Reason for Living: You're Going to Live Forever

when you're not ready to say good-bye

For more writing about living and creating within limitation, subscribe to Reasons for Living, my Substack where I share essays on chronic illness, creativity, and finding unexpected shapes for our lives. A free subscription will get you essays like this one—essays by me and essays by guest writers about reasons for living. A paid subscription will get you paywalled essays and access to a library of resources for journaling, writing, and living with limitations.

Right now, Daphne is lying in the sage-colored doggy bed near mine, deaf now, and struggling with congestive heart failure. At times, her labored breathing comes in waves. Kidney disease complicates everything—the medications that might ease the congestive heart failure work against her kidneys, and vice versa. It’s a familiar calculus, the kind those of us with chronic illness know well: the calculation of treatments that cancel each other out, until the doctors begin to tell you that the cocktail they’ve helped create has reached a preposterous number of medications that they’ll want to pare down, and meanwhile, all you want is to maintain some kind of baseline.

C has enormous baskets filled with medications to treat his chronic graft vs. host disease, which developed after his bone marrow transplant; I have boxes full of medications to treat my fourteen diagnoses. And the entire time, I fail to understand why this is happening. I don’t understand or appreciate the math of borrowed time.

Daphne has joined us in the land of the sick. We adopted her thirteen years ago, a little white mutt with apricot markings who loved to play ball. She’s seen us through so much illness since then—my slow accumulation of diagnoses, Chris’s years of blood cancer, and the side effects of treatment and recovery that ripple through a household while the household attempts to live a good life. Through it all, Daphne remained puppyish and rambunctious, a small warm body that we didn’t need to explain illness to. She loved us anyway.

To watch Daphne slow down—to see her spend most of her time dozing in that sage bed, her once-bright eyes half-clouded with age—fills my heart with an oceanic ache. There’s something particular about this grief, a specific tone of sorrow that comes from watching a creature who’s seen you through the worst of things begin to fade. When C and I needed comfort, when we needed something other than each other, we would turn to Daphne. She’d let us pet her. She’d look up at us with her soulful eyes. When I awoke from PTSD nightmares, screaming, she’d run to me and lick the tears off my face. She never asked why I was crying. Unlike my disability insurance company, she never judged me for not getting out of bed, She simply was who she was, the sweet girl who asked for food and fun and our comforting presence, and we loved her for it.

The vet told us she has six to eight months to live. C and I know something about living with prognoses. They might be wildly generous or wildly scant: our sweet girl, the girl to whom we sang so many made-up songs. (I burst into tears when C texted me with, ‘What do you think was the last song Daphne heard us sing to her?”)

What I’ve whispered to her throughout her life—You’re going to live forever—was never meant to be an actual promise. It was the sort of thing we say to those we love because of the ferocious wish of it.

But I find myself wishing it could be true, that the little white mutt who has witnessed our worst days and our best could somehow stay with us for so long that we never have to feel the grief of letting her go.

She’d just had a vet appointment that seemed to bode well. All we learned from that appointment was that she was healthy—her heart murmur hadn’t gotten worse; she wasn’t going blind; she was doing well for a 13-year-old dog. The only thing we learned was that she’d become, as I’d suspected, completely deaf. She’d adapted so well that we didn’t know for sure that she’d had such extreme hearing loss. It was fine. I said what I always say, which is the thing that my BFF says is also a very Jewish thing to say: “It could always be worse.”

The next week, I took Daphne on a walk around the block, as I’ve been trying to do more often to help her lose those last two pounds that the vet has been recommending. But on the last leg of the walk, she slowed down. She was no longer prancing, but walking so slowly that I had to slow down, too. Still: she went up the stairs to our home in a way that seemed normal. I was watching.

But when we got inside and I began to take off my shoes, Daphne collapsed onto her side, her legs kicking wildly and her breathing becoming more labored than usual. This dog who we’d just been told was healthy seemed to be having a seizure.

I called C, who was on the way to my brother’s home. He rushed home while I called various emergency vets. I wrapped her in a blanket and we took her to the emergency vet. “I’m concerned about her oxygen levels,” said the person who reached for the bundle in my arms. “I’m going to get her some oxygen.”

And that was when we learned that the walls of her heart were slowly collapsing, liquid going into her lungs. She was in the emergency vet’s for three days and two nights. We visited her oxygen kennel and she seemed perky and beautiful, her angelic face the same as always, happy to see us. Maybe even as happy to see us as we were to see her.

I find myself taking more photographs of Daphne now, recording little videos of her soft snoring or trotting along on the beach, as if I could somehow preserve her in these small artifacts against the day when they’re all I have left of her.

I’m not ready to lose Daphne. I don’t know if anyone is ever ready to lose a creature they love—no matter how much we think we’ve emotionally prepared, I’m learning, as I’ve learned through every loss that illness has brought, that love and readiness don’t necessarily play well together. There is no bulwark against pain except for the willingness to stay even when staying hurts.

Daphne doesn’t know she’s dying. She only knows that I am here, that her bed is warm, that the hand stroking her fur is familiar and kind. Even though she can no longer hear me call her name, I hope that she recognizes my smell.

I still whisper to her: You’re going to live forever. And in the way that love outlasts the hearts that stop beating and the kidneys that stop working—perhaps, in some astonishing way, she will. ❤️

For more writing about living and creating within limitation, subscribe to Reasons for Living, my Substack where I share essays on chronic illness, creativity, and finding unexpected shapes for our lives. A free subscription will get you essays like this one—essays by me and essays by guest writers about reasons for living. A paid subscription will get you paywalled essays and access to a library of resources for journaling, writing, and living with limitations.