Illustration by Alex Chen
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Hugo is dying and I am already grieving. I have been for weeks. It’s hard to believe our strong, playful dog is leaving us sometime in the next few days; he’s been by our side for more than 14 years.
He spent a few years in New Zealand with us. Perhaps that’s where he picked up his melanomas. We had the first one removed but the second one is now the size of a peach, hanging off his chest. His walks are short now, and slow. He has almost stopped eating. He still loves to be with us out in the garden or watching a movie upstairs, and his bark is as loud as ever, but his days are severely numbered.
It is hard to fathom as I look at him lying outside on the grass, sniffing the breeze, that this time next week he won’t be here. I will never again sink my hands into the deep, soft fur on his chest, or feel the gentle boop of his big rubbery nose on my thigh when he wants my attention. He won’t be by my side this summer as I go for forest walks, stopping to sniff at ferns and flowers. He won’t be shadowing me around the raspberry patch in July, mooching for a taste of the ripe fruit. He is by my side now, warm, alive, gazing at me; how is it possible that he will soon be gone?
He sees me watching him and walks stiffly over to me, putting his head on my lap. He always has done that; sometimes he is reminding me it is time for his walk, sometimes he just wants to be cuddled. These days he does it only for cuddles. He knows something isn’t right. I never shoo him away, even when I’m busy. I hold every moment I can with him, drinking in his warm, clean scent, his beautiful eyes, now clouded with cataracts, his glossy, rippling ears, his muscular frame, still strong and solid despite the cancer eating him away. I want to be able to still feel him, even after he’s gone.
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I rarely cry; it doesn’t seem to be in my make up. Even when my mother died three years ago, I didn’t cry, despite the weight of my grief for her. But a few weeks ago, after I had been to the vet with Hugo and acknowledged for the first time that he was dying, I cried, hard. I was walking up our carpeted stairs, covered in Hugo’s signature tufts of curly black hair, when I was hit with no warning by a tsunami of grief. Tears and snot poured out of me in such volume that puddles formed in front of my feet. I could do nothing to stop.
I don’t know how long I stood there but when the tears finally dried, I was utterly exhausted. It was as if Hugo’s impending death had brought back to me the fatigue of the three weeks that I spent watching my mother die. I didn’t cry then, but the fatigue condensed and intensified into a blanket of tiredness so heavy I could barely stand under its weight at the time. Now, as I watch Hugo decline, I am wrapped in that blanket again, replaying those last days of my mother’s life in her hospital room over and over in my head and in my dreams, and the tears are finally coming.
I remember being taken aback at how heavy her head was when I lifted it to moisten her lips with a wet sponge. Her body was wasted; she had eaten next to nothing for weeks. But her head remained heavy, her dark silver-grey hair still thick on the pillow. Hugo too is still solid, despite looking so weak; when he stops suddenly on the leash to sniff at something he yanks me to a halt with no apparent effort. It makes me laugh and breaks my heart at the same time. I look at him now, as I did at her, accepting the inevitable while struggling with it, and thinking: “When?”
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Feb. 16, 2026: Hugo is finally gone, but I see him everywhere: lying in front of the woodstove, wandering among the trees in the back yard. I see him on the grass at my mother’s feet as she sits on our garden bench in the summer sunshine. I see her at the kitchen counter, preparing food, while Hugo watches her every move. I picture myself holding her hand, feeling in my mind its gnarled veins, its skinny coolness as she was slipping away. I can still feel the softness of her hair, the heaviness of her head in my hands. I can feel the smooth solidness of Hugo’s chest, the silkiness of his thick fur beneath my palms. It feels impossible to grasp the truth that they are both gone.
Grief is a strange thing: now, my tears will not stop.
Katherine Palmer Gordon lives on Gabriola Island, B.C.