Sometimes They Choose Us

This is a beautiful story for me to write but it is also a challenging and emotional story for me to tell. Not because it isn’t an amazing story of love, rescue and healing but because Malik is no longer with me in this physical world. On March 5, 2021 Malik, my beautiful and goofy boy, made his transition from the physical realm to the nonphysical realm. Despite my grief and aching sadness, never have I felt so drawn to telling his story before. There is a feeling that sharing snippets of his journey here is a way for me to honor and celebrate the 12 years we spent together. There’s also this knowingness, this belief in synchronicity and signs; this is a loving Universe’s way of allowing me to reflect, to grieve and to heal. And so, I shall follow the Universe’s breadcrumbs and tell you his, and subsequently part of my, story.

Malik and I were destined to be, our paths aligned before we even met. I was 25 years old at the time and had just started volunteering at a local animal shelter. I was a little over a year sober and feeling free and deeply passionate about saving the world. I struggled my whole life just to survive. The intensity of being a deeply feeling human and living in such a chaotic and sensorially overwhelming world left me reaching for drugs and alcohol to cope. I so often felt like I was treading water to stay alive, and it was exhausting. Sobriety offered me the gift of emotional freedom. I was taught another way to live that didn’t involve repression, hiding, numbing and escaping.

When I got sober, I was surrounded by beautiful, wise and sober women who taught me how to live sober, one day at a time. They told me to bring my dreams with me. They said “we don’t get sober to live boring lives. We get sober so we can actually live our lives. There is nothing you cannot have, do or be so long as you don’t pick up a drink or a drug and you live in partnership with a spiritual solution.” I felt the truth of their words. I was on fire and passionate about life.

I’ve always been head over heels in love with animals. I think describing myself as someone who loves animals doesn’t even begin to do it justice. I adore animals. I see their pain and their suffering, and it can sometimes overwhelm me. Their tenderness, their innocence, their instinct to be aligned without effort and their untouchable and almost unspeakable beauty dwells inside the innermost part of my heart. It gives me strength and courage to be a human who makes this world a better place for them.

With a depth and well of love like this, I never in my wildest dreams thought I would be capable of volunteering with animals at a shelter. However, in sobriety I became connected to a profound sense of spiritual faith and meaning. I found myself well-equipped to go into a place where pain and suffering existed and not take it on as my own. I found this wellspring of love inside of me and it allowed to be in the world but not of the world. It gave me an understanding that we all return to love no matter how painful the physical experience may be. With this newfound spiritual peace, I stepped into the animal shelter and began to take action and be of service to the world around me. To say it was a powerful time in my life diminishes the experience greatly. I felt as if the whole of the universe existed inside me (later I discovered it did) and I felt there was nothing I couldn’t do in this world. I felt invincible yet humble, empowered yet grounded. And the big dogs responded to this love, calm and confidence in remarkable ways. I was called the dog whisperer and there wasn’t a dog I couldn’t reach.

Malik was different from the start. First of all, he was a strikingly lovely dog, tan and white with big, tall ears and the most amazing ice blue eyes. His right eye was half-brown and half-blue. He was absolutely stunning. When he looked at you, his piercingly blue eyes looked as though they reached the core of you. People described this look as intimidating. I think they felt that way because of the intensity of those eyes. They dug in deep, and it was as if he saw all of you, even the hidden and shadow parts, the rejected and unacceptable parts. It felt off-putting. He was a medium sized dog, about 50 pounds. He was fierce in his composure, conveying a tone of “don’t mess with me” and “I’m the boss”. He showed aggression to all the other animals and sometimes showed aggression to humans. Underneath the bossiness, there was glint of what would develop to express as goofy giddiness and unabashed joy. It was like it was just underneath the surface, ready to bubble up and make itself known at any moment.

