Part 2: I Was Forty, Bald From Chemo, and Could Not Look at Myself in the Mirror. One Morning I Woke Up and My Golden Retriever Had Cleaned Every Strand of My Fallen Hair Off the Pillow. The Vet’s Explanation Made Me Cry Harder Than the Cancer Had.

Part 2

I need to tell you about Daisy before I tell you the rest, because Daisy is not an unusual dog and that is somehow the whole point.

Daisy is a Golden Retriever. She was six years old when this started. I got her as a puppy from a breeder outside the Quad Cities, the ordinary way, for the ordinary reasons — I had wanted a dog, I had finally had the life that could hold a dog, and I had driven out on a Saturday and picked the puppy who walked over and sat on my foot.

She is not a service dog. I want to be clear about that, because this is not a story about a specially trained animal. Daisy has had exactly the training a reasonably responsible person gives a family pet — she sits, she stays, she does not pull too badly on the leash, she has a complicated and not entirely successful relationship with the doorbell. She is a normal dog. She is, if anything, a slightly goofy dog. She has the soft, uncomplicated golden temperament that is the whole reason people love the breed.

For six years before I got sick, Daisy and I had an ordinary, happy, undramatic life. She slept on the bed — at the foot of it, mostly, on the left side. She came to the door when I came home. She lay on the floor of the spare room I use as a studio and watched me paint. She was, in the plainest possible sense, my dog, and I was her person, and neither of us thought it was a remarkable arrangement, because it is not a remarkable arrangement. It is the most common arrangement in the world.

When I got sick, Daisy changed where she slept.

This was the first thing, and at the time I did not think much of it. Within about a week of my diagnosis — before chemo, before any of the visible part of it, when the only thing that had changed was that I now knew — Daisy stopped sleeping at the foot of the bed and started sleeping up by my head. Nose to nose, more or less. Facing me.

I assumed it was because I was home more. I assumed it was because the household rhythm had changed and she was responding to that. I did not think: the dog knows. I am an art teacher, not a mystic, and I did not think the dog knew anything.

I want to flag that for you, because I was wrong, and the way I was wrong matters.

The dog knew something.

She knew it before the chemo, before the hair, before there was anything for a human being to see. She moved up to my head, and she started watching my face while I slept, a full month before there was a single strand of hair on a single pillow.

Part 3

Chemotherapy started in June, and the hair started to go about two and a half weeks after the first treatment, which is roughly on schedule, and I want to walk you through those first weeks honestly because the honesty is the part that makes the rest of it land.

It does not all fall out at once. That is one of the small cruelties of it. It would almost be easier if it did. Instead it thins, and it loosens, and it comes out in your hands in the shower, and it comes out on your sweater, and it comes out — most of all, most visibly, most undeniably — on your pillow overnight.

I started waking up to it in the last week of June.

The first morning there was hair on the pillow, I sat on the edge of the bed and I cried, and Daisy pushed her head into my lap, and that was that, and I told myself I would handle it better the next morning.

I did not handle it better the next morning. Or the morning after.

I had a routine, by the second week, and the routine was grim. I would wake up. I would not move my head for a minute. I would gather myself. Then I would sit up, and I would look at the pillow, and I would see the hair, and I would carefully gather it up and put it in the bathroom trash so I would not have to keep seeing it, and then I would go and stand in front of the bathroom mirror and look at a woman I was having more and more trouble recognizing.

I want to tell you about the mirror, because the mirror is the thing I am least proud of and the most honest about.

I had decided I was ugly.

I know that is not a generous thing to say about myself, and I know all the things you are supposed to say back — that I was not ugly, that I was strong, that the hair did not define me, that I was beautiful in the ways that mattered. I knew all of those things. I taught my middle schoolers versions of those things. And none of them touched me, in that bathroom, at six in the morning, looking at a pale, thinning, hairless, exhausted woman who used to be me. I felt ugly. I felt erased. I felt like I was watching myself be slowly removed from my own life, one pillowcase at a time.

That was where I was — that exact place — when the mornings changed.

It was the first week of August. The second month of chemo. I woke up before my alarm, and I did the routine, I lay still and braced myself, and then I made myself turn my head and look.

The pillow was clean.

Not a strand. White, and clean, and empty.

I thought, the first morning, that I had simply not lost hair that night. It happens; it is uneven; some nights are worse than others. I was almost lightheaded with relief and I did not question it.

But it happened the next morning too. And the morning after. A clean pillow, every morning, for a week, while my hair was unmistakably, visibly, still falling out of my head every other hour of the day.

The math did not work. Hair that was coming out in my hands in the shower at noon was not landing anywhere at night.

So one morning in the second week of August, I set an alarm for four a.m., and I lay very still in the dark with my eyes barely open, and I waited, and I caught her.

