The Gospel According to Dogs

a guest post by Suleika Jaouad

From Nadia:

(I am on a medical leave of absence - but here’s another substitute teacher you can misbehave around)

Suleika is a heart walking around in a human body, her pursuit of creativity, especially in times of struggle and sorrow, continues to inspire me. In fact, after my own diagnosis, I started using her Book of Alchemy each morning as a journaling companion! Enjoy this essay by my sweet friend. I’ll be back real soon!

The Gospel According to Dogs

by Suleika Jaouad

Twice now, during seasons of illness, Nadia offered me a great kindness—she stepped in to host my newsletter, The Isolation Journals. Now, as she takes some much-deserved time off, it’s my honor to return the favor and share what gets me out of bed in the morning, what makes me laugh in the bleak hours, what keeps wonder alive.

Dogs. That’s what’s keeping me going these days.

I love all dogs—small and large, scruffy or sleek, serene or chaotic. They’re fully here in a way humans rarely manage: devout practitioners of the present tense, attuned to every scent, sound, and fleeting joy; awake to the world as it is, not as they wish it to be.

I longed for that kind of presence in my early twenties, during my first bout with leukemia. I was recovering from a bone marrow transplant and feeling as lost as I’d ever been. In a fit of optimism—or madness—I convinced my medical team that adopting a puppy would be good for my recovery.

Enter Oscar: a small, scruffy terrier mutt—spectacularly badly behaved, opinionated about everything, and entirely himself. In many ways, we grew up together. Stairs were our first challenge: I was weak and unsteady after months of bed rest, and his short, stubby puppy legs meant that more often than not, he tumbled rather than walked down them. But we kept at it, side by side—two creatures relearning motion, reentering life one shaky step at a time. Each morning, he dragged me into the world, delirious with discovery, reminding me to notice what I’d stopped seeing: grass slick with dew, a half-eaten chicken wing gleaming on the sidewalk, a sudden explosion of pigeons into the sky. Despite his tiny stature, Oscar was fearless, absurdly so—once, in the woods of Vermont, he chased down a bear—and he inspired me to approach life with confidence, to meet fear with a sense of daring, to trust I could handle whatever came along.

Oscar was my closest companion throughout my twenties; he went with me anywhere and everywhere, including my 15,000-mile solo road trip around the United States. A decade after I first brought him home, Oscar was diagnosed with cancer; two weeks later, I learned mine was back. While I was in the hospital undergoing a second transplant, his condition worsened, and we had to say goodbye.

Losing Oscar nearly undid me. Grief opened inside me like a cavern, vast and echoing, and I swore I’d never get another dog. That’s the temptation after loss, isn’t it? To build a moat around the heart and call it self-preservation. I told myself I was being sensible. But the house was so still, so quiet. I began to realize that a life walled off from love, is a life in monochrome: no color, no vibrancy, no surprise or joy. It’s one of the great catch-22s of the human condition: love is actually the antidote to heartbreak. It is solace and respite in our plight, even if it eventually yields more loss.