I sat up with Izzy much of the night, to sit with him as he struggles. I was awakened by his trying to breathe, a new sound. I am one of those people, I think, who show emotion best with my fingers and my photographs. It was never safe for me to show emotion in  public, I don’t yet know how to do it. It is very painful to watch Izzy struggle this way, and my heart goes out to those many people who have done it, and have yet to do it. I am very mindful that everyone reading this has experienced it in one form or another, or will, and that is part of our connection, our community.

My life with dogs is not sad, it is joyous, each coming and going an opening in my heart and soul, an ignition of the creative spark, a passage in my life, a reminder of what it means to be a human being. Sometimes that means being happy, sometimes not. I woke up very early realizing I had not yet written about my chasing sunsets with Izzy, an experience that altered my life. “I haven’t written about the sunsets,” I told Maria in the middle of the night. You can do it tomorrow, she whispered. It seemed wrong to wait that long, as if I have done Izzy a disservice and I want to get it straight, before he dies in the morning.  And so I am here, at the computer, Izzy lying with his head on my foot, listening to his struggle, his fighting for every breath.

In the winter of 2008, it seemed as if my life was completely disintegrating, although in truth, it was really just beginning. The great recession and all of its panic and pain were a fitting backdrop to my struggles, the radio, TV, Internet filled with the horror stories that have become the news for profit. I had broken down, was getting divorced after a 35-year marriage, was alone and in terror much of the time. Izzy and I were doing five or six hospice visits a week, and people were dying all around us. I remember counting the hours until Maria, who was helping with the farm animals on weekends in exchange for using the Studio Barn, would come through the door on Saturday mornings. But I was not quite alone. Izzy was here, and one brutal winter’s day, I took my brand new Canon camera that I had bought on mysterious impulse – I had never owned a camera before – and drove in my Chevy Blazer in the gathering dark to Kinney Road in Argyle. It was an awful winter in many ways. I parked the car, puzzled over the tripod.  Izzy jumped out and lay by the side of the ride in the bitter wind and was still while I took my first photographs of the brilliant sunset highlighting the simple farmhouse on the hill.

A farmer appeared at my side with a rifle and asked me what I was doing and when I told him, he shrugged and walked away. A truck roaring down the hill nearly crushed me against the car in the dark and knocked my tripod into a creek.  The wind blew my cap off and froze the tears on my eyes but I took photo after photo and my spirit was suddenly re-arranged and I began to see the world in a different way, especially its color and beauty. Night after night, as dusk approached, Izzy and I chased sunsets. On Kinney Road. On Bunker Hill Road. On Cambridge Center Road, on the way to our hospice visits in the Adirondacks. “Let’s go chase a sunset,” I’d say, grabbing my camera bag. Izzy was always at the door. We did this almost every night for nearly a year, and in that very powerful year, my life began to change, as if those brilliant sunsets, one by one, healed my soul and lit it up like a stage. Izzy and I slipped into the daily routine that dogs love so much, and that are life itself to border collies. Izzy always jumped out of the car on those freezing cold nights, went to the side of the road and watched my evolution as a photographer and a human. He loved it more than anything.  Every night I would post those photos on this blog and a few minutes later the phone would ring. My friend Maria was calling to tell me how much she liked my photography, how good my photos were, to encourage me when there was no one else who could do it or would do it.

Every time I posted a sunset, Maria would call to tell me how much she liked my pictures, offered me suggestions, artist-to-artist,  gave me the strength to put them out there, the gift of encouragement that every writer or artist needs so much, and that the world so rarely offers. The calls were brief, businesslike. Neither one of us wanted to even imagine something more. But our creative connection was formed in those calls, deepened and grew, altered our lives. I knew then that we would be together one day.

Maria did not know that when she called on those winter nights that I was sitting in my favorite living room chair, Izzy at my feet, waiting, praying,  for the phone to ring, staring at it,  so that I would know she was there and I was still alive, and would be alive in the morning. I swear Izzy stared at the phone just as I did, as if he were on pins-and-needles too.

And here is the thing about life: at 4 o’clock in the morning, four years later, I am sitting in that chair right now, Izzy lying at my feet and he is weakening with every breath, and I do not know if he will make it to morning, but if he does not, I will be here at his side when he goes. I’ve been talking to Izzy, telling him I needed another border collie on any farm I was on. He would be the first creature to understand that.  I just told Izzy this, before I knew I had to write it, share it, because this is what I do, this is my emotion: “we found those sunsets, didn’t we, pal. Such great work a dog like you can do, riding in the chariot alongside of us as we ride our way through life.” And Izzy raised his head when he heard me mention the sunsets, his wheezing eased, and rested it on my knee.

May you chase a million sunsets, Izzy. You are a spirit dog, and spirit dogs never really die, do they?