The Pet Shop

I HAD A PUPPY for six days.

If you’ve listened to my podcast, particularly episodes in the spring of 2019, you know I have wanted a dog for a long time. Jenna and I were on a flight in January and I took two quizzes to see what kind of dog would work for me, and from that day forward, I was on a mission. I wanted a dog. To be exact, I wanted a cavapoo. The cavapoo, sometimes also called a Cavoodle, is a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel partnered with a Miniature Poodle. I WANTED A CAVOODLE.

I don’t know what made me want a dog so much that year. Honestly, it just sounded like fun. A companion, a friend, something I could care for and something that I would be responsible for.

There’s a weird thing that happens when you are unmarried in your late thirties and you have no children or pets. You realize that while your friends were being responsible to the children they were raising or the spouse they were sleeping with, you were just being you. And this isn’t a grass is always greener story—these are just facts. As a single woman, my life has been relatively all about me. And while that can seem fun—well it is—at some point, I began to wonder if I was missing out on something because I wasn’t having to sacrifice for anyone else. There just comes a point when you’ve done you for so long that you start to think maybe there is something to the joy others feel when they don’t get sleep and when they are covered in poop but their lives still seem to be full and joyful.

I didn’t know that experience, and it felt like I was missing out on fun and didn’t even realize it. Maybe that sounds crazy, but there was a whisper question in my mind, wondering if there is something to searching for Eden in loving someone else more than you love yourself. I felt that desire growing in me, the desire to know what it could be like if I wasn’t the most important living being in my own story.

Research proves it is true; pets make your life better. For people who live alone, a recent study found that owning a dog can decrease the risk of death by 33 percent and risk of cardiovascular death by 36 percent (compared to single folks without a pet).1 Better for your life. Better for your heart.

And I could see it in my friends’ lives. I could see how they loved their dogs, how they prioritized them, and how they also seemed to still have an active social life, which mattered to me.

The thought of it just started spinning in my mind. I’m a slow decision maker for big things like this, so I started talking about it and thinking about it in the winter, searching online and asking friends, stalking breeder litters and adoption sites and businesses, but I didn’t find the right puppy for me until September.

But I knew when I saw her. Her name on the website was Sequoia, but she was tiny. A total oxymoron—such a little gal with such a big name. I thought I wanted a dude dog until I saw her. (For months everyone told me that I’d want a girl, not a boy. They were right after all.) She had already been matched with a family and for some reason that had fallen apart, so she was ready to be adopted.

I sent the email that I was interested and in a matter of hours, she was mine. She would be at my house in two weeks. I immediately called Dave’s wife, Annie Barnes, and asked her kids what we should name her. Ben said Slushie. I laughed. Zanna said Helen. I laughed harder and I knew. Helen was her name. Helen F. Downs.

The next day was a Saturday, and I was watching football with some friends. I had two weeks to read books and prep my house and do all the things to get ready for a long, long, long-awaited puppy. But then my phone rang, and the caller told me it would not be two weeks. Helen would be at my house in twenty-four hours.

My palms started sweating, I got giddy, and I got in my car with two friends who were in from out of town. Betsy and Ashley and I rushed to the local puppy store, Nashville Pet Products Center. It is the store EVERY pet owner suggested to me. I acted like a rich person that afternoon—just pointing to everything that the woman said my puppy might possibly need and saying, “I’ll take it!” Toys galore. A few bags of snacks. A teething ring (WAIT—PUPPIES LOSE THEIR TEETH? I did not know enough). A crate that I would call her palace. Can you just imagine a funnier thing than telling a puppy named Helen F. Downs to go to her Crate Palace? It just felt so right. I was suddenly very prepared.

Around 3:00 on Sunday afternoon the van pulled up and a kind older guy named Jack stepped out and slid open a door and there was Sequoia. There was Helen. She looked just like her pictures. My mini cavapoo, only two months old, was just barely the length of my forearm and weighed in at an estimated four pounds.

