The Dog Who Would Save Me

It was an ugly break-up.

I was a sophomore in college; plenty old enough to get my heart broken, but not old enough to know what to do about it. The guy I had been dating for a few months cheated on me with his ex-girlfriend back home during Thanksgiving break. I didn't learn of it until Christmas break, when she -- who I did not know and had never wanted to meet -- showed up at my roommate's parent's house while I was visiting and confessed their offense with more than a little pride.

We split, then drifted back together as the young and inexperienced often do. By Easter, we were sitting on the back steps of my dorm and he was telling me that I had too many personal problems and was dragging him down. I must have cried rivers, though I don't really remember. So it goes with young love.

On a dead-end road across the street from my dorm was the city animal shelter. I began volunteering there on long Friday afternoons when I had nothing better to fill the time. So it must have been a Friday when I first saw the little dog who would save me. Standing at the front of a shared cage on the right hand side of the main aisle, his short nose fit neatly inside one of the diamonds in the chain-link fence. While the dogs around him danced excitedly and barked a cacophony, he simply stood there staring as if he had been waiting for only me. I took him out for a walk -- my assignment as a volunteer -- and didn't want to give him back.

The coordinator at the front desk said he was a stray who had been deposited at the shelter after ignoring repeated warnings not to chase the cats belonging to the generous stranger who was feeding him. They said he was a Boston terrier, but if so he was the farthest from breed standard Boston terrier I had ever laid eyes on. Instead of sporting a white blaze down his forehead and across his nose that should have given him two black-masked eyes, his entire head and neck were white. His left eye was brown, his right eye a pale aqua blue. Above his brown eye was a white ear, while above his blue eye the ear was black. He suffered a serious underbite, and his wrinkly pink tongue didn't quite fit inside his mouth. The overall effect was puzzling; some would say he was so ugly he was cute. At perhaps a year and a half old, he had already been hardened by life on the streets. Demodectic mange had turned his white head pink, scaly, and bald, and he wore the dull, dirty coat of a dog who hadn't been properly fed or bathed in a while.

He needed someone to love him, and I needed someone to love, so we became each other's. I named him Patch in hopes that he would heal the holes in my heart.

 

Focusing on him, in addition to creating my first self-constructed world, moved me past the pain of that break-up. In the coming years, this little Boston and I would see each other through many more wonderful and painful and difficult times.

In June 2000, I turned a blind eye when Patch peed on my leg, still groggy from the anesthesia of his neuter surgery. Then I sat up with him after he surreptitiously spit out his pain pill -- exhausted, shaking, and in agony, he couldn't lay down so I wedged him on his back between couch pillows and stayed up with him all night.


He was bored while I took summer classes so he amused himself by chewing on the baseboards, spiral notebooks full of class lectures, and once a highlighter that left his face and front paws blue for three days. When Tropical Storm Allison stalled over East Texas and flash-flooded my first apartment with 8 inches of water, I carried Patch over my shoulder while we were passed along a human chain from one fireman to another until we reached higher ground. We lost a number of possessions to muddy water, but we were safe...and I didn't have to pay for any of the damage he had caused to the walls or carpet.

Later that year we graciously accepted a new man into our lives, for he was a dog person and Patch was a people dog. Patch happily joined the pack at my boyfriend's parents' house, eating cheese treats and chasing the cat. The following year Patch laid on the couch at a new (second-floor) apartment and eyed my cupcake as I blew out the candles for my 21st birthday. He celebrated as I got engaged that summer. (Or at least I think he celebrated. Patch had a look that landed somewhere near boredom and perpetual annoyance most of the time, unless there was food involved.)

In 2002, just two weeks shy of college graduation, Patch was the first to catch my tears as my engagement unraveled. Many nights he spent with ears wet from my sorrow.