At the time I was learning so much about dogs. I was coming to realize was they really didn’t want to be in charge. I was finding that dogs needed a leader, someone to follow, someone to trust and if they didn’t have a leader they engaged in very similar behaviors as humans do when they are scared. They would react with fight, flight, freeze or please. In a shelter environment, a dog with a fight reaction wouldn’t always last very long. However, I found myself so attracted to those dogs with aggressive behavior. I would see Malik at the front of his kennel, and he would be ferociously barking and pulling, with his teeth, at the chain link. I saw through his tough guy act and I would look him straight in the eyes and say “SIT” in a calm yet commanding voice. He would immediately stop and sit down. He needed a leader.

The shelter manager, a strong, no nonsense and burly man, had already made up his mind about Malik. Some shelters have no choice but to literally make life and death decisions on a daily basis. Municipal shelters are required, by contract with the city, to take in dogs and if there are no kennels available, decisions must be made. Furthermore, Malik represented a threat to humans and to other animals. Adopting him out was a legal risk. Therefore, Malik was slated for euthanasia.

Malik was placed in an outside kennel and his euthanasia was scheduled for the next day. The assistant manager, some volunteers and I had fallen head over heels in love with this dog and we couldn’t let this dog die. We joined forces to save his life. I was committed as I drove my car around that gravel driveway. I was breaking him out of jail and saving his life. I opened up my door, grabbed the keys to unlock the padlock of his kennel, looped a slip knot lead around his neck and coaxed him into my car. Honestly, I only intended to save his life. I had no idea that he would save mine.

Once out of the shelter, I saw a dog I didn’t recognize. His tail remained tucked, and his ears pinned back for the first six months of his time with me. When I introduced him to Maddie, my black lab mix, it was as if he had never been around another dog. Maddie was such a nonthreatening and submissive sweet pea and therefore Malik wasn’t threatened by her. He was unsure at first and it took months, but she taught him the joy of playing and of being a dog. I had a feeling his life before me was unsafe, scary and uncertain. Because he was unsafe, he never had the opportunity to learn how to actually be a dog. It turned out underneath all the dominance, the bossiness, the fierce independence and the messy aggression was really fear.

I believe, as many traditions of mysticism and spiritualism teach, there are only two main emotions: love and fear. I saw my job, as his foster guardian, was to teach him the opposite of what he had learned. My job was to teach him all about love. My goal was to shine a light on the fear and darkness, dismissing it and replacing it with love and light. It sounds lofty and it is. But concretely it was accomplished by offering him discipline, security, safety, exercise and buckets and buckets of reassurance and love. He needed me to show him the world was a safe place to live. And over time, he became stable, secure, calm and trustworthy.

We walked every single day. I was reading a lot of Cesar Milan and regardless of the many opinions out there about him, his work helped me. I realized the power of “a tired dog is a good dog” and the profound influence a pack walk has on a dog’s well-being. I realized the managing of my own emotional energy around dogs was the most important thing I could when rehabilitating them. I began to trust myself to be the person he needed. We grew together.

During those first six months Malik taught me so much about my own responses to life. Malik and I weren’t so different. Formative experiences taught us both the world wasn’t a safe place to live. Experiences taught us that we needed to fight to survive. Through the mirror of his behavior, I saw my own behavior was often based in fear. As much of my life as I could remember, I was defensive, argumentative and sometimes even combative and downright aggressive. Together Malik and I learned we could drop our defenses and engage in the world in new ways.

Eventually the shelter gifted Malik to me. I don’t remember if it was because they didn’t think he was safe to adopt out or if they felt he deserved to continue to grow and be with me. I do remember thinking I really wanted my second dog to be a purebred German Shepherd. It wasn’t that I didn’t adore Malik, it was about having this ideal image of being a German Shepherd owner. I wrestled with it for a little while and then someone told me “sometimes they pick us”. I couldn’t have known, at the time, how true that would be for me. I needed him just as much, if not more, than he needed me.

