The Chihuahua And The Broken Heart

I swallowed hard as I snapped the red ESA vest on my little dog Paco. He was my youngest son’s birthday present eight years prior, but he quickly and unexpectedly attached to me. Shortly after he came home to us, he and I became inseparable. Today he was all I felt I had in the world. The backpack was pulling on my shoulders, and I gripped little Paco in my arms, praying somehow to get through this. My heart sank as I watched my husband of twenty-seven years disappearing from my view in the window of the airport tram. I stared until I could no longer see a glimpse of him and continued to stare as if his ghost would somehow reappear and tell me not to go. However, that is not how my story would end.

Tears poured down my face, and fear overwhelmed me. I was on my own for the first time, really. I trudged through the airport with trauma, panic attacks, and unrealistic fear of being alone. Arms sore, back hurting, heart broken in two. I braved the unknown and walked through the dense emotional pain and the judgmental stares of strangers who cast their titles on me for the small dog in the red vest that rode on my lap. The only thing I now had in my suddenly big scary, and very lonely world.

Depression and anxiety medicine ran my life at this point. The panic and fear that generally consumed me were even greater as I arrived at my oldest son’s house in the town where I gave birth to him. I cried in his spare bedroom with Paco at my side for a month before I decided it was time to venture further out on my own. The nights without my husband were some of the most unbearable times in my life. The tears fell almost endlessly from my eyes, and no amount of coaxing would get me out of that little one-room apartment that had become my new home. I squinted with Paco on my lap to watch the tiny television, which was all I could afford, petting him as my gratitude overflowed that he was at my side.

Fear of leaving my little studio apartment overwhelmed me, so Paco and I could first take short walks only at night to avoid contact with others. Soon this 45-year-old woman with a stunned abused, and abandoned inner child was able to start walking in the daytime. And then, out of the apartment building parking lot to a few feet down the street. With Paco at my side, I not only had a reason to wake up every day, but I also had a love so pure and genuine, a love that would never abandon or judge me to walk my side as an ever-faithful companion and protector. A love that never ended and filled my heart daily

Missing my home, my belongings, and my husband, despite the torrid abuse I was walking away from, I cried and suffered in ways I wouldn’t wish on anyone. Many days all I could do was get up and breathe, go to bed and then wake up and breathe again. Time seemed to drag, yet the days and weeks away from the only man I had ever known or loved piled behind me. I had to try and live some kind of new, unfamiliar life. I had borrowed a car from my nephew, an old beater he wasn’t using. Paco rode everywhere with me in this old car that was falling apart. I remember pulling into an auto parts store with Paco in my arms, walking in, and asking for something to help keep up the driver’s window that was constantly dropping down, which in the Midwest in the dead of winter was no fun. Gorilla tape kept the snow from blowing in on us for about a month, but nothing kept the broken heated seat from burning the crap out of my behind everywhere Paco and I went.

As time went on, Paco and I became the hit of the building. Visiting various elderly tenants and bringing them food with a little scratch for Paco as a thank you from them every time. This little guy was lifting the spirits of everyone, from a depressed and suicidal eighteen-year-old girl that had moved into the studio across the hall, to the elder adults that loved seeing him pass by downstairs every day. He was not only my hero and savior. He’d become the light in the darkness for many in that building.

One day upon waking to a barrage of brutal emails from my estranged husband, I read his hate-filled words, and tears began to pour down my face and continued to do so for a solid two weeks. It was back to night walks and hiding in my tiny apartment. “There was never any love at first sight”, I read in the email from my high school sweetheart husband. “There were only lies I told a stupid girl to get in her pants. And I only stayed with you all these years out of pity and obligation.” I cried in disbelief. Twenty-seven years of my life were not only peppered with cheating and abuse. But they had now also become a lie. I felt the knife twist in my back, and my heart hurt so badly I wished it would just stop beating to make the pain finally go away.

I lay down on the dimly lit floor of my new studio apartment, and the pain and agony filled every crevice of what was now my shattered being. At that moment, I wished to die, but Paco wished me to stay. They say touch alone is therapeutic; hands and loving arms hold the power to heal you in ways nothing else can, as does the touch of a four-legged friend. While his best friend was lying in a fetal position, bawling on the floor, my only potential help, Paco, with no prompting from me, got up as if guided by angels and leaned his head forward as he approached my chest. With his head tilted towards me, he found the exact location of my agony. My heart. As I wished for it to stop, he pressed his forehead forward, directly on it, and without words, told me he wanted it to keep beating.

I’ll never forget the feeling of that tiny, unconditional love-filled forehead resting perfectly over the one thing in my body that was causing me the most pain I’d ever felt. My broken heart. It was one of the most profound, moving moments of my life, and it is proof that my husband’s words were wrong. True love did exist for me, and it was in the form of a twelve-pound Chihuahua named Paco that helped save my life.