An Impossible Prayer
What you whisper into a dog’s ear may be the truest words you ever say. At least for me. Sometimes, they are dreams you will share. Sometimes, they are promises. Sometimes they are hopes, even when you have agreed that hope is not a good idea. You have it anyway. And sometimes, you whisper an impossible prayer.
“Stay with me,” you say. Stay with me forever, when you know that you were never going to get forever out of the deal.
That’s what hurts the most. For people who believe in heaven, they know they will see their dogs there. They will get to run the mountains again. Aches and pains will all go away, and only bright skies and wild birds for miles. We will get to run all of that together forever. But I don’t know that, not for certain.
What I want is for my dog to stay with me forever right here. Forever like we’ve had. That was heaven, and it wasn’t a faraway place. We could get in our car and go there. I don’t have to dream it up, and it isn’t a static image. It’s a moving picture of Hugo running wide open in a mountain valley, tail flashing. It’s watching him run up a valley wall so steep it would take you a half hour to reach his elevation, and before you could get there, he’d be somewhere else. Like a kid who can’t get enough, who tries to run everywhere at once.
Hugo has always been like that. If he were a person and had the chance, he would jump out of an airplane without a parachute. I’d like to think his faith in me and Steve is the reason why he takes so many trust falls. The times I stood with my legs shaking on a goat’s hold of a shale slide, trying to call him back or find him because he outdistanced my field of vision, are so many that I have rolled them all into one memory. No matter how many places we’ve been – the different mountain valleys or foothills, they all condense into one place. Our favorite place, where we had our best days. Where we were most alive.
That place is our heaven, and I want to be there again with him. I whispered that in his ear. I want to take you to the mountains again. However, I am not sure if I can. I don’t know if we will still be alive and able by the time the snow melts. I don’t know if we will get to have that again, even if we can wait out the suffering months and drive there, and our feeble legs can make it to the place we remember best. I don’t know if you can run so fast and far ever again. There is only one time in our lives when we hit the highest point, and we never know it until we cannot try again.
It’s impossible to think that we will get another chance. It’s impossible to ask for that because it goes against gravity and other forces of nature. But that’s what I want most. I want what cannot be. I want you to live forever and to go to the places we went to. And, if I can’t have that, I want a heaven for us where we are magically young again and all the people didn’t show up and put tents on the lichen and have parties there and drive away the wild birds and leave bare patches of earth.
Maybe true believers would tell me that it’s possible and that heaven exists. And I won’t insist that it doesn’t, because I want it to. I won’t insist. But it’s that I can’t be sure that it does that has me gasping like a fish without water. I’m here in this world, where we’re all screwing things up.
Meanwhile, a good dog is suffering on the floor. Hugo had collapsed on the floor in the middle of the night – the sound of his falling woke me up. We had been lying on the floor for quite a while before I got up to research symptoms – pale gums, cold paws, lethargic. I type these thoughts as I wait for a return call from the emergency vet. I’m not going to work in a few hours. My face is swollen, and my head is filled with snot. And I don’t care to fix any of that right now.
What I want is a heaven that doesn’t exist. I whisper in Hugo’s ear, as I have since he was a pup, “We will have adventures.” I have always meant this, and I still do. I just don’t know how to make it happen now. It’s an impossible prayer. It’s faith in the form of suffering. It’s belief in the form of memory. It’s love for the beautiful life on the floor beside you – a dog who is better than you are and who you always knew would not live forever, even though you ignored that fact for as long as you could. And when you finally have to face it, you find a way to ignore it a little longer.
We will have adventures.
Post script:
Hugo is an 11.7-year-old English setter who has spent most of his life running in the mountains of Alaska. Over the past year he has slowed down some, but he still enjoys a daily run near our home and loves the mountains.
On Feb. 26, Hugo collapsed in the middle of the night and had an emergency splenectomy. A ruptured tumor on his spleen had caused internal bleeding; the surgeons removed the spleen and tumor, and he lost about a liter of blood (a lot for a 55-lb dog). The pathology results a week later confirmed hemangiosarcoma (HSA). The encouraging part was that it did not appear to have metastasized – his chest X-rays were clear.
Our vet recommended scheduling euthanasia within 1–2 weeks and prescribed prednisone, explaining that HSA can progress unpredictably and that a planned goodbye might spare him the trauma of an emergency crisis. However, I was not comfortable making that decision yet –especially since there was no evidence of metastasis and many people have shared positive experiences with supportive care, both Western (chemotherapy) and Eastern (I’m Yunnity, Yunnan Baiyao, etc.).
These past few days Hugo still seems very much himself: bright eyes, playful, and eating better. He barks at moose outside the yard, plays with the other dogs, and snuggles with me in the recliner.
I’ve been learning as much as I can about HSA and the different approaches people take to support their dogs through it. I had no idea how many people have faced this heartbreak, or how common this diagnosis is – especially for Golden Retrievers.
Several people kindly shared resources with me that I found helpful, and I’m sharing them here in case they are helpful to others as well:
(1) Canine Hemangiosarcoma | Facebook
(2) The Heartbreak of Hemangiosarcoma in Dogs - Dr. Loudon
(3) I’m-Yunity for Dogs Immune Support Proprietary Mushroom Supplement
(4) Yunnan Baiyao Capsules (Jiaonang)
Beautifully written, Christine.
My girl Apple passed away this last fall from HSA. Even though I knew it was coming, it still felt sudden and was heartbreaking. She lived two years beyond the initial diagnosis.
Much love to you and Hugo.
Oh Christine, I wish that there was something else you could have shared about Hugo but I understand the need to share even the sad news. I’ll be praying for Hugo and you and Steve. By the way, I am a true believer, while not overly religious, I choose to be convinced that I’ll see my pups that have gone and that they and I will share an eternity of adventures. Take good care of your boy.