Over the coming years, Malik and I would teach each other so much about trust, respect and love. As I worked to create safety for him, I began to feel safety in my own world too. I saw this dog go from outright fear to pure love, pure trust and absolute loyalty to me. Through his love and trust, I began to love and trust myself and to trust the love and benevolence of the Universe. I started to flourish, emotionally, personally and professionally. I enrolled in a master’s level program studying leadership development and I met a man. Falling in love with a man was a big deal for me. I was so traumatically wounded in childhood and through the pain of my addiction, that I didn’t think I was capable of romantic love. My relationship with this man taught me that wasn’t so. Through these big milestones in life, Malik was right there alongside me. I finished my master’s degree program, moved in with the man, and accepted a position as the director of the animal shelter.

What happens next isn’t pretty, romantic or glamorous. Tears stream down my face as I allow this part of the story to surface. The relationship with the man didn’t work out and to say I was devastated would be an understatement. I was a little over 4 years sober and I moved out. I took three of the four dogs we had together and moved back to Terre Haute, into a small and shitty duplex. I fell into sadness and despair, doing anything I possibly could to not have to feel the depth of the pain I felt with the loss of the relationship. I tried to feel, deal and heal but it had triggered some deep abandonment wound inside. My father had committed suicide when I was 12 years old, and it felt like all the grief of that loss was activated through the loss of this relationship.

It wasn’t that I didn’t understand I was an alcoholic and addict, it was that I didn’t care anymore. I couldn’t, could not, cope with how I was feeling. I didn’t have access to the only solution I knew – a spiritual solution, a connection with a Higher Power. I couldn’t feel God or the benevolence of the Universe anymore. I could not understand how I did everything right, I stayed sober, went to school, did the work and the relationship didn’t work out. I was a good person, and it still didn’t work out. My relapse started small, with NyQuil. Then it plateaued for a while with the marijuana maintenance program, and eventually it escalated to prescription pills. It was messy and it lasted years. Malik was one of the steadiest streams of love and support during those five to six years. We had developed a bond in my sobriety that couldn’t be broken even in my desolation.

There were times of light during my active addiction. It wasn’t all darkness. One of those times remains bright as the sun inside my mind. Malik and I went to visit my Gramps in a nursing home facility. Malik, a dog who was going to put to sleep because he was so aggressive, went with me to a nursing home and brought love, peace and joy to human hearts. We walked into my Gramps’s room. I sat down in a chair and I told Malik to sit. Then I told him to “sit pretty” which involved putting both front paws in my hand and resting the weight of his body on his hindquarters. When he placed his paws back on the ground, my Gramps patted his head and said: “for such a big dog, he sure is well-behaved; I think I like him”. Malik and I proceeded down the hallway after our visit, stopping in other residents’ rooms. Malik loved people intensely. He brought so much joy to them.

Several months later, Gramps passed away. I was blessed enough and sober enough at the time to have been able to show up and be present as he took his last breath. When I got home that night, I remember, so vividly, sitting in my bed and sobbing. Malik laid the length of my body and licked away my tears. There was nothing he wanted more than to comfort and be with me.

In those last two to three years, I laid waste to my life. I was laid off from my job; then I lost another job. I had a hard time showing up for my life or for my dogs’ lives beyond the basics of survival. I racked up debt. I was barely surviving, barely making it through the day. I was a shell of a woman. I ended up in emergency rooms as my physical body started to fail me. The house I was living in was literally falling apart from lack of attention. The dishes were stacked high in the sink.

The only reason I am alive today is because of my dogs. More specifically, because of Malik. When I was in bed, near death, he would be the one who would nudge me. I have no doubt, without his love, I would not be here. He became the only source of solace I had in the world as had completely and totally isolated myself from the outside world.

All of it came to a new kind of bottom in 2017. I missed Christmas and my Mother came to drop off presents at my house. She looked around at my house and at my five dogs and said: “your house looks like your father’s did when he committed suicide”. Those words were the catalyst that inspired me to get sober. My Mom, my Dad, Malik and God all conspiring for me to live. My Mom for saying the words. My Dad, who’s death inspired me to go on living. And Malik, who’s love kept me living long enough to get sober again. Over the next few days, I would deeply surrender and make a decision to get sober. I got sober January 9, 2018 and I haven’t had a drink or drug since.

