Lately I look at my dog Cosmo and a panic sets in: you will die one day. He is seven, middle-aged for a standard poodle, and he is extremely healthy so that worry seems inane. But it feels like the same worry I had as a kid: I will die one day. I no longer worry about that for myself—chronic illness has if anything granted me a healthy relationship with death—but I think about it a lot for my loved ones. And that includes my dog.

I adopted Cosmo seven years ago. Today on Facebook memories I saw the first video I made of him: in the car, at Albuquerque airport, where I first received him, in a box. He was my first non-rescue dog—I worked with greyhound rescue for years and could never imagine a non-rescue, but I was too ill when the time came to even visit shelters and pounds. So I basically bought a dog on the internet, something I never thought I would do. Well, the story is a bit more complicated than that—I tell it in my memoir Sick:

I had seen an identical dog—this little serene black poodle with a perfect shape and mellow disposition—with a patient at Dr. Canfield’s office. The dynamics of the IV room became such that you knew immediately who to like and who to ignore, sometimes six hours going by with your arm on a needle, needing all the small talk of the fellow patients to be pitch-perfect. I knew the dog owner was to be avoided because my favorite patient, Faye, a ninety-year-old ex-dancer who was married to a Los Alamos physicist, and who was dying of some awful cancer, immediately shut her eyes tight when this other woman came into the room. Faye had this way of pretending to be deep in sleep if someone annoyed her, and I had tried to pick up this habit, but the dog was too cute to ignore. The woman mentioned it was a Moyen poodle, and as I searched on my phone I found there were only two breeders in the country. I told her I was torn, as I had only had retired rescue grey- hounds and rescue salukis—I never wanted to support a breeder. “Oh, nonsense!” Faye came to life when the woman was gone. “You are ill. You can’t risk it with a rescue!”



She was right—she was always right, always with a quick answer for everything, so sharp and so wise.



“Well, one day,” I muttered.



“One day?!” Faye exclaimed. “Today is the one day. Come on! Why would you wait? You need that dog. You loved it.” I knew Faye was right, so I went as far as leaving a message on the phone of one of those breeders, telling myself that it was nonbinding to inquire. “Mark my words, you will have that dog!” Faye declared, and indeed Cosmo, the only black dog of a litter in Georgia, was shipped to me at eight weeks old only two months later. I brought him to the IV room one day to show everyone, but especially to show Faye. I was gutted when I heard the news— Faye had died just a few days before. But I knew she knew I would have that dog—she knew before me.

So that was my Cosmo. He’s staring at me as I write this. I doubt that he is a “moyen poodle” as he weights 55 pounds and the breeder had told me he’d only get to 35. He is no longer black, more a true blue as he’s greyed in the most beautiful way. He is all mischief outdoors and all serenity indoors. He loves cats, sleep, snow, bodies of water, toast, ice cream, dog parks, bigger dogs, and hates skateboards, razor scooters, vegetables, garbage bags, blowdryers, and small dogs. It’s hard for me to remember he is a dog sometimes. A friend once told me poodles were more like humans than dogs and another friend told me she feels Cosmo is just a “boy in a dog suit” and that all feels correct. Cosmo is very expressive: often silly and happy, other times disdainful and petulant, other times alert and alarmed. He is my greatest love, as I raised him since he was eight weeks old, when he fit in the palm of my hand. He has lived with me in Santa Fe, LA, Montpelier, Pittsburgh, a Florida beach town, and NYC. Like me, he loves NYC best.

I was away from him for months at a time in the past two years, when he stayed with my parents in LA. I could not find a permanent home, as I had severe mycotoxin illness and became allergic to the entire world, it felt like. I could not take care of him or even let him—my therapy dog!—take care of me. And I didn’t think it was fair to move him from den to den. Right now he feels so at home in my highrise in Queens, where we have several dog parks in the complex.

My father used to joke—only slightly joke really—that dogs were what got in the way of me finding a husband. I was too focused on dogs. The truth is I have been very focused on dogs! I’ve had them since I could really have them, since stable homes became possible to me. It was my first gift to myself after grad school. My first dog was a senior, a retired racetrack greyhound rescued from Florida. He was a beautiful skeletal white and brindle old man. He had a long complicated racetrack name but everyone called him King and he soon became my “Kingsley.” We all called him Kiki. He was slow and depressive and incredibly kind, far nicer than Cosmo. He was also far stupider. And far sicker. He was my first experience with a chronically ill being. He was sick the entire time I had him. He had Lyme. Until I had to pass him onto an elderly couple in Pasadena, he never got well. They took him to a healer that rewired his thyroid—their story, I was very skeptical—and he lived several more years than anyone thought. I miss him so much to this day.

