Month: October 2025

The past seven years have been the longest stretch of time in my life that I have not had a dog. A few months after I moved in with Michael he had to put down his dog, Izzy. In his old age, Izzy, never really took to me as he had many health issues including limited vision that made him wary of everyone. It was like living with a cranky old-timer at the nursing home that you would tiptoe past in fear you’d startle him causing him to bark at the wall.

Through my dogless years, my oldest daughter, Maggie, made it her mission to find the perfect dog for me. On a regular basis she would send me pictures of dogs at shelters that she thought would work. I looked at a few and once brought my granddaughter with me to look at one who was perfect but already adopted by the time we got there. When they asked me the kind of dog I wanted, I said, “Chill, not too barky.” They said they had the perfect one and brought out a chihuahua who didn’t get the barking memo.

After Izzy was put down, Michael and I talked regularly about getting a dog but we were traveling quite a bit. It never seemed like the right time until a few months ago when we started searching on a more regular basis. We mostly used PetFinder which has listings from all of the shelters nearby. We went to see a terrier mix – a sweet dog they told us, the perfect pet. It was clear this dog was very recently pregnant and nursing puppies which was not revealed in the listing or until we asked. “But we’ll get her fixed before you adopt her,” they said and we declined.

We went again to the same shelter a short time later and I’m going to climb on a soapbox here and shout to the wind WHAT IN THE NAME OF SARAH MACLACHLEN IS GOING ON WITH ANIMAL SHELTERS? We had to be buzzed in, surrender our drivers license for photo copying, fill out a questionnaire (again) as the last one was only good for thirty days, then get put in the queue to wait to see the dogs. In this case, two brothers surrendered by an elderly owner who could no longer care for them. When our name was called we had to meet with a pet consultant and go through another grilling as if we hadn’t just answered the same questions. Yes we own our house. Yes we have a fenced yard. Yes we have a vet. Yes we have owned dogs before. Yes we have a plan for when we’re at work. No we don’t have small children in the house. No we’re not sure about owning two dogs but here we are and there is a whole buildng full of pets that need homes so….. Finally we got to meet the dogs who could have cared less about us and by that point we’d been there so long I thought we were going to end up on their adoption site.

Not to be deterred for long, Michael spent his lunch hour looking at pets and sending their info to me. One was from a smaller rescue group and on my lunch hour I started filling out the adoption paperwork. Have you ever put a dog down? Why did you put the dog down? What was the date you put the dog down? Would you agree to having the dog meet your other pets? Would you agree to having a home visit so we can see the environment the dog would be in? I declared I was done. The hoop jumping trying to adopt a rescue dog had gotten too crazy for me. Michael pivoted and turned to Craigslist and next thing I know there’s the dog of my dreams in a text. A sweet, white terrier named Ghost whose young owner was moving and couldn’t bring him to their new apartment.

The next day we put the address in our phone and headed towards rehoming the dog I knew would be perfect. He was except that he barked at us nonstop the entire time we were there. I whispered sweet nothings to him and held my hand out and he never stopped barking. “He seems really afraid,” Mike said. “To be honest,” I said, “I think my big hair is scaring the shit out of him,” which would not be the first time that happened.

I couldn’t stop thinking about Ghost and the next day said maybe we should try again. I went to run a few errands and Mike found a dog at a different shelter and drove out to see him while I was gone. He thought it was a go and called back when I got home to make sure he was still there and I could see him. He already had a hold on him as smaller dogs are the Labubu(s) of the pet adoption world – everybody wants one.

Michael found another one on Craigslist – a very specific kind of doodle that goes for thousands of dollars and yet could be ours for the Very Low Price of $250. He sent me the link. He was cute all right but a few minutes later the link had been removed. “Just a misunderstanding with someone,” the seller said and after some back and forth we went the next day to look at him at a remote parking lot thirty minutes away. “We’re either coming home with a dog,” I said, “or we’re going to end up dead. ” We waited a bit in the empty lot, and I thought of every show I’ve watched on Netflix where some dumb shmucks end up in the wrong place and are held at gunpoint until they agree to be drug runners.

I may have exaggerated a wee bit because we met a very nice woman with a dog she couldn’t keep. She had three dogs and a new granddaughter with a heart condition that she needed to help her daughter manage. The youngest of her pack needed to be rehomed. I walked him and he didn’t pull, he immediately rolled over on his back when I went to pet him, he did not bark at us. We closed the deal and put him in the car.

A week later Michael said, “I think that woman drugged the dog when she introduced him to us because he is not that mellow.” No, he is not. He thinks the minute he leaves the house everybody can’t wait to meet him. He loves a cool, refreshing drink from the toilet bowl. He terrorizes the cat, running so fast into him every time he comes in from the backyard that he ends up tackling him. He eats his food, drinks his water, and gets in his face constantly. The cat loathes him and looks at us in contempt for bringing this buffoon into his otherwise quiet life.

But on a cute scale he is a solid 10++++++. He is so happy to start the day he can’t stand it. He loves when our grandkids come over because they run him ragged. Some days he’s good on his walks but more often than not he’s a shit. He likes to jump on the couch and knock every pillow on the floor. He pulls every toy he has out of the basket to the point that it looks like we’re running a daycare. He follows us everywhere as if we can only be successful with his input.

My criteria all along when we were looking for a dog was that I wanted a female and not a puppy. Meet Ernie – our seven month old puppy. 50% some kind of doodle, 50% unmedicated attention deficit disorder, and (not anytime soon) our good boy.

Before Mark’s death, I was a frequent contestant in the If That Were To Happen Me game. This is where someone throws out a tidbit of a life event and you fill in the blank. Sometimes it could be fun like spending mega millions from a lottery win or living abroad for a year. The food! The wine! The scenery!

More often than not, though, it is a more dire circumstance – death of a spouse, death of a child, a devastating diagnosis, making a decision about life support, an aging parent who cannot safely live on their own, an unwanted divorce, someone you love who is an addict, a fractured relationship beyond repair. The only rule of the game is that you have zero life experience with said topic which makes it obvious that you know exactly what the next right thing is to do. But what happens when life does hand you one of those circumstances, when you can no longer play the game you were so good at when nothing was at stake?

The summer Mark died was the same summer a dear friend’s husband was losing his life to cancer. They were taking a family vacation a few hours away from us and we drove down on a Sunday to meet them for the day. All of it was so normal – the conversations, the laughter, the ease of being with long-time friends, and yet crushingly sad. How I would glance at Jim and plead with the universe that he was too good to take. How I wanted to take him aside and promise him that I would be there for his wife, but every practiced conversation in my head got stuck in my throat. Little did I know then that my own husband was going to beat him to the other side by eleven days.

Three weeks after that visit there would be a horrific boating accident on the same lake we had been on when a duck boat would venture out in questionable weather that quickly became life threatening. Seventeen people on board would die, five of them children, who became trapped inside the boat. One woman who managed to escape with her nephew lost nine family members that day. The story was national news for many days and I watched in horror. We were just there. Five children? An entire family gone? How is this possible? I texted Carla. Did you see this? Can you even imagine? Two months later I would learn in my own life that everything can change in the blink of an eye and there is no going back from the edge of that.

We are all lousy contestants in the game of pretending we would know exactly what to do when life upends all that we cherish, though, we like to believe that is not the case. The chasm between what if and what now is too big to cross with any certainty save for those who got pushed to the side that was just fiction until it wasn’t.

And on that side the only thing we have figured out is that we are here and we have keep going.