I. A Photograph
I’m seven years old. It’s summertime. We’ve just hiked up a mountain and we’ve stopped to eat lunch before heading back down. I’m sitting cross-legged on what appears to be the edge of a cliff, but I’m guessing that’s just the angle of the camera. At any rate, it looks impressive.
I’m wearing a white shirt and blue shorts and brown boots. There’s a ridiculous floppy blue sunhat shadowing my face, but you can just make out the deep red sunburn spreading across my nose and cheeks. I’m smiling up and to the left of the camera with my lips slightly twisted: either I’m in the middle of saying something, or else I’m in the middle of using my tongue to fish bits of ham and cheese sandwich out of my molars. It’s hard to tell.
Lying beside me, looking directly at the camera, is Sophie. Our black Standard Poodle, two years old at the time of the photograph. She’s panting happily, her long pink tongue emerging from beneath her nose. Her collar and leash show up bright blue against her body.
Behind us, on a neighbouring mountain, small dark green trees stretch out and fill the rest of the frame. We are adventurers, perched on our rock. My pale white hand covers her jet-black paw, bridging the distance between our bodies. We are best friends, and there is nowhere else that we would rather be.
II. A Diagnosis
It’s a Wednesday in late November, nine years of photographs later. My dad is just getting off the phone with the vet when I walk through the door, thinking ahead to tea and physics homework. If Shirley pushes a crate up a driveway with Don pushing at a sideways angle of 32 degrees . . .
“There are some strange lumps on her X-rays. He thinks that it might be cancer. We have an appointment with an oncologist tomorrow.” And suddenly, just like that, I feel as though I am the crate in my textbook, with Don—evil, malicious, calculating Don—pushing me off my course by 32 degrees.
We reason with each other, keeping obsessively calm and upbeat as though the others are children. “They might be benign!” “Look at how healthy she is!” “An oncology referral in a day? Wish it was like that for humans!”
We cannot deny it after the appointment. I walk through the door the next day and am greeted with sad, resigned faces. I will not cry, I tell myself as I hear the words. Hystiocytic sarcoma. Masses. Everywhere. One to six months.
I cry.
III. A Poem
The first poem I ever memorized was “The Span of Life” by Robert Frost. I was six. Sophie was one.
The old dog barks backwards without getting up.
I can remember when he was a pup.
It hit me that Sophie would one day be an old dog. It made me uneasy and I tried to cover it up with a blasé kind of innocence. “Sophie won’t be like that!” I screeched, trying to protect my parents. “Even when she’s old she’ll still be running to the window to look outside!”
She was that kind of dog. She tore through life, banging her head on things and drinking from scummy ponds in forests. She walked with her tail arched over her back, flipping her paws up after each step. Men yelled at us from across the street. “Did you teach your dog to walk like that?”
“One . . . two . . . three . . . GO!” I would whisper in her ear when we were outside and she would take off, me desperately holding on to the leash, running as fast as I could behind her.
She made people happy. Not just us, but everyone. “Doggy!” squealed small children. Young couples smiled and pointed. Old men fed her treats.
Even after her diagnosis we had people stopping us on the street. “Is she a puppy?” My father had an elderly woman comment on how “full of life” she seemed. We took her to the duck pond and she quivered and moaned and pulled on the leash with her tail sticking straight up in the air.