Part 4

I want to describe what I saw, as exactly as I can, because I have gone over it many times since and I do not want to soften it or shape it. I want to tell you exactly what my dog was doing.

It was a little after five in the morning. The room was gray, that pre-dawn gray. I had been lying still, half-feigning sleep, for an hour.

Daisy was up by my head, the way she had been for months. And at some point, very quietly, very carefully, she lifted her head off the bed, and she began to work.

She was licking the pillow.

She was licking my hair off the pillow. Slowly, methodically, gently — she would find a strand, or a small fan of strands, where it had settled overnight near my head, and she would lift it with her tongue, the way a dog works to get the last of something out of a bowl, and she would clean that spot, and move to the next spot. She was not frantic about it. She was not playing with the hair. She was doing it the way you do a small, careful, repeated job that you have done many times before and that you do not want to make a mess of.

She was so gentle that I had slept through it for a week.

I lay there in the gray light and I watched my Golden Retriever quietly, deliberately, tenderly clean every strand of my fallen hair off the pillow beside my head — clean away the evidence, clean away the thing I dreaded, clean away the proof — and I did the thing I had been doing every morning for two months anyway.

I cried.

But it was a different crying. I want you to understand that. For two months I had been crying the cry of a person watching herself disappear. And lying in that bed in the gray light, watching my dog do this thing she had apparently decided was hers to do, I cried a completely different kind of cry — the kind you cry when you discover, with no warning, in the middle of the worst thing that has ever happened to you, that you are not, after all, doing it alone.

Daisy heard me, of course. She stopped, and she turned, and she pushed her face into my neck, and I put both my arms around her — a bald, hollowed-out, forty-year-old woman holding onto a Golden Retriever in a gray bedroom at five in the morning — and the pillow beside us was clean, because she had made it clean, and I lay there and held my dog and let myself, for the first time since April, simply be taken care of.

I thought, for a few weeks, that it was the sweetest accident in the world. A quirk. A dog being a dog.

Then I asked the vet, and the vet gave me an answer I was not expecting.

Part 5

I took Daisy in for her routine annual checkup in September, and at the end of the appointment, almost as an afterthought, half-embarrassed, I described the hair thing to our vet.

Our vet is a woman named Dr. Aparna Iyer. She has been Daisy’s vet for all six of Daisy’s years, and she is a calm, precise, careful person — not someone who reaches for a sentimental answer when a real one is available.

She did not say “aw.” She did not say “what a sweet dog.” She got a thoughtful look, and she asked me a few questions. She asked when it had started. She asked whether Daisy did it only at night, only with the fallen hair, only near my head. She asked whether Daisy had changed anything else about her behavior since my diagnosis.

I told her about Daisy moving up to my head a month before the chemo even started. Before there was anything to see.

Dr. Iyer nodded slowly, like that fit something.

And then she explained to me what she thought was probably happening, and I want to give it to you the careful way she gave it to me, because she was careful, and the carefulness is part of why I believed her.

She said she could not be certain — that nobody could be certain what is happening inside a dog’s experience, and that she was not going to pretend otherwise. But she said that what I was describing was consistent with something she did, in fact, understand.

She said that a dog’s sense of smell is not just powerful, it is informational, in a way ours is not — that a dog reads the world chemically the way we read it visually. And she said that human hair, and human skin, and the sweat and oils on them, carry our scent profile, including the chemical signature of stress. Cortisol. The stress hormone. She said it is well established that dogs can smell shifts in human cortisol, and that this is the basis of a great deal of what we call dogs “sensing” things — sensing fear, sensing illness, sensing distress.

She said: “Your hair, right now — falling out, under chemo, from a body under enormous physiological stress — that hair very likely smells, to Daisy, intensely of your distress. It is, to her, the most concentrated source of ‘something is wrong with my person’ in the entire house.”

She said: “And dogs, when they encounter a distressing scent associated with their person, very often groom it. They lick. It is a comforting, regulating behavior — it is what a mother dog does to a puppy, it is what dogs do to each other to lower tension in a group. It calms the dog. And many dogs seem to direct it at the thing that is carrying the distress signal.”

She said: “I think Daisy moved up to your head when she first smelled the change in you — before the chemo, before the hair, when your cortisol first shifted. And I think that when your hair started falling out, she found the thing in the house that smelled the most like your distress, and she did the only thing a dog has, which is to clean it. To groom it away. To make it not be there anymore.”

She said: “She is not, of course, thinking ‘I will spare her the sight of it in the morning.’ I want to be honest with you about that. She is a dog. But the effect — the effect of what she is doing — is that every morning, she removes from your sight the single thing in your house that frightens you most. And she does it because removing it calms her, because the smell of your fear is hard for her to be near.”

I sat in that exam room and I held that.