She was a glorified footlong sub sandwich covered in fur of every shade, from the patches of white over her eyes to her apricot sides down to her black tail. I was in love.

I hadn’t lived with a pet in twenty years and I have never really loved my friends’ pets, so I didn’t know this feeling would be so complete in just a day. Just a moment. But honestly, it wasn’t a moment. It was months of looking and hoping, hours of conversations with a variety of friends and mentors, prayers prayed, then suddenly she was here. I fell in love in a moment with a dog I had known for minutes but my heart had known for almost a year.

I teared up as she jiggled around in my arms and leapt from couch cushion to pillow to me to pillow. She had puppy energy, but they had also told me she was fun and energetic. It was part of how I knew she was the right dog for me. Her description said, “Full of fun but also a leader. Independent but loves to snuggle.” Could I have found a more Annie dog?!? Helen was proving herself to be true to those descriptions in the first few minutes. I was laughing, and tearing up, and I knew my life had changed.

The day the emails were flying back and forth between her current owner and myself, I asked God if I was doing the right thing. To me (and also to you), He is that kind of God who will step into every situation with me and give me direction if I ask for it. I don’t like making big decisions alone, so having God whisper into them, even about owning a puppy, is comforting to me.

I opened my daily devotional app and it read Exodus 23:20 (NIV) out loud to me. “See, I am sending an angel ahead of you to guard you along the way and to bring you to the place I have prepared.”

A guard and a guide. That’s what Helen would be for me, bringing me to a place that God had prepared for me. As she bounded from here to there to everywhere in my little living room, I saw her as that guard and guide. Since Helen was only footlong sub size, I wasn’t going to depend on her to guard me from any large person or animal—I would probably be THAT kind of guard here in our little family—but I knew she was guarding me from something and guiding me to something.

Jack stayed for a bit and explained some things I didn’t know, Helen peed on the rug, and then Jack was off and away in his van and I was entrusted with this little gal’s life. She looked at me like she knew we were both in over our heads—me the most, but she seemed to sense she hadn’t come into the home of a low-energy lady either.

The stats were true. My heart was healthier from moment one. Helen and I clicked right away. We both laughed (I don’t know how to explain that I know that’s true, but I do), we took a selfie, and I sat on the rug and held her. Before I called any friends, before I showed her to anyone, I wanted some moments of just us. I didn’t want to be called a “dog mom.” Helen has an actual dog mom who birthed her. I’m just her human. Her Annie.

The first day was a lot of learning and a lot of FaceTiming and a lot of fun. The second day she came to work with me, and Jenna loved her. She settled into her Crate Palace well, both at my house and at the office. I got home from work on Monday, and she still didn’t smell like me. She smelled like wherever she had come from. So after dinner, I decided to give her a bath. I only had people shampoo and she hated every second of it and barely looked me in the eye when it was done, but we survived. And as we sat on the floor of the living room, playing with her lamb chop squishy toy and her stuffed squirrel, my face started to itch. Not a lot, not terribly, but it was a familiar feeling.

Because of that annoying dairy allergy, I’m familiar with the signs of an allergic reaction, and what was happening to my face with Helen is what happens to my face with milk.

But I couldn’t be allergic to a cavapoo. They’re hypoallergenic. So what was happening on day two? The first day was fine. I refused to believe I was allergic to Helen. She was my guard and my guide.

I spent the next three days on the phone with vets and human doctors and pet expert friends. My face continued to react, then so did my skin and eventually my lungs. I got my house cleaned and Helen had a sleepover party with a friend, just to see if maybe it was something in my house. I saw my naturopath and I shampooed Helen again, this time with dog shampoo. I did everything I could think to do, but the delayed hypersensitivity reaction continued and increased, and I wept my way through it.

Because I knew what my body was telling me.

I was allergic to this beautiful sable-colored gal, and my heart could not handle what I knew was coming next.

