10,000 Miles

I didn’t set out to walk 10,000 miles with my best friend. It just happened. After all, to have planned to walk 10,000 miles, I would have needed to comprehend what taking over 22 million steps would require.

Just as thousands of miles seems outrageous, I can’t think of a single right-minded reason that anyone would plan to walk tens of millions of steps. Nevertheless, in a few days, my dog Grayson and I will walk our 10,000th mile together.

I only know these numbers because they help me explain how grateful I am to be able to tell you this story. In addition to turning 60 in the next few weeks, I’ll be celebrating five years of incredible cancer-free life.

Five years of walking every day with Grayson. 10,000 miles.

When doctors saw a mass in my left kidney, they immediately could tell from its shape and density and size that it was cancer. To remove only the cancerous cells would be extremely tricky and would require weeks in the hospital and months of recovery time. I chose laparoscopic removal of the entire kidney, however, since it would require only an overnight stay in the hospital and a few weeks of recovery at home.

About six hours after surgery, I unexpectedly awoke to intense abdominal pain. That’s when I found out that the laparoscopic procedure relied upon air being pumped into the abdominal cavity to keep it pressurized. The air would remain there until it seeped out through the skin. Until then it was pushing against every organ in my body causing such intense discomfort that to this day my threshold for pain is several orders of magnitude greater than it has ever been.

During his initial visit to my hospital room, the surgeon told me that walking was the only known means of safely forcing the air out of my abdominal cavity. That meant that while in the hospital I had to walk down the hallway and back as many times as I could reasonably stand. I think of those walks as the first of the 22 million steps I would eventually take. I also understood that when I got home I was to begin a regular walking regimen. I realize now that because the doctors did not specify a length of time for this regular walking, I simply never stopped.

I’ve been thinking a lot over the last few days about what it really meant to have walked all those days, hours, minutes, all those miles, all those steps with another living being over the course of five years. One insight that remains near the surface of all my musings is tremendous gratitude. Embedded in that gratitude are the parts of me that have grown and the parts that have changed. Each aspect of who I am today has been shaped by the walks and the interactions with others during those walks.

But the walking would never have happened without Grayson. My faithful walking buddy singlehandedly helped me begin a new life focused on my health and fueled by the love he so freely shared with me each day since.

I vividly remember that as soon as my eyes opened that first morning back home after surgery, I started to cry. Not only was I still in physical pain, but I was feeling overwhelming emotional pain. It’s not relevant to how this story turns out, but at the time the stress of losing a kidney to cancer had begun to place terrible stress upon my marriage. As it crumbled into dust, I went into surgery. By the time I returned home, my husband, the first true love of my life, was gone.

Upon awakening I instantly decided that I was going to throw a fit and act in every inappropriate way that I could imagine. My injured ego seized upon the notion that today was the day that I would stage for myself the Pity Party of the Year. “Yes! You deserve to wallow in these truly devastating losses,” my ego screamed inside my head. This was going to be the greatest auto self-destruct sequence since Star Trek.

I love to remember that singular moment when despair had begun to creep into my consciousness as an actual life choice. I look back at it now and can’t help but laugh myself into a snorting guffaw. For a single instant, I had entertained the notion of allowing some kind of dark spell to descend over me and for it to take over my day, perhaps even my life.

There were nanoseconds of time involved in this entire process from beginning to end. Fractions of fractions of seconds elapsed before the spell was broken. Completely vaporized by the power of love freely given by Grayson who had jumped into bed and was looking me directly in the eye. Grayson is the most confident dog I have ever known. His unflinching, self-assured demeanor is reflected in all that he does. Thus, on that morning, in that instant, he performed a wordless intervention and nothing was going to stop him.

I was looking into the face of none other than Grayson Carter-Malone, Standard Schnauzer Extraordinaire, Prince and Prime Minister of Positivity. He tapped my tear-dampened cheek with his wet nose. The timing, the gesture, the look; it all happened so instantly, so spontaneously that I didn’t doubt for a second that what I had been thinking in the instant before was never going to happen. I was involved in a truly magical act of love for which even this description seems inadequate.

He gave me another look to make sure I was watching him, and Grayson turned and flew off my bed toward the bedroom door. One step through the door he turned to look at me. I turned my outstretched palms toward him. It was the hand signal I used to tell him that I loved him. Satisfied that I would be along soon, he turned again and was gone.

I could feel myself lifting my body off the bed and onto my feet, although I couldn’t really understand how it was even possible. The pain I felt in pushing from sitting to standing forced a scream from somewhere deep in my body. But the forces that had got me moving just moments before –forces that would propel me into a new world of love, hope and growth—gave me the ability to get dressed and to be at the back door where Grayson awaited me.

As a member of a working breed, Grayson knows how to express unconditional love and he considers various duties to be part of the relationship he has with multiple humans. On that morning five years ago, Grayson expressed his love for me and he reminded me that we had walking to do. I came to understand as gifts his need to get something accomplished, to play a game, to exercise with his human, and so many parts of his personality that provide me with endless entertainment.

Although we walked from time to time before our transformation five years ago, it wasn’t the same. That day was the day that I use to measure all that we have done since. It wasn’t a lot of walking. We would walk a little and then we would walk some more. We put one foot and one paw in front of the other and we began moving forward. Always forward.

I understand now that forward motion creates its own momentum. It helps propel us in ways that we won’t always understand, but that we will appreciate when it’s cold or wet outside.

Over the coming months and years we became inseparable and were easily recognized as the man and his dog both smiling and happy walking around our neighborhood and then the neighborhoods adjacent to ours and then parks nearby, streets including the old Route 66 through downtown, and back home. People always think we’re going somewhere in particular. Nope, not really. We’re just looking to see what can be seen, to meet those who we might, and to experience life on its own terms. At the end of each walk, Grayson gets a little dog treat and we temporarily go our own directions until the next walk.

Every time I look at Grayson, I feel that sense of gratitude only a miracle could produce. He’ll be turning 9 this year and although I’ll be 60, if you saw us walking down the sidewalk today, you wouldn’t think we were anywhere near those ages. Five years ago I looked and acted like I was ancient. These days when a friend who I might not have seen in a few years visits, some of them stare in stunned silence at the transformation. I look and feel like I’m 40 years old and I carry myself like I’m even younger than that.

The simple act of stepping out my door each day to begin a walk with my dog has turned into a means of meditation away from the darkness that so often fills our world. In the meditation I have found a means of physically manifesting a future filled with possibility.

Finally, I have come to understand through my relationship with my dog that loneliness does not have to be a permanent state of being. I take a longer view of time and I don’t worry about instant gratification. If I am to have a new love, or new friends, then the only thing that I can do is to be myself and to remain open to love.

Grayson doesn’t allow for excuses. He understands delay, but absence is not allowed. He doesn’t understand complacency and he loves anyone who is fully engaged in life.

He’s such a good boy.