The Gospel According to Dogs

An Essay

Last week, my friend Nadia Bolz-Weber—writer, pastor, and creator of The Corners, her fierce and tender newsletter about the holy in the everyday—published my essay, “The Gospel According to Dogs.” Nadia has been navigating (as she put it) “a shitty medical diagnosis” with the same irreverent grace and startling honesty she brings to everything she touches. When she asked if I might guest host her newsletter while she is on medical leave, I immediately said yes; she’s stepped up for me during my own seasons of illness more times than I can count.

We talked on the phone yesterday and—like so many of our conversations since her diagnosis—we kept circling the same questions: What’s holding us together right now? Where are we finding beauty and hope, even in brief flashes? What do we cling to when the world feels sharp and precarious?

This essay unspooled from one of those exchanges. And as the days shorten, the sky turns pewter, and I start to feel a little cooped up—not just indoors but inside my own mind—it felt right to share it here, too. It’s about what keeps me going, what makes me laugh in the bleak hours, what helps tether me to the living world.

The Gospel According to Dogs by Suleika Jaouad

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.