Three years since She-Wolf left for other worlds.

Photo copyright Wings, 2021; all rights reserved.

Impossible that it's been three years already. But it has.

Three years since She-Wolf left for other worlds.

I know that photo looks like she's saying goodbye, but she's not; Wings took that in August of 2015. She'd just stood up after lying in the grass, yawning hugely, and was just checking in with us as she always did.

She-Wolf found us, way back in 2008 when she was still a puppy. She and Raven were cousins, at the very least, perhaps half-siblings, even, and they were both abandoned and starving, and made their way to our gallery door separately from each other. Unbeknownst to each other, we were both feeding them on our respective shifts and allowing them to sleep by the warmth of the fire. And while it would take a few more months for her brother, she came hoe with us on the night before Thanksgiving of that year.

But the damage had been done by her first months of starvation; she had barley survived to find us. And by the time that photo was taken, she had already been diabetic for two full years, a product of that early and deadly neglect, and already she had outlived all the predictions in more ways than one. When she was diagnosed in the fall of 2013, by which time we knew she'd had it for a few months, the vet warned us that her eyesight was already failing, and that she would be "completely blind" within two months at the very outside, probably sooner. But while her vision was somewhat impaired by the time that photo was taken (it's why she tracked us so closely), we were able to save most of it for the better part of four and a half years.

Until the cancer that took her suddenly in 2018. It would turn out to be interstitial carcinoma of the bladder, a sudden-onset, fast-moving, very aggressive kind of cancer in a place that was not really reachable even had surgery been an option, and by the time we found out, it wasn't. Never had been, really, and we actually discovered it pretty quickly, but when they say "sudden-onset," "fast-moving," and "aggressive," they're not understating it in the slightest. But again, our great big wolf girl with the mountain-lion paws defied all the odds. When we took her to the vet in early 2018, her prognosis was clear, and very, very ugly; we were warned she'd be lucky to last three more weeks.

She lasted three more months.

And they were good months; we made damn sure of that. She had everything she needed, everything she wanted, too, and we used an aggressive treatment regimen that, while there was really no chance of it saving her life, in fact kept her very comfortable and happy and even active, and gave her those three months in which to be and do it.

And then on the night of the 26th, the tumor ruptured, as we had been warned it would do. She threw up masses of blood in an instant, and we thought that would be it, but she was not quite ready. We called all over, and no one would come out that night; our own vet wasn't even the one on call, but he did come out first thing the next morning. And at 9:27 AM, as I and the vet tech together held her in our arms (she was a BIG dog), with Wings hanging over us, his hands on her soft fur, she let the vet do his work without protest, and simply, trustingly went to sleep. They helped us lay her to rest amid their own tears, and ours.

And so this morning, I did as I have always promised Wings that I would do and I took her everything she needed to know that we remember her, that the hole in our hearts has made a space in our spirits for hers.

We love you, She-Wolf. Our spirits hold that space for you always.

All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2021; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.