Throughout the last 12 years of my life Malik has been the one constant. He was my inspiration in my first period of sobriety. He was with me during and after the relationship. He was with me when I relapsed, and he was with me when I got sober again. I am overwhelmed with gratitude to the point of tears for being able to show up for him sober the last three years. Guided by a loving Universe/God, I showed up fully and committed to his well-being and his life. These past years have been some of the most memorable of our time together.

We humans are infinitely blessed through our relationships with dogs. The last three years Malik and I would take slow walks every single day, rain or shine. We got our pictures taken together at our favorite park in Indianapolis. We played in the snow. I got to value and pay attention to his beauty and the fullness in which he lived, even as he slowed down and aged. I got to see the full expression of his character. He, even in his senior years, had this constant glean of mischief in his eyes and a steadiness of joy and happiness exuding from his being. When I got home from anywhere, he was sitting at the front door waiting for me. He would snap and gnash his jaws at me, communicating with me joyously and celebrating that I was home. He would whip his head side to side, wiggle his entire body and convey, through his whole body, his love and affection for me. He would talk to me constantly. I would be sitting in a chair and he would come up and gnash his jaws. We would howl together as firetrucks and ambulances went by. I’ve never known such love from a dog.

The last three years were his golden years; he was a senior dog, and his physical body was aging. In November 2020, he started having seizures. We saved each other in 2009 and at the time the vet estimated his age to be between 1 ½ and 3 years old. In November 2020 he would have been between 12 and 14 years old. His seizures got closer and closer together. With each one, I lost a little more of the Malik I knew, and it took his physical body so long to recover from each one. Through all of it, I got the blessing and privilege to show up for him the last few months of his life. I showed up with presence, love, tenderness and care recognizing the sanctity of his life and the sanctity of this time together. When he would have a seizure, I would stay calm, holding him and reassuring him he was okay. I would hand feed him in the days following. I would take him on short walks to keep his anxiety at bay. Seizures are scary for dogs. They don ‘t understand why they feel so different before, during and afterwards. I felt the holiness of our time together.

At the beginning of March, I made the decision to let him transition to the nonphysical, peacefully and at home. I made the appointment with the vet and I knew we only had a week together. We took three short and slow walks a day. He ate all the yummy food. We curled up together on the couch and watched TV, while the sunlight streamed in through the window. I gazed into his beautiful eyes. I celebrated and recounted the magnificence of his life and the gifts he gave me. We invited God, our ancestors and all the animals who had already passed into our time together.

I let other people support and carry me so I could be there for him. I remembered that he wasn’t gone yet, and I put aside my feelings so that I could be present for his last days on this earth. I honored him beyond anything I’ve been capable of doing in the past. This dog, who gave me his whole life, who taught me about love, life, safety, security, trust and respect, deserve the very best last days in his physical body. The honor was all mine.

The day of his passing, I sat on my bed with my hand on his heart and I let him know what a privilege it was for me to witness his soul’s evolution. I let him know I was immeasurably blessed to be his human. I assured him he was always welcome in my life and in my heart, in all the ways. I lovingly gazed into his eyes and he back into mine. Having deeply cultivated spiritualism and mysticism, I recognized these moments as completely and fully sacred. I walked through some of my favorite memories with him: hiking at ALL the state parks, going horseback riding and him running free through the woods, him looking back at me with that mischievous and stubborn look in his eyes, moving to Indianapolis, playing in the snow, catching snowballs and taking long walks. I told him he had my full permission to be a part of my life after he left his physical body.

In my reflections after his passing, I’ve come to believe he didn’t just come here to teach me about life and love. I think he came here to teach me about death too. He taught me that death isn’t the end. It is only the beginning of something different than life on this earth. I believed and I still believe he survived his death. Malik left this world on March 5, 2021 at around 4:30 PM in the afternoon. Never in my life have I felt the aching grief of loss like I did that evening. I walked around my house wailing in grief, allowing myself to fully feel the depth of the loss.

