This brings me to my subject, my dog Sweetpea. She’s facing her last days bravely. Cancer afflicted her. I want her to continue living. The past few months are rough, and honestly, seeing her cope gives me about the only incentive I have to carry on myself. She’s developed a tranquil and benevolent aura about her now. When the cancer first broke across her body in huge puss exuding lesions, she was panicked. After months of grueling chemotherapy, many of the lesions have been soothed. Just when it appeared she might be rounding the corner for a miracle recovery, her feet broke out. Now she has great difficulty walking, but it is because her claws have grown so long and splayed during her last recuperation. I am afraid to cut them for her, because she is so sensitive about her paws being touched. I carry her just about everywhere.

Snow makes me think of her favorite day or maybe our favorite day together. It was about ten years ago when Baltimore was hit with a freak ice storm in mid-March. My roommate was in Mexico. So it was just I, Pea and television. I took her out into that glassy world and let her walk off the leash with me around the corner to her park. Sneaking into an alley was a big black cat. Pea scampered toward it, and for once her footing was surer than her prey’s because she snapped it up by the neck and tossed it in the air. She beamed at me with her tongue lolling out her mouth, her doe-like eyes bright and focused. The feline dashed across the street with Pea on its tail, and again she repeated her cat toss. But she didn’t abuse the cat any more. She was content to show the dirty creature who was really boss.

Pea has a very gentle spirit. Once she carried a baby bird home from the park alive, being ever so careful not to injure it in her powerful jaws.

Later that night, Pea and I were sitting on the couch with the National Figure Skating Championships. I chowed down on a plate of spaghetti, with Pea’s eyes enraptured by my every move and drewel leaking out of the corners of her mouth. I paused with the fork mid-air to watch a particularly spectacular jump, and the next thing I knew Pea had eaten food off my fork. I laughed and fixed her a plate for herself. She’d been a good girl and I felt like she’d done no wrong by insisting we share.

Now we struggle together all the time. I dislocated my shoulder last week carrying her up the stairs. I’ve become her taxi service. First it was just the stairs going up. Now it’s pretty subject to her whim. Afterall, it isn’t every dog who qualifies for free frequent flier miles. In my arms, she feels soft like a well-worn blanket.

It’s one of life’s major ironies how the noble among us suffer. There seems to be an inverse relationship ship between suffering and integrity. I am strangely reminded of a recent experience that occurred after I dislocated my shoulder. I went to the supermarket. Immediately, I was oppressed. I could here voices whispering and could feel walls of memory surrounding each body around me. I knew who was shoplifting. I was determined to make this a short visit. When I got on-line I made brief eye contact with a tall toussle-haired youth buying a dozen roses. I was shocked. His eyes were dead. Soon he was smiling and chatting in a crisp British accent to the cashier, and I saw his death. The blank eyes were a snapshot of his eyes the instance before his car crashed, and his narcotic oozing body was torn asunder by shards of steel and glass. I was stunned…..Later I wondered did my physical distress cause my psychic acuity to rise to a new level?

What must Sweetpea, oh great mother-sage of doggy, be feeling and seeing now that death distresses her body? She’s a Lazarito like I am now. I’ve been cleansing her in the name of Asowono religiously. She’s been cleansed with grains, bread and palm oil, guinea hens, peanuts and cactus. She liked the peanuts best, because she managed a few tasty nibbles that leaked from my clenched fists. Asowono’s afflictions have become hers – first the lesions, then the crippling. And like him, graciousness seems to grow mightier as pain increases.

For those of you who don’t know, Asowono is a deity of suffering, smallpox, AIDS poverty, charity, virility and righteousness. He is older than humanity. His essence is an infusion of earthly microbes that pre-date dinosaurs. He is eternal true owner of this earth. Even today, when we are privileged to glimpse Obatala’s beauty lend Hell a glossy veneer, all we have to do is dig. The ivory purity soon yields to blackness, the inevitable accumulated disintegration of manifold vegetable and animal matter. It is revealed when a dog digs. Sweetpea no longer does.

In her fleeting hours, I want to record my impressions of her. My memory is already eroded, and even happy memories appear distorted by television snow as my brain addles in its slow chronic death throes. I had my own story to tell once, but it’s forgotten. But while my friend Pea lingers with me a while longer, I’m going to try in these pages to record what I can of her story.