The universe has decided to mess with me yet again. This chapter is titled “Let’s give the swim coach the dog that can’t swim.”

Yes, it’s true. My sweet little Henson, who is perfect and smart and such a good boy in many ways, is just about hopeless when it comes to the water.

Duncan has been an excellent swimmer from the first night he was in our pool. I do remember his initial reaction being somewhat less than enthusiastic. But, Steve was with him every evening, and Dunc wanted to do whatever made Steve happy, so swim he did. It wasn’t long before I was getting text messages that Dunc had swum the entire length of a nearby pond, chasing after geese.

So, I assumed that Hens would pick things up just as quickly, maybe even more quickly because he had such an excellent role model in Duncan. The first time I took him out, I was cautious, throwing the decoy into shallow water where I knew he could stand. He immediately got the hang of running into the water, snatching the decoy, and bringing it back to me. I got a little braver and tossed it out into water that I knew would be just deep enough to get his feet off the ground. And that’s when the wheels came off the bus.

He immediately panicked, and dropped his back feet to the bottom. Luckily, when he was vertical, he could get his head out of the water and he bounced his way back to where he could stand. He was obviously a little confused. I repeated the toss, and he did exactly the same thing. At that point, he’d had enough and got out of the water.

As I tossed the decoy for Duncan, I hoped that Hens would observe the process and try it again. Instead, he ran out to the limit of where he could stand, waited patiently for Duncan to retrieve the decoy and swim it back, and then grabbed the decoy out of Duncan’s mouth and brought it back to me. As I said, he can be pretty darn smart when he wants to be. I am certainly not a dog training expert, or even a novice yet, but I am pretty sure that this process wasn’t going to fly with the real hunter type people.

It became clear that I was going to have to spend some time in the water, actually teaching him what to do. I wasn’t looking forward to this, as I severely dislike water where I can’t see the bottom, but Hens had to get used to swimming in lakes, so I had to take one for the team and jump in.

When they say anger is part of the grief cycle, I’m not entirely sure that they meant cursing your dead husband out for making you get into the giant fish toilet with the dog was what they meant, but that’s where I’m currently at. I guess I should be thankful that since Hens was such a mess, I had to focus more on keeping his head above the water than on whatever it was that might or might not have just touched my foot.

I was hoping to get away with wading in to my knees, but before I knew it, I was neck deep, with Hens perched as high on my shoulders as he could be. Later, when I was describing the experience to G, he observed that Hens was behaving “just like every other kid we get in swim lessons.”

He was right. Puppy swim lessons had a lot in common with human lessons. In the 35 years that I’ve been teaching swim lessons, I have come to realize that most kids are one of two types of swimmers: the kind that will get better with practice and explanation and a lot of patience and the kind that if I could just throw them in the deep end, they’d figure it out themselves. I was hoping that Hens was the latter, and I stood there for several seconds watching him bob fruitlessly up and down, slipping farther and farther under the water. He inhaled a decent amount of the lake before I realized that he really wasn’t getting it.

I played around with a few other swim coach tricks, but he got tired before he got the hang of swimming, so we called it quits for the day. I was hoping to end it on a high note, but instead, I basically carried him back to the shore.

As usual, I find myself wishing I’d paid more attention to what Steve did and how he did it, but this is also a chance for me to figure things out for myself. In this case, at least I have a bag of tricks to pull from. I definitely stand a better chance of teaching the dog to swim than I do replacing a shower head.

Since Steve has been gone, everything has been way harder than it has to be, and this is no exception. At the very least, Steve would have had Hens in the water a lot sooner. He also wouldn’t be saying “ewwww was that a fish, a water snake, or something I don’t even want to think about” the entire time in his head, which I’m sure Hens picks up on, but I can’t seem to turn it off. It didn’t help that he had himself so contorted at times that the tip of his tail was sticking out of the water in an odd place and out of the corner of my eye, I was sure it was some kind of water monster coming to get me.

This is one more thing that I’m sure I’ll be laughing about someday in the future. Or at least I would have laughed about it before, with Steve.

Right now, though, it is just one more thing that didn’t go as planned, one more thing I can’t control, and one more thing that has me saying, “Steve should be here to deal with this,” over and over again.

In the meantime, it’s time to dig out the doggie life jacket that Dunc turned up his nose at, and get back to work on doggie paddle with Henson.

Liz Pinkey is a contributing writer to the Times News. Her column appears weekly in our Saturday feature section.