After his passing, I was deeply comforted by a friend who reflected to me that Malik completed a full cycle of my life with me. He was able to leave because he finished what he came here to accomplish. I was sober again; I was fully engaging in life. I didn’t need his physical protection anymore. He was able to leave knowing I would be more than OK. Honestly, during most of my sobriety I thought there were two things I wouldn’t or couldn’t stay sober through: losing Malik or losing my Mom. As I type this, tears streaming down my face, nose stuffy, can’t hardly breathe, I am still sober.

Grief is real and it needs to be felt in order to be healed. Since his passing, in my morning practice and time with God, I’ve started to invite Malik into my heart. I created a little altar for my ancestors and my pets that have passed. I light a candle for him every morning and I keep a painting of Malik to the left of where I sit in the mornings. I close my eyes and I see him, full of joy, unattached to a body that wasn’t working for him, and I see him leading the way. I see him nudging me to let things go that aren’t working for me. I see him moving obstacles out of my path. I see him making the way straight. I see him leaving me signs and orchestrating intuitive hits. I see him being a more active part of my life from the nonphysical than he ever could have been in the confines of a physical body.

Several things have happened since his passing. I had downloaded the audiobook “Signs: The Secret Language of the Universe” by Laura Jackson months before Malik’s death. I thought it was a book about signs and synchronicities from the Universe and I hadn’t started listening to it yet. One day, when I was particularly missing Malik, I picked up my phone and thought “huh, I think I’ll start listening to this” and when I did, I was blown away. The whole book is about communicating with the other side. It is about, very specifically, asking for signs from loved ones that have passed on. And at the beginning of the book the author read something I had loved and shared many times before on social media. She read a quote by Henry Scott Holland. It reads:

“Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened. Everything remains exactly as it was. I am I, and you are you, and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged. Whatever we were to each other, that we are still. Call me by the old familiar name. Speak of me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference into your tone. Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together. Play, smile, think of me, pray for me. Let my name be ever the household word that it always was. Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it. Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was. There is absolute and unbroken continuity. What is this death but a negligible accident? Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just round the corner. All is well. Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost. One brief moment and all will be as it was before. How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!”

As I heard these words, I knew Malik was letting me know he was okay; he was/is with me. As I listened to this book, I started asking for signs from Malik. I didn’t really know what to ask for though, so I let it be a blank canvas. One morning, very clearly, I wrote out in my morning pages “Malik, I invite you to show me you’re with me; be with me, guide me, let me know you’re OK”.

I put it aside and went on with my day, but I paid attention, all day. I went to the bathroom at one point, and I looked down at the toilet paper and there were butterflies etched into the toilet paper. I chuckled and thought “has my toilet paper always had butterflies”. Then I had to go get a new tire and I couldn’t take the highway because I was driving on the spare. There was a building in downtown Indy that had art all over the side of the building, butterflies and a great blue heron, two of my favorites. I was like “hmm, ok, there could be something here”. Then I received a delivery of a deck of inspiration cards, from a Canadian Artist, AutumnSkyeArt. I went to play with them as a divination tool that evening. I closed my eyes, envisioned Malik in my mind’s eye and asked him to be with me. I pulled a card. I saw a skull but didn’t fully embrace or look at the imagery (I’m more of a verbal than visual gal) and I turned around the card. It read “Transformation – Let go, accept impermanence, make peace with death, recognize the light in all things, look for hidden blessings”. My mind was blown! I turned around the card to look at the image and there was a butterfly flying out of the skull’s eye.

I lost it. I started crying and I could so, almost tangibly, feel Malik in my heart. Butterflies have significance for me beyond loving them. I have two friends who call me “Little Butterfly”. I knew Malik was with me and that he could participate in my life more fully now than ever before.

Malik saved my life, figuratively and literally and more than one time. I will never forget this story of him choosing me as his human and I will never forget the beauty and magnificence of his life, his death and his afterlife.

“Sometimes they choose us” feels like a perfect title to his story; sometimes we, as mere humans, don’t know what we need. In our limited perception we aren’t able to see what and who would be good for us, but the Universe does. I am forever a changed human being because of Malik.