When I made a new home in my first real adult apartment, Patch lounged in sunbeams as I worked at a daily newspaper. He was skeptical but silent when I reunited with my former fiance in the fall, and traveled happily in the car as I followed this man to Dallas in late 2003. He was also with me when that relationship ended for good in 2004, and served as my only comfort in the tiny, slightly grungy, cheap apartment where I ended up.

Alone, marooned in a city I didn't like by a man I was no longer with, Patch sympathized with my depression by stress-eating -- after he devoured half a box of dry Belgian waffle mix, I found myself scrubbing dried dog vomit from the carpet and telling him through my tears, "I know you're not happy here! I'm not happy either!" He just stared at me with soulful eyes, one blue as day and one dark as night. After he helped himself to most of a bag of Double Stuf Oreos that won him a trip to the emergency vet, I installed a gate between the dog and the kitchen, and he spent his days watching Animal Planet. On Sundays I would take him to the dog park, where he would spend the afternoon asking one person after another to scratch that spot right above his tail while he ignored the other dogs completely.

In 2005 a new man walked into the apartment. This man, whom I would marry a few years later, likes to tell the story that Patch eyed him and said, "Momma. Not another one, Momma." But they became fast friends, even though his new man had never owned a dog -- but Patch was no regular dog. He was my best friend wrapped in fur. We were a package deal.

In 2006 Patch helped me visit my mother for the last time, insisting on sitting with her even though she was too weak to hold his weight. We put a pillow between her shrinking lap and his four feet, and he dozed with his chin on the kitchen table. I will never forget them that content.


He was much less happy to learn we were moving to the Midwest a few months later: he destroyed a box of bakeware to voice his disapproval just before moving day. Nevertheless, he traveled about 1200 miles over 26 hours in a rented truck, shaking and malcontent, on a pillow in my lap the whole way. He suffered the indignity of being fed his dog kibble from a bowl at a truck stop, and was even made to wait in the parking lot while we ate at a restaurant somewhere in Tennessee. His payoff, though, was the elevator at the pet-friendly La Quinta where we stopped for the night. For years Patch referred to it as the "magic room" where he went in, the doors closed, the doors opened, and suddenly he was in an entirely new place that smelled of new things. This may have been the highlight of his life.

During the darkest days of my life, Patch spent untold hours curled up next to me as I mourned my mother's death in 2007. Once again he silently sopped up my tears and kept me from drowning as the waves of grief washed over me. He was my constant. An anchor with paws.

Rumor has it Patch helped pick out the engagement ring my husband would give me -- one single, nearly invisible inclusion in an otherwise flawless diamond, a white line, is said to be a Patch hair frozen forever in stone. My husband explained that he let Patch see it beforehand, and the dog kindly approved of our union.

Life moved faster after I got married, and the white on Patch's paws began spreading up his legs. His belly hairs turned white too, and he began to slow down. In 2009 or 2010 he developed a lump in the lymph nodes of his neck. Multiple aspirations of the mass were inconclusive. Slowly it grew until it pressed against his trachea and labored his breathing; the vet suspected lymphoma. By then he was an old friend who had lived a meaningful life and deserved a kind end. I took no heroic measures, just kept him as comfortable as he had kept me.

One May day in 2011 I returned from work to find Patch's soul had risen from his crate and chased a cat across the rainbow bridge. In despair I called my husband, who was stuck at JFK airport due to a storm. "We lost Patch," I said brokenly, my voice thick. "I lost Patch." Half of my heart had gone with him. With one hand holding the phone and one hand stroking Patch's side, I laid down on the floor next to his crate and cried almost as hard as I had for my mother.

For two hours I stayed like that on the linoleum, paying homage to my most faithful friend who never left my side. The one who had patched the holes in my heart more than a decade earlier had given me so much more than I could ever thank him for. Wherever he was, was home, and now he was gone.

Today marks five years since that loss. Like a long-ago injury, my heart has mostly healed. Though it aches from time to time, I'm old enough now to know what to do with it. First I eat some good food. Then I find a warm sunbeam to lay in or something to chase, and I let it carry me on.