Years later, I adopted another rescue: a saluki named Apollo. He had been found on a Texas highway and the story is that he had escaped from Mexico. He was a hunky blonde, muscular and yet otherworldly in the way those feathery winged salukis are. They almost look like pegasus. I got Apollo from the saluki rescue organization in Taos just months after I had moved to Santa Fe. I was newly engaged and Apollo hated my fiancé. He was otherwise a very silent gentle giant, pensive and a bit tortured, pretty indifferent to everything. He was hard to bond with. We attempted to get him a friend and adopted another saluki, a very old lady named Bakiri. She was stunning, tiny and all white, a real angel of a critter. She was a real personality: bossy, arrogant, fun-loving, wild. She made Apollo’s life miserable. Sadly she died just a few months after we had her as she was very old. She had been rescued from a hoarder in the South and yet had the best attitude. Nothing got her down. I think of her all the time, more than I think of Apollo who is still living in Reno with my ex-fiance’s father.

I had fostered many other dogs with greyhound rescue and I’ve been a godparent and caretakers to so many dogs of my friend’s. Dogs are just a huge part of my life somehow. I know the hundreds of dogs in my building far better than I know the thousands of people.

A few years ago I finally read a book that had been recommended to me for years: J.R. Ackerley’s 1940s memoir My Dog Tulip. It’s the story of a 16-year relationship: our British author’s life with his German shepherd Tulip. It is hilarious and sad. Around that time I blurbed my friend Eileen Myles’s dog memoir Afterglow, about her life with her pit bull Rosie (“Part eulogy, part homage, part love-letter, part madcap scrapbook . . . Love and loss are replayed and reimagined through the paranormal and surreal just as against the everyday and the earthly; the familial, communal, spiritual, sexual and bestial are all enlisted to spin the story of one special canine and her human. Only Eileen Myles could reinvent the memoir again so stunningly; Afterglow is the sort of multidimensional love story you could only expect from one of our greatest experimental writers living today!”) I often wonder if a dog memoir is in me, but just like a memoir of romantic love it could never focus on just one. Humans I Have Loved, Canines I Have Loved. Probably Cosmo is the greatest love of all, as I really raised him, but I can also never forget my first Kingsley.

When I was a child, my parents let us have guinea pigs and that was it. My mother was scared of dogs and in Islam dogs are considered dirty. I managed to make a leash for one of them, made out of shoelaces, and I tried so hard to walk him on the sidewalks outside our apartment complex. He would not budge because of course he was not a dog. But my greatest dream, along with being a writer, was being a dog mother. And here I am. I never imagined it too would be another fear: that my beloved dog would die one day, like the others had. I hug him with all my heart and soul and he just lets himself be squeezed. I don’t think he considers I won’t be around, although at the height of my illness he had screamed and cried for help, much like a human child. Sometimes I can’t believe someone so great as Cosmo would bother to love someone as ordinary as me, but that’s the thing with dogs isn’t it? They teach us that love is something else, some far more supreme than reason. It’s not quantifiable or logical even. We love who we love because we think of them as members of our pack, something deeper than blood and DNA, a pact all heart and soul, connections whose coding can only be understood with prehistoric deconstruction.

Cosmo is glaring at me, bored as well as accusatory. Time for a walk, my person, time to brave the rain and puddle, time to put your computer and your words away. In the hallways we chase each other as is our custom and in the elevator I say what do we do and he sits in his perfect good-boy stance, what we have rehearsed many times. In the hallway the doorman quips, hello Cosmo’s mom and Cosmo! (He likely still can’t say my name). Outside we pass the spaniels and terriers and bulldogs and one cane corso I hate and the other standard poodle I love and Cosmo hates. Cosmo takes his sweet time as the rain pours. Come on, Cosmo, I tug at his leash, and in the elevator, probably because looking at his baby pictures has made me emo today, I tear up. He tilts his head at me, his best look. I love you, I say with an exaggerated blink, because I heard once that dogs understand blinking to mean love, and I tell myself that was a blink back.