pawrent – Hearts Still Care

I am afraid of losing Xena.

And my body knows it before I allow myself to say it aloud.

We have organised our lives around her illness. Anand and I orbit her like anxious moons — checking tumours, adjusting dressings, watching if she paws at the wound, fitting the cone, giving her with food, measuring medicines, studying her eyes for discomfort. Love has become vigilance.

And now I have fallen sick.

Acid roars in my stomach like a pit of hellfire. It burns up my chest as though grief is rehearsing its entrance. A cold sore blooms at the corner of my lip — a painful eruption that feels like accusation. As if my body is saying: you cannot control this either.

I hate the helplessness.

I hate that my immune system falters under fear. That I am shivering while she lies there with a body at war with itself. I can take paracetamol. I can swallow an antiviral. I can ask for help.

What does she do?

She paws at the tumour that offends her skin. She endures.

I just lost my son. And I am strangely relieved that I believe in no higher power to blame. There is no heaven to petition. No prayer to bargain with. There is only flesh. Biology. Cells that turn rogue. Love that cannot prevent it.

But hell — hell I feel. It sits in my gut, acidic and churning.

I hate death not because it exists, but because it rarely comes gently. It arrives dragging pain and anticipatory grief behind it. It makes you rehearse goodbyes before they are required. It makes you ill before anything has even happened.

And still, she eats. She looks at me. She responds. She plays.

So perhaps this sickness is not prophecy. Perhaps it is fear trying to outrun reality.

I am trying my best. This has to be enough?

Tonight, I gave Xena a bath.

I cleaned away the remnants of blood from last week — not because they bothered her anymore, but because I wanted her to feel fresh, clean, held. I dried her gently, blow-dried her fur, and then sat with her the way I do every night, performing what has now become ritual.

Cleaning her mast cell tumours.

Bandaging the ones that still bleed.

Cleaning her anus and the lipoma around it.

Cleaning the mast cell near her eye.

Only while writing this did I remember that I forgot to apply the Fur Fresh ointment around her eye. The cone is on, though. I’m sitting right here. She’s safe. Sometimes caregiving is like this — you do ninety-nine things right and then your heart races over the one you missed.

Beyond the physical work lies the real weight.

The daily fear of losing her.

The anxiety of that dreaded call — again.

The kind of love that doesn’t sit quietly but presses against your chest until breathing feels incomplete.

Xena has been my heart and soul since she stepped into my life in 2014, after Zoe passed in 2013. And now Zach is gone too. Losing him shattered something in me that I’m still gathering up, piece by piece. Taking care of two dogs with terminal illnesses has taken a toll — on my back, my knees, my head, my heart.

Sometimes, in the middle of work, I just start crying.

I look at Xena and think of Zach.

A song plays, and I’m undone.

I am hurting. I am exhausted. I am terrified of the inevitability I don’t want to name. And still, every day, I choose to show up and make her comfortable — because this is what love demands when it is no longer convenient or pretty.

I don’t expect help from friends. I’ve made my peace with that. But my family and my partners have risen in ways that matter. My sister has been a pillar. Her husband, who was close to Zach, sees now — truly sees — the toll this has taken on me. Anand is grieving too, even if his grief speaks a different language than mine.

And me? I am so tired.

So anxious.

So stretched thin that sometimes I can’t take a full breath.

I want to write this because I want the world to understand something simple and brutal: loving an animal doesn’t mean loving them only when they are young, beautiful, playful, and easy. Loving an animal means going all the way. It means staying when they are old, sick, inconvenient, and breaking your heart.

This is the first time I’ve had two senior dogs at the same time. I’ve always had one elder and one younger — balance, continuity, hope. But losing Zach and knowing Xena may follow within months has cracked something open in me.

Six months apart.

Two souls.

One heart learning, again, what it means to love without conditions.

This is not a story about strength.

This is a story about staying.