And then Dr. Iyer said one more thing, and it is the thing I have repeated the most often since.

She said: “Renata. Whatever the mechanism — your dog has organized her entire day around the chemistry of your suffering. You should know that. She has made your distress her job.”

Part 6

I started calling Daisy “the salon manager.”

I want to tell you why I needed a joke, because the joke is not a small thing. I needed a joke because what Dr. Iyer had told me was almost too much to carry seriously all the time. “The salon manager” — that was what I started calling her, in my head and out loud, on the mornings I woke to a clean pillow. Good morning. Thank you, salon manager. It let me hold the enormous thing inside something small enough to actually carry around a chemo ward.

But I want to tell you what it actually did for me, underneath the joke, because this is the real middle of the story.

Before Daisy, the mornings were the proof that I was disappearing.

After I understood what Daisy was doing, the mornings became the proof of something else. I would wake up, and I would turn my head, and the pillow would be clean — and the clean pillow was no longer an absence. It was a presence. It was the physical, visible, every-single-morning evidence that something in my house had stayed up in the dark doing careful, patient, loving work on my behalf while I slept.

I had spent two months waking up to the proof that my body was failing.

I started waking up, instead, to the proof that I was loved.

It is very hard to overstate what that did. I went through the rest of chemo — and chemo is long, and chemo is brutal, and the back half is worse than the front half — I went through all of it waking up every morning to a clean white pillow that my dog had made clean. And on the mornings I felt most erased, most ugly, most ready to give up, I had, lying right there beside me, a sixty-pound Golden Retriever who had — in whatever way a dog does anything — looked at the worst of what was happening to me and decided it was hers to manage.

I was not beautiful, during that year. I am not going to pretend the dog made me feel beautiful. That would be a lie, and Daisy deserves the truth more than she deserves a lie.

What Daisy did was better than making me feel beautiful.

She made me feel accompanied.

Part 7

I finished chemo in the late autumn. I had radiation after that, through the start of winter. And in the new year, the scans came back the way you spend a year praying the scans will come back, and my oncologist used the words you spend a year waiting to hear, and I am, as I write this, in remission, and I am going back to my classroom in the fall.

My hair started growing back in the early spring.

It came back the way it comes back — soft and strange and a different texture than before, the way everyone warns you, “chemo curls,” a fine pale fuzz that thickened slowly into actual hair. I have a short, soft, slightly curly head of hair now. I have stood in front of the bathroom mirror and watched it come back, week by week, and the woman in the mirror has slowly become someone I recognize again.

And here is the thing I noticed, the thing that is the quiet end of this story.

Daisy stopped.

There came a morning, sometime in the spring, when I woke up and there was no ceremony to it at all — Daisy was simply asleep at the foot of the bed again. On the left side. Where she had slept for the six years before any of this started.

She had moved back down.

And the pillow in the morning — well, the pillow in the morning was just a pillow. My hair was growing in, and it was healthy hair, growing hair, hair that stays in your head. There was nothing on the pillow for a salon manager to manage.

So the salon manager had closed the salon.

I think about this more than almost anything else in the whole story. Daisy did not keep licking the pillow out of habit. She did not keep doing it because it had become a routine, or because she wanted the attention, or for any of the reasons a behavior outlives its purpose. She did it for exactly as long as there was distress in my house for her to smell and to groom away — and when the distress lifted, when my body stopped pouring fear into every strand of fallen hair, she simply, quietly, stopped.

She had never been doing it for herself.

She had been doing it because I needed it.

And the day I stopped needing it, she knew — in the chemical, scent-deep, wordless way she knew everything — and she went back to being an ordinary Golden Retriever asleep at the foot of an ordinary bed.

Part 8

It has been more than a year.

Daisy is seven and a half now. She sleeps at the foot of the bed, on the left, the way she did before all of this. We have our ordinary, happy, undramatic life back — the door, the studio floor, the long walks. She is, again, in the plainest possible sense, just my dog.

But I know something now that I did not know before.

I know that “just my dog” is not a small thing. I know that the ordinary Golden Retriever asleep on the left side of my bed spent the hardest year of my life waking up in the dark, every single night, to find the thing that frightened me most and quietly take it away before I could see it.

I have my hair back. It is short and curly and pale and it is mine.

Every morning I wake up to a clean pillow now, and it is clean for the most ordinary reason in the world — because I am well.

But on the bad-feeling mornings, the tired mornings, the mornings the fear comes back the way fear does after a thing like this, I reach down to the foot of the bed and I put my hand on her.

And I say it out loud, the way you say a thing to someone who carried you.

I say: “Thank you, salon manager.”

She did not just love me through it.

She had a job, and she worked it, every night, in the dark.

Good girl, Daisy.

The salon is closed.

You can rest now.

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