This is only going to partly be a story about Mabel—our chocolate lab-Alabama farm mutt puppy. She came up north last June with thirty other puppies in a white Budget mini-van, driven by Margaret, the pied piper of the East Coast underground dog railroad.

My husband, Tony, and I and our boys, Aidan and Thorne, met Mabel in a stranger’s backyard, near the 495 connector in Worcester, Massachusetts. We looked deep into her velvet eyes and the rest was meant to be Kodak puppy history. Mabel was supposed to be the fun epilogue of the breast cancer story I’d been living these past three years—the early Christmas present here at the end of my treatments and secret potions and cancer elixirs.

The boys are seven and nine. They’ve been asking for a dog for years and I’ve been wary about giving up the love to a puppy. Because once you give up the love, you’re just that much more vulnerable. But we brought Mabel home to Portland, and on that first day I fell for her. Then I whispered to her please do not to go and die on me.

So when she got sick last month, we didn’t notice because we were too busy thinking she was fabulous and immortal. Then she stopped eating. She was tiny to begin with and after she dropped her first ten, she looked skeletal. I brought her in and Dr. Spencer, the vet, said she was bad off. But bad with what?

We gave her antibiotics. She still didn’t want to run around or bark. Then Dr. Spencer said her lymph nodes were swollen and I pretended I didn’t hear him. He did n_ot just say the word lymph nodes_, is what I told myself. Because my lymph nodes were also swollen.

My most recent MRI had revealed them—and no way to biopsy unless we wanted thoracic surgery. “Tell me,” I said to Dr. Spencer, while she took Mabel’s temperature again. “Tell me that my puppy doesn’t have cancer.” But she couldn’t. All she would say was that cancer was rare in puppies, and that if Mabel’s sickness was a war, she was on the losing side of it just a few weeks out from Christmas.

Then her liver grew as big as a regulation-size basketball. There were puppy ct scans and puppy ultrasounds and puppy liver aspirations. I put my own lymph nodes out of my mind. My doctors had told me to wait three months and then have another ct scan. I made a pact with Mabel. I wouldn’t have a lymph node problem if she wouldn’t.

For the next two weeks Mabel lay in her dog bed in the kitchen and wagged her tail and looked at me while I did the dishes and took out the trash and made the hamburgers. It got so her liver was so big she couldn’t walk. Her eyes said this is not happening. Her eyes said I will not give up.

In the end, it turned out she had a fungal disease—one she picked up from the dirt on the farm back in Alabama. There were over 100 dogs living there. The farm owner, an older woman named Barbara, spent most of every day driving the Alabama back roads in her pick-up, catching strays.

There’s a live kill policy in many of Alabama dog shelters and Barbara tries to get to the puppies before the shelter people do. It can make for a lot of puppies on her farm without a lot to eat. Mabel became a worm eater in Alabama—burrowing in the soil because she was hungry.

In Maine she stated snapping at flies that weren’t there—gazing past me at some phantom over my left shoulder. “That’s not normal,” Dr. Spencer said when she saw the snapping at her clinic. “She’s lost cognitive function.” The next word Dr. Spencer used was incurable—everyone’s least favorite word in the entire disease vocabulary.

So we became that family who pretends not to see that their seven-month-old puppy is dying just before Christmas. I mean we knew she was dying but we fed her what she’d eat and sat with her and talked to her, and we didn’t want her to know that we knew, even though I’m certain she knew that we knew.