Broken Hearts Need Tending

There is no greater remedy for a broken heart than the boundless warmth of an animal’s love.

In 2017, a woman named Susan experienced a terrible tragedy. In the midst of a messy breakup, an unexpected career change, and financial hardship, the one person who kept her going was her dog, Bucky. Bucky, named for the Marvel superhero Bucky Barnes, was a very good boy. At a glance, most would call him a Pitbull, but his mismatched blue and brown eyes and his penchant for mischief betrayed his Siberian Husky ancestry. For more than two years, Susan and Bucky had been inseparable. The pair could often be found on the couch, Bucky’s head tucked under Susan’s arm as she played her video games or scoured the web for the latest memes pertaining to Brenden Frasier. They were a perfect match and a loving god wouldn’t have had the heart to tear them apart.

Alas, not all gods are loving and Bucky’s life was cut tragically short when, in typical Husky fashion, he escaped his leash and sprinted for adventure. Though Susan gave chase, she was not able to catch him. A nearby neighbor, who had seen Susan and Bucky many times over the years, sought to help and rushed to intercept and capture the wayward dog. Startled by the sight of a near stranger lunging for him, Bucky reacted with instinct and clamped his jaws down upon the neighbor. Though initially spurred to aid, the neighbor’s disposition changed as she nursed the bloody wound Bucky had rendered. Slowed by the encounter, Bucky allowed Susan to re-capture him, unaware that he had signed his own death warrant.

A court case followed and judgement was passed. Susan was ordered to put Bucky to sleep and, suddenly, her best friend in the world was gone.

I met Susan the following year, after she had moved to California to escape the memory of the home she had made with Bucky. A mutual friend introduced us and we soon began seeing one another. As our relationship grew, she confided the story of Bucky to me. There was no mistaking that it continued to pain her. She would often dream of him and I’d wake up in the night to the sound of her crying. The guilt and self-recrimination she had placed on herself were staggering. As time went on, it became clear that this was causing her mental health to deteriorate. Well aware of her anxiety, I suggested that she might want to look into rescuing another dog.

“After what happened, I will never adopt another dog again,” she replied.

Though I didn’t doubt that she spoke in all seriousness, I did not for a moment believe this to be true. An Instagram feed curated to show her as many dog pictures as possible and an Amazon wish list full of pet supplies told a story her words did not. But people must grieve in their own time, and I did not pressure her to begin the search. It would happen naturally when she was ready.

Time passed and our relationship deepened. Though she continued to struggle with the guilt of her loss, the healing process continued and, as the months stretched into a year, she would make little comments suggesting she may have changed her mind.

“That place doesn’t have a big enough yard for doggos,” she said of a house we were looking to rent as we prepared to move in with one another.

“I love Pitties, but I think I’d want another husky *if* I ever got another dog,” she told me as we played with a friend’s meathead of a Pitbull.

“Do you want to look at the shelter website with me?” she asked once it became clear that the resolve of her grief had faltered.

And so we began looking for our first fur baby together.

We explored several options together. A friend, whose German Shepherd had become pregnant, offered us a puppy named Draco, but we preferred to rescue a dog from the shelter as Draco and his siblings were all but assured families of their own while many shelter dogs are not. When exploring a local animal shelter, I met a beautiful golden retriever named Liza, only for her to have been adopted before I could return with Susan to introduce them. And there were so many shining, furry faces across every shelter website we checked. Though any of these dogs could have become the first pup in our family, Susan was adamant that we find the right one. I confess that after so many failed introductions and wrong fits, I began to wonder if she really was ready for a new pup in her life.

Then, on the 4th of July, it finally happened. The two of us were in Georgia for work and, without a kitchen of our own to use, I ordered a holiday feast to be delivered to our hotel. I left the room to pick up our vittles and tip the driver, but was surprised by what met me upon my return. As soon as I stepped into the hotel room, Susan leapt from the bed, pressed her phone directly into my face, and cried, “Baby, he’s so grumpy, I love him!”

There on the screen was a pixelated, grungy photo of an annoyed looking Siberian Husky. He was staying in a shelter near our home in California and he was “looking for his forever home.”

She told me that she wanted this dog more than anything in life. I didn’t want to discourage what seemed to be a very positive development, but I had concerns. “SuSu, we won’t be back home for another three weeks. A dog like that won’t be in the shelter that long.”

