introducing.

[for the time being, this is going to be a blog about grief and mourning and losing a dog you love. i know that’s not what everybody signed up for and it’s fine not to read it or to ubsubscribe.]

A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine called me. She had been looking at dogs at the animal shelter, and she wanted to know if I would tell her about what it was like to live with a husky. She had just met one, a 14-week-old puppy, and wanted to know if this dog would fit neatly into her life, with her kids, with the chickens they raised in the backyard, with the level of activity she’d be able to offer it.

I told her that I loved huskies, of course, and that they were objectively the best dogs, but that it was common for them to seek freedom on the other side of an unlatched gate, that they tended to have a high prey drive, that they were bred to substitute their own judgment for yours, because sometimes they are pulling a sled around a blind curve and they know that following your commands will lead the pack to its doom. Also, they are smart enough that the things they know how to do well make them very proud, and they like to show off. She worried that this dog might end up leaping over her fence simply because it could, a horror story that every “what it’s really like to have a husky” piece on the internet seems to recount. Dio had never done that, I told her, but I couldn’t say that it was impossible. He loved running more than jumping, but he loved to run, just to see how fast he could go when he pinned his ears back and went for it. He was so good at it.

The next day, she told me that after considering it, she’d decided to get a smaller dog. She had been so sure about this one, though, that my friend had already scheduled an adoption date a few days later, after the puppy was set to be spayed. There was no pressure, she said, but did Kat and I want to meet her? We knew, after all, how to take care of a husky.

We knew that we’d have another dog at some point in our lives, and we knew that it would probably be a husky. We were husky people, it turned out, up for the three-mile walks and the challenge of living with a dog who constantly tried to outsmart us. We’d had some conversations about it, just preliminary talk. We’d each occasionally sneak looks at dogs on the website for the shelter or the husky rescue, or talk about the day in the future where we’d be ready to take it seriously. We wouldn’t be able to handle a dog who looked like Dio—I couldn’t even imagine it, it would feel too hard to even look at it—and we had fostered huskies briefly, years earlier who had been stressed-out and neurotic. Maybe we would see about getting one from a breeder? But that didn’t quite feel like us, either. We had always liked that Dio had been a rescue. It felt right.

I told Kat that there was a husky at the shelter who needed a home, and that we might be able to meet her. We decided that, if we could get an appointment that weekend with the shelter’s COVID protocols in place, we should at least go see her. We did, so we did. She had bright eyes and liked to nip at fingers through the bars of her enclosure at the shelter. I liked her, and I felt really sad. I missed my dog, and I imagined how stressed and anxious he would have been in an animal shelter. She was small, a 25-pound puppy, with brown and white fur. We decided that we would probably feel that same wave of grief and longing meeting any other dog we were considering taking home, and told them we’d be taking her home with us.

It’s been two weeks now. The day we brought her home, we thought we had a sedate, relaxed puppy on our hands. She climbed on the couch and rest her head on Kat’s arm while she typed, and she followed me around the kitchen while I chopped onions. We didn’t know what to call her. It turns out that she wasn’t so much sedate as sedated, because of the surgery, and by the next day, she revealed her true passion, which was for biting the shit out of us and refusing to get off the couch.

There are a lot of feelings that come with having a new puppy in your house so soon after saying goodbye to a dog you loved who you’d had for more than a decade! One of them has been remembering the beginning with Dio, more than the end. He’d been a fucking asshole at first, too, defiant and destructive, prone to running away the second the door was opened even a crack. We loved him, so we looked back on those first few weeks fondly, too. That’s been a gift I didn’t expect. Another feeling: I miss my dog, the one I knew and trusted, and I don’t like that there is a tiny stranger ambushing me while I eat breakfast, with her little needle teeth. Another feeling: It felt nice, not like a violation, when she would unearth a bone or a toy that Dio had buried somewhere in the yard that we had missed. It was nice to see a little dog fascinated by the squeaker ball he didn’t like because it was too big for him to really clamp down on the way he liked to.

There were a lot of conflicting emotions. I talked to my therapist about it, and she suggested thinking of this puppy less as a new, permanent member of our family, and more like a dog we were taking care of while we had the time and space to do that, and everything else could work its way out later. She told me that it might seem weird, but that, when I was feeling that familiar grief, I might feel better if I told this little puppy about Dio. When she dug up a bone that Dio had tucked under the deck, I told her that it had been his, and it was hers now. I’ve had the monologue that Rocky gives to Donnie when he agrees to train him in Creed in my head. Apollo was special. To tell you the truth, I don’t know if you’re special. It seems like a fucked up thing to say to a puppy, but it took the pressure off. She could just be herself. She doesn’t have to be like him.

Two weeks in, and the biting is down a lot. She’s extremely food-motivated, the same way that Dio was, which makes it easier. We know what to do with a food-motivated dog. She’s eager to learn, will spend 20 minutes practicing “place” or “leave it” or “target.” She still likes to turn everything into a battle of wills, will tuck her face under her paw and pretend that she didn’t hear us when we tell her to get off the couch. She likes to fall asleep playing tug-of-war. She’s a good girl. She still follows me around the kitchen while I cook. I try not to use any of the nicknames I called Dio, because that doesn’t feel right coming out of my mouth, and it’s tough—sometimes it feels like I used most of them up with him. He was “puppy” and “goober” and “doofus” and a million other things you find yourself saying to a dog over the course of twelve years. I call her “kid” a lot. Sorry, kid, no pasta for you.

I’m still not sure of her 100 percent of the time, but we’ve committed to her few the next several months, and I suspect that by the time we get to that arbitrary deadline, it’ll be hard to imagine saying that she’s not ours. (I think Kat has already decided that she is, and is just being gracious in offering me the space to do the same.) It’s a trick, kind of, to help quiet the part that feels like having this dog is disloyal to Dio. She’s not supposed to replace him, and when it feels like that’s what we’re trying to do by having this little dog in our house, it helps to remember: We’re just giving her a nice place to be a puppy, and we can figure everything else out later. In the days after Dio died, everyone kept reminding me that the only thing that really helps with grief is time, and that’ll go by either way.

We’ll spend that time taking her on walks that get a little longer every day, until she grabs the leash in her mouth to tell us that she’s done. We’ll spend it in staring contests, until she finally accepts that she’s not allowed on the couch. We’ll spend it slipping old beach towels between her jaws when she’s trying to bite our hands. We’ll expect that she’ll grow out of most of that, the way that Dio did, and we’ll figure out what happens after that. She’s not going to replace him, but maybe she will have a similar role to his over time.

Oh, and her name? Her name is Ozzy.