Right before my parents got divorced, they got my sister a puppy. Christmas 2008. She was around eight and I was in my early twenties, but I was still pissed on the inside: I’d always wanted a dog, and no one had ever gotten me a dog. Quinn was a fluffy mutt from the North Shore Animal League of indiscernible breed: we named her that because it was another name option on the list for my sister, who ended up being called Cameron, and because “The Mighty Quinn” is a great tune.

Quinn was nuts, which I say as a compliment, and would leap over fences to chase rabbits and squirrels through the neighborhood. She didn’t calm down until she was over the age of seven and even then, until she was probably 13, she was always intensely active and didn’t seem to need anyone. Benny and my sister’s dog Zoe both have pitbull in them (Zoe is fully pit), and this makes them snuggly; whatever Benny is mixed with, though, makes him also quite prickly and demanding. He’s a character, and whenever I read that dogs hide their pain, I want to submit Benny as an anomaly: He lets you know exactly what he wants, precisely when he wants it. This is probably because he’s never been denied. He’s often assessed as “spoiled” by people who’ve known him for five seconds, and this entire post perhaps attests to this truth.

The Quinn experience gave me a weird understanding of dogs, especially mutts (called “satos” in Puerto Rico). I thought you just kinda… let ’em live, listen to the vet. I was too scared, initially, to cook his food, out of fear of not providing enough nutrition. He got overweight because everyone in the neighborhood gave him treats, so we put some boundaries in place. Quinn lived until she was 16, and though my mom was making her food for years toward the end of her life, that seemed to be more about my mom than a necessity. (She maintains that dogs need hot meals. Anyway, per usual, it turns out my mom was correct.)

Benny getting the lymphoma diagnosis in February completely rocked my world. I don’t think I’ve ever felt such deep despair, and while that might sound absurd because he’s a dog and I’ve lost my own human brother, it’s because it was anticipatory and I knew how much it would hurt to lose him, and I was feeling it with the full force of all my faculties. (I also realized, strangely late, that they have the same initials: BMK.) With my brother, I’d had no time to prepare for his passing—it just happened one day, and that kind of plunge into darkness comes with its own psychological protections.

And it’s not that I was delusional about his lifespan; it was that I assumed he’d be like Quinn. But with who gets cancer and why, for any clear scientific reasoning, there are multiple exceptions. People who’ve never smoked get lung cancer and people who smoke a pack a day never so much as cough. Being alive is a crapshoot.

Because the prognosis of canine lymphoma is quite dire—basically, if he ended up showing more symptoms than swollen nodes, he’d die within weeks—and because it’s systemic, not tumor-based, chemotherapy was our only option, and I was receiving and reading anecdotal evidence that chemo + fresh food diet = long remission. So I got to work, and some of that is chronicled in this piece I wrote recently for Wired.

I’m putting a more precise rundown of what we feed Benny behind a paywall because I’m a professional food writer, not a professional dog-food-maker. My experience developing recipes and being a baker has helped me here because I’m able to stream-line processes. This is what’s worked for Benny: