shot through with crazing but will I crack?

There is a story that makes me cry, hard, every time I read it. "The 24-Hour Dog" by Jeanette Winterson. (You can find it here if you like.) The story is the same every time I read it. The words never shift or change. I know exactly what will happen even before I pull the book from the shelf: A person (I imagine the narrator as a woman but there is no need to do so) adopts a dog. She prepares her home for the arrival of the dog. When the call comes, she retrieves the puppy. There is evening, and there is morning, which are the first day and also the last day. The next evening, the narrator returns the puppy to the farmer. That is the entirety of the plot.

The narrator tells us over and over that the dog will find her out; that the dog has found her out. That everything she fiercely loves about this brand new puppy would be everything she fears about everything; all that love and vulnerability, clashing and uniting would expose her every tender spot and stream from every pin hole in her person:

I was looking into the future, thinking about what I would have to be to the dog in return for what he would be to me. It would have been much easier if he had been an easier dog, I mean, less intelligent, less sensitive, less brimful of that jouissance which should not be harmed.

At the end she says that "though I have given him away, I can't lose him, and he can't die. There he is, forever part of the pattern, the dance, and running beside me, joyful." These are the last words of the story, and they seem to be meant as a kind of consolation. She insists that she retains at least something of the dance, at least a dim shadow of the joy, at least a ghost of the pattern. But earlier she was more honest:

I knew I was moving through something that had substance. Something serious. Here was the dog, me, the sun, the sky, in a pattern, in a dance, and time was dancing with us, in the motes of light. The day was in the form of us and we were in the form of the day. Time would return it, as memory and as futurity; part of the pattern, the dance that I had refused.

Whatever dance she is dancing, it is not this dance, not this dance she refused. Yes, I know she is invoking Eliot's Four Quartets; yes, she can counter me with "that which is only living can only die" and the perfect memory of that perfect day with that perfect dog will never die until she does. There will be no physical death for a metaphysical dog. But how much reality has she relinquished in order to keep her heart intact and to preserve the fiction of impenetrable wholeness?