If there really is something powerful about falling in love, if this whole thing had been a search for the deeper thing I felt I had lost at some point, I was now about to lose it again. What does it all mean when the thing you love is the thing you lose, far before you thought you would?

On the Friday morning of that first week, just six days after Jack left her in my care, Helen and I loaded up in my RAV4 at 5:00 and headed across the state of Tennessee to hand her over to a foster family until she would be rehomed with a forever family.

I cried the whole drive. But that was nothing new; I’d been crying for days. When I pictured things in the future, like Christmas, I grieved. My mind’s eye can see the whole story long before it’s written, and I saw a long life with Helen. I grieved the loss of a companion and the loss of a friend. I grieved deeply the trust and bond we had built that she didn’t know I was about to break. I cried, I talked to her, and I thanked her for some deeper moments in my heart that she had directly given me. I rolled down the window twice because my lungs felt so tight in her presence with us trapped in my little car that I couldn’t breathe. The decision was right, everyone (including me) agreed with that, and my lungs confirmed it. But it didn’t help and wasn’t healing my broken heart.

Helen and I had been together practically constantly. When she yelped in her Crate Palace, she was yelping for me. When she looked around the corner from the kitchen to the living room, she was looking for me. When we walked outside to go potty in the middle of the night, multiple times a night every night, it was just us. My guard and my guide and me.

Pastor Kevin, the lead pastor at my church and known to the That Sounds Fun podcast listeners as “pastor of the pod,” came to the office the day before Helen left me. He held her and she fell asleep almost instantly. (Another proof that she was my kind of gal—we can fall asleep anywhere.) And he prayed. He prayed for her, for me, for my health, and for our hearts. He looked into my eyes as the tears poured down my cheeks, and he said, “I think this is a test from God. Not for Him to see if you would pass, but for you to see if you could.” I looked at him and listened as he continued. “Maybe you needed to know that you could love this much. Maybe you needed to see that you would be willing to sacrifice time and money and sleep for someone else that you loved more than yourself.”

He was right. Maybe Helen guided me to a place where I could learn that I could love. Not learn to love but learn that it is already in me. Maybe she guarded me from a life where I thought I didn’t have what it takes to parent, to love a man day in and day out and serve him well, to sacrifice for a human baby. Helen didn’t tell me I could do it, she told me I already had. Maybe Helen came into my life to remind me that my heart was still beating and had everything it needed to love deeper than I thought I could.

I am an amateur at this. It sounded so fun to have a companion, to have someone who depended on me, to have someone waiting for me when I got home from the office or a trip or a date. I didn’t want her to leave, and I told her that in the car as the sun rose in front of us and we got closer and closer to the meet-up spot.

Matt, the foster dad who met me at the BP gas station off the interstate, arrived soon after I did. Helen played in the grass as I cried. And as I moved her Crate Palace into Matt’s car, I kept holding her and saying thank you. And ten minutes later, after stories were told and tears were cried and reassurances (from Matt to me) were made, we both drove away. Me heading back to Nashville alone, Matt back to his home and his family with my girl Helen.

THERE IS EDEN even in loss. There is deep joy in profound connectedness, even if it doesn’t last. I am heartbroken and in love and I will never forget Helen.

I gave Matt all the toys and snacks and accoutrements I bought for Helen. Except one. That Saturday we had gone to the pet store, the day before Helen arrived at Harvest House and in my life two weeks premature, my friend Betsy stood behind me as I searched for the right collar and leash. She tapped me on the shoulder and in her hands was a chew toy that was shaped like a Coke Icee, my all-time favorite drink. I laughed, but it was also a sign to me. A reminder that, yes, God was in this. And I bought that Coke Icee chew toy. And when I loaded all of Helen’s things into my car to eventually transfer them into Matt’s car, I left the Coke Icee toy on my dining room table. It remains a reminder to me of the week, of Helen, and of the ways that searching for Eden can matter, even when it hurts.