dog in the headlights

For Dog Rescue Day

“And it is exceedingly short, his galloping life. Dogs die so soon. I have my stories of that grief, no doubt many of you do also. It is almost a failure of will, a failure of love, to let them grow old—or so it feels.” — Mary Oliver

Edgar came into my life one October morning that now seems so long ago.

It wasn’t.

There he was, standing in an already busy intersection on 16th Street right before the sun came up. We had just left the gym when my daughter spotted him, alerting me to that fact by screaming at me to stop the traffic before jumping out of our car and flailing wildly at an oncoming vehicle, somehow bringing it to a momentary standstill.

Within seconds, she had scooped up the tiny Chihuahua trembling in the widening beam of the headlights before him.

By the time we got to the house – before I’d even had my first cup of coffee – she had named him Edgar – an homage to Poe – introduced him on Facebook as “50% tremble, 50% snuggle” and calmly informed the world online that he would be moving in with us.

Meanwhile, somewhere in the back of my mind, I was already drafting imaginary FOUND DOG posters and reassuring myself this was all temporary. By the end of the day, Edgar would be back where he belonged, answering to a name someone else had given him.

I was not emotionally prepared for a Chihuahua before caffeine.

I wasn’t ready for another dog.

Sophie almost convinced me to let her stay home from school to be with her new dog. He was shaking – submissive and starving, his little ribs as noticeable as the heart shaped markings on his coat. Without saying it out loud, I knew we also knew that based on our experience with Molly the Greyhound, a dog was probably not in the cards. 

On the heels of a spectacular crisis in my professional life, we had visited the Arizona Greyhound Rescue and brought home a beautiful brindle, a retired racing dog named Molly. Elegant and affectionate, she knew how to be retired. She lounged around the house all day eating Lay’s potato chips, but she did not want to do it without me. She needed someone home all day. She needed another greyhound. She needed more space.

Within a week or two, we found out that another family was waiting for Molly, with another greyhound and someone at home all day long. It was a better place, her “forever home.” It was also heartbreaking to let her go.

Life with Molly, although brief, had sealed the deal as far as future pets were concerned. We would remain a one-cat family. No dogs. No fostering. No rescuing. No way. 

No more dogs.

And yet there were tell-tale signs that Edgar was finding a way into my husband’s heart. “Surely someone is missing this little guy terribly,” he said, slipping out to Safeway for dog food and treats. 

He drove slowly through our neighborhood posting FOUND DOG signs beside LOST DOG notices on lamp posts. He searched Craigslist. The next day he took Edgar to the Humane Society where they scanned for a microchip

Nothing.

No chip. No collar. No clue that he belonged to anyone.

He took him the Humane Society where a vet checked for a microchip. No chip. No collar. No clue that he belonged to someone. The vet estimated Edgar at about seven years old. Malnourished and dirty with ghastly breath and worse teeth, Edgar weighed three pounds. Less than a bag of sugar.

Nobody was looking for him.

So Edgar stayed.

At first, despite having four perfectly good legs, he expected to be carried everywhere, and dutifully, we all obliged.

It turned out Edgar had very firm ideas about how life should proceed from that point forward. Slowly he gained weight. He stopped trembling so much. He learned where the treats were kept. He learned the sound of our voices. He slept every night curled against my daughter’s chest, his tiny heart beating against hers.

Without quite realizing it, we had become his people.

And he had become ours.

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On a gloomy Friday about a month later, my daughter and I were out walking with my parents near their village in Northern Ireland. I was trying to distract myself, keeping my fingers crossed that an old friend might come through with concert tickets for Van Morrison, who had just been granted the Freedom of the City and was performing in Belfast.

But underneath the ordinary shape of the evening, something felt wrong.

I kept calling home to Arizona, and every call went straight to voicemail. What unsettled me most was the strange sound of my own voice leaving messages — overly bright, trying not to betray panic.

Worried, I did what I always do when I have “a bad feeling” and sent a text to my friend to ask her if she would drive to the house just to check.

I know I have a flair for the dramatic. Conventional wisdom be damned, I tend to sweat the small stuff and find the devil in the tiniest details. I make mountains out of molehills.

Sometimes that instinct serves me well.

But this — this would become one of the most significant details of my adult life, wrapped inside a text that travelled across several time zones from a small village in Northern Ireland to Chandler, Arizona at 12:25 p.m. Mountain Standard Time:

“Trying to be calm, but afraid he is hurt or dead.”

I stayed on the phone while she drove to our house.

I can still hear it.

The hum of traffic behind her as she walked up the path. Her breathing. Her knocking at the front door.

I held on while she peered through the bay window to see little Edgar staring back at her, still and silent, his heart beating faster than ours.

I held on while she found my key hidden beneath the doormat and stepped into our sunny yellow living room.

I held on while she called my husband’s name once, twice, three times.

I held on while she found him.

For years afterwards, what stayed with me was not only the anguish of that moment, but the thought that my man’s final moments on this earth were likely spent with three pounds of unconditional love curled like a comma against his chest.

And afterwards, when grief moved into our house and unpacked itself into every corner, Edgar stayed too.

Grief changes the atmosphere of a home. Even laughter sounds different for a while. But Edgar remained gloriously consistent in his demands: breakfast on time, immediate belly rubs, and absolutely no one allowed to cry alone in the bathroom.

For a long time, my daughter said that every morning without her dad began not with sorrow, but with Edgar licking her face and making her smile.

Edgar was always ready to walk – or be carried – into the world with her.

He became a kind of metronome in our shattered lives. A small steady heartbeat reminding us that there was still dinner to make, walks to take, sunlight pooling on the floor, another day – possibly a better one – waiting beyond the unbearable one.

People often talk about rescuing dogs.

But anyone who has ever loved a rescue knows the truth is often the other way around.

Edgar rescued us too.

He died a few years later in my daughter’s arms, after almost a decade of loving her faithfully. Afterwards, I remember she told me he had left “a little Band-Aid” on her heart — and on the hearts of everyone who ever scooped him up when they came through our front door.

Edgar, was the sure thing in a world that no longer made sense after the loss of the man who had been my daughter’s first word. Daddy.

On Dog Rescue Day, I find myself thinking again about that tiny trembling Chihuahua standing alone in traffic before dawn.

How love sometimes arrives disguised as inconvenience.

How rescue is rarely a one-way act.

And how somewhere tonight, another frightened dog is standing in the widening headlights, waiting for somebody to stop.