By Joseph Bardin

We used to look at people with dogs and wonder what deficit in their lives would make them get so involved with their animals. Until we got Marco and Isabella, our Spanish Water Dogs, and became too engaged with them to care. They transport Bernie instantly, even in her lowest moments, from the crisis of breast cancer to their dimension where death and time itself has no dominion. Sometimes it’s as if she switches channels, or they do it for her, in mid-sentence, to a sweetness of word and touch that knows nothing about the threat of loss, only the whole-hearted feeling that flows so naturally from Bernie.

The vibration of connection that pulses from their little bodies to us is an endless signal of centering and goodness. It’s also medicinal. Every form of disease and toxicity can be understood as a breakdown of communication. In the case of cancer, normal cell signaling regulates cell growth, division, and death. When these signals are disrupted, it can lead to uncontrolled cell growth and division, which is cancer. Marco and Isabella keep the channels of feeling and connection wide open.

Cancer, like all disease, and mortality itself, bullies us out of our bodily awareness into headier spaces of anxiety and its inadequate remedy, positive rationalization. But Marco and Isabella bring us right back to our flesh and blood being. It is the physicality of the present that commands their expertise. 

Like small children, Marco and Isabella can absorb enormous doses of affection, which are apparently otherwise pent up in us, and in return provide an endless spring of benevolent physicality.

I would love to find out how they maintain such presence, how they stay in the now, but like most masters, they are allusive about their gifts. Marco just gazes at me with his deep brown eyes, mouth slightly smiling, suggesting, I suppose, I should be happy to just be. While Isabella taps my arm with a paw inviting me to pet her more.  

Like any enlightened beings, they also have their flaws. Marco nips guests he hasn’t been properly introduced to, and Isabella occasionally joins in. They both rain down a headache of barking on the delivery people who only want to bring packages to our front door. Marco is scared of the wind and hides under the shirts hanging in my closet. Isabella is a princess who pouts when she feels under-attended, going so far as to cry out as if injured.

We got them as puppies from the same litter a couple years before Bernie was diagnosed. At first, they were two fluffy little barbarians rampaging from room to room, chewing up furniture, peeing, pooping and otherwise wreaking havoc— consistently quicker to chaos than we were to restraint. We have a fountain in our front yard, and the moment we opened the door for any reason, they would flash to that fountain before we could think to stop them, as if by teleportation, only slowing down to walk in satisfied circles in the water up to their ears.

Two dogs make a more whole society for them, which is also fascinating to watch for us. But two dogs also made training an exercise in exponential distraction, as the waves of puppy anarchy ping-ponged between them while we tried to get them to sit. 

Not disciplinarians by nature, we had a trainer come over to help us establish some order. But he was probably too enlightened himself and was determined to teach us not to say “no” to them, which he considered hard on their psyches. He suggested instead we opt for the gentler, less scarring “let it be”. This while we were struggling to survive the onslaught of their puppy bedlam.

Another trainer taught us to leash them and get them to sort of pay attention, which felt like progress, but not enough. Finally, a third trainer, in one hour, showed us how to growl at them in their own language, and spray them with a water bottle when they’re bad, and we were able to come to an understanding together.

During the interregnum between anarchy and order, my nerves had frayed, and I wasn’t sure I could live with the frenzy of these creatures much longer. But one morning, walking towards Marco flopped on the hallway floor, through my frustration and weariness, the simple goodness of his small, furry form registered in me. In that instant, reading the change in my body chemistry towards him, he opened himself to me, lifting his little leg to show his belly for a rub. It happened in zero time, a lesson in presence that stays with me.

Truth is, despite all they do for us, they are kept lovers who have the energy and ability to do so much more. They really need a herd of something to watch over and boss around, but we can’t provide them that. Instead, they have taken to herding shadows.

As birds work and play along the tiles of our front porch, they cast quick shadows onto the gravel below, which Isabella and Marco, tails wagging with the joy of purpose, are keen to spot and quick to pounce on, going so far as to dig substantial holes in the ground where the shadows play.

Marco fades after a couple hours, but Isabella is tireless in her obsession; not the birds themselves as they flutter from tree to bush to roof and back again, but only the shadows they cast on the ground. It’s an actual dog version of the famous cave allegory by the Greek philosopher Plato, in which the limited nature of our perceptions is described in terms of people chained in a cave facing a wall, who only see the shadows of what passes behind them and think it is real life.

This turns out to be a fair metaphor for how eyesight works. When light hits the retina in the eye, it triggers photoreceptors there to send signals to the brain. The brain then interprets these signals and creates an image of what we are seeing. What is real, Plato’s cave allegory asks us, beyond our perceptions?

Plato asks is the physical world reality, or just a screen on which we project what we think is real? Like all of us, he wants reality to be different than it is, to be perfect according to his idea of that. No doubt we make projections, but cancer is no shadow flitting across our consciousness—if only it was.  

The physicality of our bodies is the most real thing I know; what expression does the mind have without this flesh, blood, bone form electrified into life? The threat of disease, of death itself, makes this physicality allusive, even scary, as if we could run from it, but run where? Out of the cave into another world where there is no darkness—what world exactly is that? If Plato is saying the mind plays tricks, no doubt it does in order to survive. But isn’t one of those tricks that there is somewhere else to go, some life to live, other than this one here and now?

What is the presence of disease but an urgency to feel our physicality further, to own this bodily being rather than withdraw from it. And to count our blessings, including Marco and Isabella, even if it sometimes feels like we are herding shadows.

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Joseph is an essayist and playwright based in Arizona by way of Trenton, NJ, Washington DC, and Tel Aviv. He is the author of the essay collection Outlier Heart, (IFERS Press). His essays have appeared in numerous publications including Interim, Louisville Review, Superstition Review, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and Eclectica, and been anthologized in the Transhumanism Handbook (Springer). His plays have been performed both domestically and abroad. A scholarship alumni of the Valley Community of Writers, he is a member of the Dramatists Guild.