My wife and I adopted a ‘pandemic puppy’ to make self-isolating less lonely. It didn’t work out like that.
“I think we should get a dog.” This was my wife, Alex, our first night sheltered in place. I was on the couch, in sweatpants, eating a burrito; Alex stood before me in jeans and a black blazer. In the crook of her right arm she cradled a laptop full of research she’d conducted on Bay Area dog shelters. She twirled her free hand as she spoke, like a lawyer addressing the court. “And I think it should be a puppy. A young puppy. Preferably with floppy ears. What do you think?” “I think it’s a great idea,” I replied quickly, aware that her question had not really been a question, and that it would have been unwise to offer my honest opinion, which was that I thought adopting a puppy to be a bad idea. My reasons were mostly selfish. For one thing, though several months of quarantine-style isolation did seem ideal context for puppy-raising, I had imagined spending those months in a starkly different way — like by investing bullishly in myself. I wanted to read the New Yorker, write a novel, acquire abs (burritos notwithstanding). I wanted to install bookshelves. And it was hard thinking of a better way to torpedo that dream than by adopting an animal predisposed to destroying furniture. I had also long suspected dogs’ love for man to be more transactional than man likes to admit — that what dog-behavior we interpret as love is, more often, hunger — and so more generally, I doubted whether the new-puppy destruction to which Alex and I would be submitting could possibly, ultimately, be worth it.Then I met the puppy in question. Nola was a three-month-old, foot-and-a-half-long Lab/shepherd mix with a gold coat she hadn’t quite grown into, eyes that gleamed like large buttons, and a brow that conveyed, in turns, bemusement, befuddlement, and serious thought. (And her ears: Boy did they flop.) Alex and I met her inside the small, Band-Aid-colored front office of a dog shelter in Potrero Hill. She was standing at attention in a pen in the corner. Her cuteness was hypnotic. She cocked her head at us; we, helplessly, cocked our heads back. By the time I snapped out of it, Alex and I had signed the pup’s paperwork, decided on the name, and started back for our apartment in Oakland.INTERESTING FACT ABOUT YOUR PET: 94% of pet owners say their animal pal makes them smile more than once a day.
“I actually can’t,” I finally managed, reaching for the disinfectant. Then, under my breath, to myself: “What have we done?”
My nerves didn’t last long. Once the poop had been cleaned up and the puppy pads and chew toys deployed, I was able to get to know this little creature — and that’s when things started to change.
INTERESTING FACT ABOUT YOUR PET: When your dog is carefully choosing the perfect place to do his business, it is because they prefer to go poop in alignment with the Earth’s magnetic field.
But suddenly — so suddenly! — with Nola, I felt insulated from all that. I understood why everyone and their mother had been adopting puppies. Outside, the world might be rife with fear, but inside — equipped with kibble, coffee, several hundred puppy pads — we were content. Our apartment was an island, and we, its privileged inhabitants.
Then Sunday came, and with it the obliteration of our delusions; the moment we woke up, we knew something was wrong. Nola wouldn’t eat, drink, or wrestle. When she peed on her puppy pad, she didn’t accept our proffered treats. She had a cough.
We went online. We found a service that connects pet-owners — for $40 a conversation — with veterinarians online. “Sounds like kennel cough,” we were told by a man who sounded roughly my age. He prescribed Robitussin.We decided to do a bit more research. That’s when we came across a word we’d been introduced to, briefly, at the dog shelter, when we were signing Nola’s adoption papers, in reference to a disease Nola might have been exposed to in their care: “parvo” — or, more specifically, “parvovirus,” which operates in much the same fashion as the coronavirus. Those it kills often die on ventilators.
Nola, we determined — obviously, Jesus — needed to be tested. Still, we reassured ourselves on the drive to the Oakland Veterinary Hospital that we were merely being cautious. Nola didn’t seem that sick — certainly not as sick as the puppies we’d read about online. Look, we remarked, she’s still licking our faces! We agreed that the test was but a pitstop; on the way back, we’d pick up the Robitussin.This is a copycat version of the kind made by Greenies.
