My potential need became her game.

Many M.S. flares have come and gone since then, leaving their residual effects along the way. A few months before Patou displayed symptoms of bone cancer, my right eye flamed a deep pain with movement and the glare of bright light, and I soon lost the ability to read most text for about a year, the letters rising up out of themselves: M.S.-related optic neuritis. Just as I contemplated a different life of listening more than reading, of possibly needing a larger dog to help me navigate the world, Patou began needing me more.

At an agility class the summer before the cancer diagnosis, she ran up a tall wooden apex structure called an A-frame, and couldn’t make it to the top. She stopped a little higher than my shoulders, unable to gather enough momentum to climb all the way up the steep incline, and she turned to me. This was the moment my dog let me know that she needed me. I stretched out my arms, watching her scramble to gain footing, and she dropped into them, uncharacteristically laying each front paw on either side of my neck.

It felt like wholeness, holding this 45-pound dog like a child, but tentative.

What is wholeness?

All bodies change over time; no one body is ever permanent or completely symmetrical. After her amputation, Patou’s body remolded itself to suit her movement. Her solitary front paw, the left one, angled inward, forming a strong center paw. It grew to nearly twice its original size, eventually capable of holding large compressed rawhide bones upright — formerly held between two paws — as she chewed. Her back hunched more, neck thicker, stronger. She still jumped to catch toys in midair, ran faster than other dogs, as though, my father would say, the other leg just got in the way.

There is beauty in this change, the grace and balance found in asymmetry. In two creatures from different species of vastly different size using three legs to move through life: her lack, my excess, this pairing of three.

Wabi sabi, the Japanese aesthetic philosophy closely tied to Zen Buddhism, insists upon asymmetry and imperfection, aware that these are signs of life’s impermanence and decay. In wabi sabi, fallen leaves may carry more meaning than those still on the tree; a ceramic bowl is more beautiful by its lack of uniformity; the composition of a painting or photo more deeply felt through its rejection of centering, the subject somewhere near the frame’s edge, amid a field of blankness. Maybe even a disabled, asymmetrical dog with her disabled, asymmetrical human can aspire to such beauty.

Wabi sabi expresses a profound love of life through sorrowfully recognizing its fleeting nature. If there’s anything a dog lover knows and must contend with, it’s the fleeting nature of a dog’s life, the speed with which they age and die relative to our own life spans.