Meanwhile, in real life, sad news finds its way through the cell towers. A text message converts to data packets, bounces between satellites and ground stations, and reassembles itself on your phone screen in perfect sequence. The technology is elegant. The message is not.
“Are you available for a call?” asked the text message. I was waiting for the dog rescue to share a veterinarian’s report on our foster dog Darcie’s limp. I generally find that good news doesn’t need a preamble. Good news has emojis.
“Good news” would be that Darcie was just limping because she’d stepped on one of those fierce honey locust thorns and antibiotics would treat the infection in a few weeks. Or maybe inflammation — some minor injury aggravated by roughhousing with my dogs.
“Yes, in 5 minutes,” I replied. I’d be available after the Tuesday networking meeting wrapped up.
Meeting Darcie
We’d been fostering Darcie for two months at this point, ever since she’d been found alongside a highway in early September and brought to the animal shelter. She didn’t have a collar or a chip, but she did have a belly full of developing puppies. Since we’d fostered two batches of rescue puppies over the spring and summer, the rescue asked if we could help again.
Darcie quickly adjusted to our household pack and our liberal pets-on-furniture policy. When she wasn’t keeping me company in my home office or lollygagging in the sunny courtyard, she was inspecting the house and assessing the best spaces to deliver her puppies. I hadn’t thought about HER selecting a space. The youngest puppies we’d ever fostered were week-old Corgi mixes. They came complete with a mama dog who was happy to nurse her 11-pack in the guest bathtub I lined with blankets. But Darcie, a Labrador mix, rejected the tub as too small, and by mid-September she nominated my husband’s closet for her nursery.
Welcome puppies
As a first-time newborn puppy fosterer, I Googled the signs of impending puppy delivery. The pacing and lack of appetite suggested puppy delivery in 24 hours. To me, that was “tomorrow.” But I was off by a day: within 45 minutes of my “I’ll be right back to check on you, Mama Dog,” three puppies had arrived. I had the honor of watching a mama dog work tirelessly to welcome, clean and nurse her babies.
By the second day, we knew that two of the six puppies were struggling. One was failing to thrive and the other had severe developmental abnormalities and would have to be humanely euthanized the next morning. Darcie and I sat through the night, trying to keep the failing puppies warm. We had several long looks together, me placing the pups in a warm basket, her taking the puppies off the warming blanket, back and forth.
The sweet things, with their beautiful coats and perfect faces, passed before sunrise. I honored their 36 hours with a quiet flower ceremony on our prairie, surrounding them with stems of goldenrod, boneset, bluestem.
The next challenge
Then came Darcie’s battle with mange and its relentless itchiness. It’s funny to tease your dog, calling her “You mangy mutt,” unless she actually turns out to be a mangy mutt. Darcie had started to scratch and itch, strip mining her body into a patchy terrain of bald spots. As a nursing mama dog, we could only bathe her in the gentlest of soaps, and gentle soaps are powerless against sarcoptic mange mites. This army of microscopic arachnids are only defeated through a war of attrition: Simparica to break the mite life cycle, laundry (so much laundry — every blanket, towel, sheet and pet bed in the house, again and again, on the highest heat) and dog baths. Ten minutes at a time, three times a week, Darcie sulked in a lather of chlorhexiderm shampoo. Four weeks later, her fur started to grow back. I celebrated as I found fewer clumps of black fur in the dryer’s lint trap and more strands on her body.
Our black Lab foster dog finally had a full coat, but there was that worsening limp. “Are you available for a call?” asked the text message. The networking meeting had wrapped up, and I called my contact at the dog rescue.
Darcie was limping not from a torn ligament or an infected paw, but from bone cancer high in her shoulder. Since the cancer was located in her shoulder, amputation was not an option. And though her lively eyes, bouncy ears and wagging tail suggested otherwise, Darcie was in a lot of pain. We — my husband and I — would now be fostering in hospice status.
Sitting with the sadness
Still in the parking lot at the networking event, I sat with that sadness. Darcie’s story was supposed to get better. We were supposed to be interviewing her next people, some nice couple ready for a young, clingy Labrador mix with bouncy ears and a perpetual tail wag. Or maybe we’d simply “foster fail” and keep her.
“Foster fail” is pet parlance for officially adopting your foster animal. Actually, we probably would not have adopted Darcie ourselves; not because she wasn’t adorable and keepable, but specifically because she was very adorable and keepable and therefore adoptable by someone else. Our foster fails are strategic decisions to keep the dogs that get overlooked and ignored. Darcie’s pretty personality would shine through on the social media videos, and she’d receive several applications that I’d review and then she’d go live happily ever after and I’d receive happy text messages, with emojis, of Darcie and her happily-ever-after family.
But suddenly the happily-ever-after timeline was very short. A week? Weeks? We’d said goodbye to three senior dogs earlier this year: Hank, Audrey and Greta. Sitting in my car in the parking lot, not quite sure where to drive next, I thought about the rich happily-ever-afters my husband and I had shared with those splendid dogs.
Why is ever-after so finite?
Beauty in the darkness
The finiteness of time, and life, is a topic I visited in October when I featured Texoma artist Taylor Brooke in a blog post for the Creative Arts Center of Bonham. Her memento mori paintings work in the centuries-old tradition of incorporating reminders of mortality into visual culture. Even though I was writing a series of blogs to feature fall and Halloween art, I felt her message was so much more important than our American dismissal of death as a thing to mock the last two weeks of October and then repress the other 50 weeks of the year. Taylor paints to sharpen appreciation for life by acknowledging its limits.