An hour and a half later, still in the parking lot, we received a call from the doctor who’d administered Nola’s test. We put her on speakerphone. She confirmed that Nola had tested positive for parvo. Then she recounted a litany of horrible facts: the virus had spread into Nola’s lungs. Nola would require hospitalization, intravenous fluids, intense antibiotics, potentially a ventilator, and she still might die; mortality rates for her disease ranged as high as 90%. And hospitalization was expensive. Most families can’t afford it. Indeed, she posited a figure that, if borne out, would account for all the available money Alex and I had to our name. She insisted that if we opted not to hospitalize Nola, we weren’t bad people; it was a difficult and, for many families, solitary option. She asked us what we thought.
She was a part of what we thought about when we thought about “Us.” It felt like we’d had her forever.
We had no fucking clue. Thinking was, suddenly, hard; it felt like we’d been jumped — beaten and arrested for a crime we didn’t commit. Certainly, we hadn’t been ready for this. My heartbeat thumped in my jaw. I looked at Alex and there were tears in her eyes and then there were tears in mine, too. The rain fell harder.
We decided, wordlessly, that we would try to save Nola, whatever it took. I’m not sure either of us really considered the alternative. I understand why some people might find that extreme. We’d had Nola less than a week! But in that time, we’d also built Nola into our future, and as such, built her into our lives. She was a part of what we thought about when we thought about “Us.” It felt like we’d had her forever.
INTERESTING FACT ABOUT YOUR PET: The Saluki is the world’s oldest dog breed. They appear in ancient Egyptian tombs dating back to 2100 B.C.
We informed the doctor of our plan.
“Nola’s lucky to have you,” the doctor replied. “Now, unfortunately, I need you to go home.”
“Wait!” I blurted. “Isn’t there a way we can see her, before we go?” I was suddenly furious. Also panicked. This was, as I would soon learn, a kind of madness, one unique to the moment, the madness of powerlessness. I thought of Nola curled up with Alex on the couch, and I thought about how I needed to protect her, and didn’t the doctor know that I needed to protect her?
The doctor’s reply — worn down, no doubt, from being issued so many times — made clear that it didn’t matter.
Four days later, on a ventilator, Nola died. Alex and I received the news the same way we’d received every other update that had come from the hospital that week: huddled over the phone, squeezing each other’s hand, lit up by anxiety, angry. Only now, it was over. We’d been living on a kind of jerry-rigged life raft, clinging to its sides as the ocean roiled. And having it be over was like having the ship splinter and fall apart. It felt like sinking. (I thought of Josef Kavalier, the hero of me and Nola’s favorite novel, who responds to the death of his 12-year-old brother — whom he had been working to extricate from Nazi-controlled Prague — by attempting to drown himself.) And then the only thing we could think about was that we hadn’t said goodbye — hadn’t so much as petted Nola before she’d been plucked out of the car. She’d probably thought we were monsters.The weeks that followed were consumed by the task of challenging these thoughts. It was hard, less like surviving at sea and more like walking through swamp, the task itself always pulling you back. I found it hard for a while to look around the apartment — still strewn with the vestiges of Nola’s presence, which we couldn’t bring ourselves to throw out or put away, like her chew toys, the illimitable puppy pads — and see anything other than Nola’s absence. It swallowed everything that had previously filled the space — happiness, warmth, sound — and replaced it with a hollow loneliness far worse than that which, by way of adopting Nola, we’d been trying to evade. It also didn’t make sense—there was no Why to explain the What—and this was deeply unsettling, made us nihilistic, distrustful.
Use a teapot to rinse dogs off in the bathtub without getting water and soap in their eyes.
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It’s easy to slip, forget these things, and get mad, but we’re keeping at it. The other day we retrieved Nola’s ashes from the hospital. Back at home, we went down the list. (This is our routine.) Remember, just because we didn’t say goodbye doesn’t mean Nola didn’t know that she was loved; yes Nola’s story was short — too short! — but stories don’t need to be long in order to be impactful; and, yeah, even though our apartment still feels empty from Nola not being in it, that doesn’t mean it isn’t also made more lovely by the memory of her harrumphing around the living room, or cuddling up on Alex’s lap on the couch, or of how happy she seemed — how happy we all were — that last Saturday night when we finally let her up on the bed.