So, it’s cancer

After the rains everything is lush and glowing. The undergrowth in our forest suddenly tumbles unhindered towards the house, spilling over from the edge of the trees, every shade of green imaginable.

I step down from the wooden chair, with its fine-bones and peeling white paint, onto the old laundry platform that balances precariously on a couple of rocks and some roughly cut wood planks. The laundry tub is empty at my feet and I sit for a moment on the chair and watch Bear. She has emerged from the woods and lies casually at the edge of the trail that winds away amongst the trees.

Her fur, a deep velvet black, is striking against the vibrant green; she is the colour of darkest midnight beneath the diffuse light of a brightly overcast sky. It is quiet except for a gentle breeze, warm and fresh, that stirs the leafy undergrowth and washes through the canopy. I watch as she lifts her nose to sniff at the air, her silky ears falling back from her perfect Lab face as she watches the world go by. There is utter contentment in that motion. I want to freeze this picture in my head.

Murdoch appears beside me, his line rattling against the wooden planks of the deck. He puts his front feet up on the platform and rests his head in my lap.

“Look at that baby,” I say to him as I ruffle the fur around his ears. “I need to get my camera.”

I try to move quietly, to leave and return unnoticed, but as I glance out the window from the kitchen with my hand on the camera Bear is already on her feet and meandering back to the house. I meet her at the door. “Beary, I was just coming to take your picture,” I say. Her tail sways and she tosses me a glance as she enters the house, “you already have a million pictures of me.”

That’s true. But I want a million more.

Morgan and I sat at the kitchen table just the morning before staring shiny-eyed at the words scrawled on the back of an envelope after the phone call; mast cell carcinoma, thyroid cancer, fairly aggressive, keep her comfortable.

The news wasn’t a total surprise. We expected there was something bad going on after she’d had those seizures, but there was also the raspyness in her throat when she panted heavily and a couple of suspect lumps on her body that seemed different from the various cysts attributed to being an eleven-year-old Lab. Even though we had talked about the possibility of cancer it was deflating to finally know for sure.

We sat numbly for a while with the news weighted heavily between us. And we watched Bear, lying on her bed, looking healthy and strong. She stared back at us with her beautiful brown eyes, that inquisitive wrinkle on her forehead, and stomped her foot impatiently in the direction of a half-peeled tennis ball that sat just out of reach. “If you guys are just going to sit there and stare at me you should really throw my ball.”

I went through the motions of that day as if I were underwater, removed somehow from the real world. That night we watched Bear through this new filter and questioned everything.

“Why is she so tired?”

“Why is she panting so much right now?”

“Do you think her eyes look different?”

Somehow we expected things to change overnight, for her to become frail, sad, now that we knew. But she awoke with her usual energy, her voracious appetite, the need to play ball after breakfast. And when I wandered up the trail into our woods to plant some two-year-old blue spruce seedlings, Bear skipped ahead proudly twirling a stick in her mouth. Later she wallowed in ditch water, green with duckweed, when I had to go across the road in search of a delinquent Murdoch.

I sit with Bear now on her bed in the kitchen, run my hands over her soft, shiny fur. I hug her and kiss her graying face and try not to think about life without her, try not to feel how tangible time has become, how it has tipped us up and we are sliding down a wet grassy slope with nothing to stop our descent.

What I do think about is how lucky we have been to share our lives with Bear, how lucky we are that this perfect dog should be ours. And I think about those million pictures I have of Bear traveling with us half way across Canada and back again, of swimming in each of the five great lakes, of canoeing on Lake Superior and countless rivers, of accidentally shooting rapids, of chasing sticks and gorging on peanut butter, of sandy beaches and rocky shores and of Bear wandering freely in our forest, lying contentedly in the shade beneath the trees watching the world go by.