In her piece “Even in Arcadia,” two complete skeletons tenderly embrace among delicate pink cherry blossoms. The bones are rendered in warm golden beige against deep charcoal backgrounds. Taylor paired this with the classical Latin phrase “Et in Arcadia ego” — “even in Arcadia, I exist” — with “I” being death itself.
“I wanted to show how love and beauty can exist even in decay,” Taylor told me. The blossoms symbolize “the fleeting fragile beauty that mirrors life. It is the contrast between life and death, beauty and impermanence that I wanted to capture.”
Stewing in my car, trying to recalibrate my day around this crappy news, I reflected on a bittersweet line from the October blog post. “I want people to feel both the beauty and ache,” said Taylor. “How fleeting life is and [how] meaningful that makes it.”
“I want people to feel both the beauty and ache. How fleeting life is and [how] meaningful that makes it.”
Taylor Brooke
The cultural gap
As if this day wasn’t weird enough, it was curious and ironic that at this same Tuesday networking event, an end-of-life doula introduced herself to the networking group. She actually introduced herself as a “death doula.” That quieted the room. Which was her whole point: Death isn’t something that we should be hush-hush about.
Melissa Wood runs Peaceful End of Life, providing compassionate support to individuals and families navigating death. Her work centers on emotional and spiritual support, companionship and advocacy for those facing the end of life — or for those preparing to say goodbye to someone they love.
Just as Taylor’s serene paintings, with their gentle portrayal of death and finite time, registered to me as bold and important, so did Melissa’s message at the networking meeting: It’s a struggle to talk about death at all. In the United States, we live in a culture that keeps death sanitized and out of sight. Professionally, we’re expected to stay composed, productive and unbothered — while the reality of loss is anything but tidy.
“That gap creates shame and silence,” Melissa said. “People end up navigating the most human experience of their life with no language for it and no support.”
Connecting to what matters
In the week following Darcie’s diagnosis, I thought about the act of feeling sad. Am I wasting away the minutes with this beautiful dog by focusing on the sadness of it all? I wanted to know Melissa’s thoughts on sitting with sadness and the larger conversation around death.
Talking about death isn’t morbid, she told me. It’s freeing. “It reconnects people to what matters and gives them permission to live more fully while they’re still here.”
“Talking about death isn’t morbid. It’s freeing. It reconnects people to what matters and gives them permission to live more fully while they’re still here.”
Melissa wood
Sacred doesn’t mean tidy
People often describe the end of life as a sacred time, Melissa told me. But sacred doesn’t mean peaceful, tidy or free of conflict. Melissa’s work often involves giving people permission to feel the messy parts.
“My role isn’t to take the hard feelings away,” she said. “It’s to normalize them, to hold space for them and to help people understand that even the messy parts still belong to this sacred time. Presence doesn’t require perfection; it simply requires the courage to be real.”
“You can deeply love someone who is approaching the end of their life and still feel angry, heartbroken or disappointed about what’s happening,” she explained. “Those emotions aren’t signs that [a person is] doing it wrong; they’re signs that they are human.”
The in-between days
The “in-between days” — the time between diagnosis and death — are often misunderstood, Melissa explained. People think they refer to the final stretch, but they can actually last months or even years. She frequently works with individuals who are far from their last days but want to make sure their death aligns with their values.
For Darcie, our in-between time would be measured in days or weeks, not months. But the principles still applied: we were watching her, reading her pain levels, weighing quality of life against simply holding on because we weren’t ready.
Good preparation, Melissa told me, isn’t just about paperwork or medical decisions. “It’s about helping someone feel seen, heard and empowered to shape the end-of-life experience they want — one rooted in their definition of quality, not the healthcare system’s definition of quantity.”
With Darcie, that meant paying attention. As long as she actively chose to join our prairie walks and explore the tall grasses, she was telling us she still wanted to be here. The meds kept her comfortable enough to make that choice.
Being present
Meanwhile, in real life, as of this writing, Darcie is still with us. When she chooses to romp around with our pack — her tail spinning like a propeller, her ears bouncing — we feel she’s not ready to go yet. It’s strange being the keepers of her time. I hate that part of pet care. It’s too much responsibility. But there it is: we’re simply being present for however much time she wants.
Taylor Brooke is a Texoma-based visual artist who works in murals, canvas paintings and window art throughout Texas and Oklahoma. She specializes in ethereal fantasy artwork, cherry blossom aesthetics, emotional storytelling, and bright, community-focused murals that bring life to local spaces. She is passionate about partnering with charitable organizations and benefit events, using her art to uplift communities and support causes that matter. Taylor accepts commissions for custom murals, original canvas pieces and seasonal window displays. Learn more and view her portfolio at taylorbrookesart.com.
Melissa Wood is an end-of-life doula serving North Texas through Peaceful End of Life. With 20 years of healthcare experience, credentials as a licensed massage therapist and naturopath, she provides compassionate support, patient advocacy and companionship to individuals and families navigating death and dying. Melissa works to create a culture of openness around end-of-life conversations, helping people approach death with dignity, comfort and peace. Learn more at peacefulendoflife.com.