“Yes, he will!” she insisted.

“He looks so angry in that picture. What if he has a bad temperament?”

“He doesn’t, he’s perfect!”

“We don’t have a big enough backyard for a big dog.”

“It’ll be fine! You’ll walk him lots!”

Well, there’s no arguing with that sort of flawless logic. So I stepped back, agreed that we’d go meet him if he was still there when we got back, and prepared myself to hear that he was no longer on the shelter’s website within a few days. In the meantime, there was a hotel room feast that needed eating.

As fate would have it, Susan was right and I was wrong. Every day, she checked the shelter’s website to see if he was still there. Occasionally, she’d even call the shelter to confirm that the site wasn’t mistaken. Day in and day out, the Grumpy Husky was still there, as though waiting for us. A week passed. Then two. As we approached the end of our final week in Georgia, we made a plan to fly home, drop off our bags at the house, and take my car to go meet our new friend. On our flight, Susan couldn’t talk of anything but “our new Husky.” It was a done deal in her mind. We would sweep in and he would be ours. It was as simple as that. I confess, I felt more anxiety than excitement. I did not want to see her heart broken again.

Our plane landed and Los Angeles traffic was as slow as ever. By the time we reached the shelter, it was late afternoon and they would be closing soon. We spoke to the manager, giving him the Husky’s Kennel number and requesting to meet him.

“Oh, he is such a love bug!” the manager squealed. “He’s been here for so long!”

“How long?” Susan asked.

“Three months!” she replied.

We couldn’t believe it. How had such a magnificent dog been in a cage for so long? When we expressed this disbelief, the manager regaled us with an interesting bit of trivia. While the HBO series, Game of Thrones, was still on the air, the breeding and selling of Siberian Huskies had gone through the roof as fans of the show wanted their very own “Dire Wolves.” But Huskies can be a difficult breed. They are possessed of a natural curiosity and stubborn disposition, making them difficult to train and natural escape artists. As a result, Husky sales would typically go up surrounding episodes of Game of Thrones featuring Dire Wolves, but by that season’s finale, a large number of those Huskies would end up in shelters as their new owners found them too difficult to raise. And so shelters found themselves overwhelmed with Huskies, many of whom lingered in shelters for months before eventually being put to sleep. Our Husky was just one of many in the shelter that day.

When the manager dropped us off in the back kennel area and asked a volunteer to bring out our Husky, I admit that I questioned what we were doing. “I’ve always wanted a Husky to be my real-life D&D companion,” I told Susan. “But I’m kinda nervous after hearing how difficult they can be.”

“Bucky was like that,” she told me. “He’d do something bad like go through the garbage or dig up the carpet and then put himself in timeout in his crate because he knew that that’s what I’d do when I found out. Huge shit eating grin when I found him too, like, ‘You can’t be mad, Mom, I’m already in timeout! Little fucker.”

There was such a pained affection in her words.

“You think we’re ready for that?” I asked.

For just a moment, she seemed to waiver. There was a flash of doubt, then resolve once more.

“We have to give him the attention he deserves. Be super responsible with him and make sure he’s really well trained. It’ll be a big job. But I don’t want to leave him if he’s been here for so long. What if they transfer him to a kill shelter?”

Not much I could say to that. Then the door opened and the volunteer emerged with a black and white husky wearing an infectious grin. I spotted it a moment before Susan did. Our Husky’s photo on the shelter website had been blurry and pixelated. It had been difficult to make out specific details, like the color of his eyes. Or rather, colors. Our Husky trotted up to us, sporting one blue eye and one brown eye, just like Bucky. Susan erupted in tears as she crouched down to meet him. The rest of the Meet and Greet was a formality. She had found the one.

To carry on the tradition established by his Big Brofur Bucky, we gave our boy the name of a Marvel supervillain: Dormammu, Lord of the Dark Dimension. Dormammu proved to be every bit the Husky we were promised. Playful, affectionate, chatty, stubborn, and oh so weird. His personality is like that of no other dog I’ve known. It has been four years since Susan and I adopted him. Since then, we rescued two more pups. Another Husky, Fuego, came from an abusive home and had a fiery temper to match his name. And then, in the first weeks of the COVID-19 Pandemic, we found an abandoned Scottish Terrier who we named Chewie. We’re an eclectic bunch of strays, but we’ve built a family and a pack, rooted in love and care for one another. And it all began with Dormammu.