There is a kind of sadness that doesn’t arrive all at once.

It builds quietly, in layers — in cones and pills, in unsteady legs, in the way a body you know by heart begins to move differently.

I’m watching my two dogs, Zach and Xena, navigate illness at the same time, and it feels like the ground has shifted beneath me.

They say a parent doesn’t have favourites. I know that’s meant to be comforting, but it isn’t always true. Xena is my baby girl. She came into my life in May 2014 — a tiny thing, travelling alone in a crate from Bangalore, brave before she even knew what bravery was. I loved her from the moment I knew she was coming. Some bonds form slowly. Some arrive fully formed.

Now she has mast cell tumours. One of them is in her eye, and to protect her from hurting herself, she has to wear a cone. Watching her struggle to make peace with it breaks something in me every time. I want to take it off. I want her free of it. But I also don’t want her to bleed again, to panic again, to hurt again. Holding those two truths at once is exhausting.

Zach is another kind of heartbreak. My big firstborn son. My Virgo boy. The gentleman who loves women, especially strangers. His hind legs are giving way — cancer, muscle loss, steroids. I see him trying to stand tall in a body that no longer cooperates. I wanted to lift both of them onto the sofa with me, to gather my family the way I always have. But Xena wanted down. The cone went back on. The moment passed.

There is grief in these small things.

I can handle my own pain. I’ve done that my whole life. I can handle illness, fear, uncertainty — when it belongs to me. But not this. Not when it’s my children. They look to me. They trust me. And there are moments when I can’t fix what’s happening to them.

What makes it harder is memory.

They’ve seen my aunts alive.

They’ve seen my mother.

They’ve seen me truly happy in a new home.

They are woven into my life’s milestones, my becoming, my survival. Zach, my steady beginning. Xena, my brilliant, intuitive girl — the one who always looks back for me on walks, the Aries family soul who makes sure everyone is accounted for before moving on.

Xena understands more than people give dogs credit for. She watches. She waits. Even now, groggy from medication, she tries to cooperate with a world that feels suddenly restrictive. Zach, even in weakness, still believes in affection. Still believes people are kind.

I have done grief before. But never this — never two lives I love this deeply hurting at the same time. It feels like life keeps adding new levels to sadness, as if asking, Can you carry this too?

And yet… love remains.

That is the part I am holding on to.

I don’t need miracles anymore. I don’t need guarantees. What I want — what I hope for with everything I have — is that they do not suffer more than they already have. That their days are gentle. That fear does not dominate what time we have. That there is peace, even if there is no cure.

Peace looks like rest without pain.

Peace looks like safety.

Peace looks like being surrounded by someone who knows every inch of you and still chooses you, again and again.

If I cannot give them long lives free of illness, then I will give them this:

presence, dignity, softness, and love without condition.

And maybe — just maybe — that is enough.