The first time he saw a kangaroo on TV, he went up close to the TV to try and capture it, then snuck behind the TV to see if he could go in the back door. His fur is the color of thundercaps, waiting for the lights to click and the TV to flicker. I am waiting now, waiting to see how his surgery goes, waiting to see him with three legs, as nervous as I was when I became his new parent.