“If you love something, let it go. If it comes back to you, it’s yours. If it doesn’t, it never was.”
Richard Bach
The house was empty without Rina.
My heart ached to hear her nails clicking on the floor and her tail thumping in the shoe-lined corridor when I walked through the front door. Vowing to keep my promise to her, I left my healthcare job in the corporate world, and I enrolled in a service-dog training school. I’d spent hours poring over my options, finally deciding on an associate degree program that seemed to align with my philosophy on positive training methods. But there was a catch: The school was in California. If someone had told me that one day I’d just pack up and move to California for a four-month program, I would have said, “You’re crazy.” It just wasn’t the sort of thing I did, the control freak that I was, but I was determined to keep my promise to Rina.
I found an apartment near the school, a quiet place with its own entrance above a family home. What made it especially appealing was the dog run on the side of the house. The training program required students to care for their service-dogs-in-training 24/7, so having access to a dog run was a bonus. The owner, Paul, helped me carry a few things from my car into my new home.
“So you’re going to school,” he said with an appraising look, seeming to note that I was a bit older than the usual coed.
“Yes, I’m getting my associate degree in service-dog training,” I answered. “I just raised my first service-dog puppy.”
“A puppy,” he remarked. “What’s her name?”
There was a moment’s pause before I could even form the word. “Rina,” I choked out.
“Isn’t that something,” he said. “The woman we bought this house from was named Rina. What a coincidence.”
Rina was such a unique name, one I’d never heard in my life prior to caring for my Rina. I wondered if somehow Rina had something to do with the synchronicity of me finding this particular apartment out of all of the other possibilities.
“It’s great that our dog run is going to be put to good use,” Paul said, motioning toward the side yard.
There wasn’t a lot of time to explore since school started right away. What I loved the most about working with the puppies was how they were like little sponges—clean slates, eager to learn, and always surprising me with what they were capable of doing. The more they learned, the more I pushed the envelope. I wondered what I could teach a puppy that no one else had taught at such a young age. My first success was teaching a puppy the complex task of turning on a light switch when it was only six weeks old. As far as I knew, no one at the school had taught that behavior to a pup so young.
One night when I returned from school, I noticed that I had a voice mail. I was only half-listening until I heard a woman say, “Rina is being released from the program.” The voice on the message gave a couple of reasons, but one term resounded through my mind: “assertive fear.”
I stood still a moment, letting the weight of the message sink in. Then the tears came. I was smiling, then laughing—and all the while crying. Beautiful, wonderful tears. It was only later that the thought came to me: assertive fear . . . had Rina, possibly . . . just maybe . . . growled?
Could I believe it? Rina was really coming back to me? Puppy raisers get first dibs if the dogs they raised are released. Yes! Rina was coming back to me!
The next day, I called to find out exactly what had happened. The woman who answered the phone shuffled through papers as she read me a list of Rina’s shortcomings in a voice that sounded like she was reading a bad report card.
“Assertive fear: She refuses to perform behaviors when she is uncertain. Avoidance assertiveness: She has resistance to following commands,” the woman said.
“But what did she do exactly?” I asked.
“It looks like she refused to walk by a stationary vacuum cleaner even though it wasn’t turned on,” she answered. I heard more papers shuffle. “She refused to walk on an unsteady table and to step across a grate.”
The woman paused and sighed. “In short, she just shut down.”
It’d been one month since I’d dropped her off, thirty days that felt like an eternity.
“When can I pick her up?” I asked, trying not to laugh.
It was never my intention for Rina to fail the program, of course, and despite our differences in training philosophies, I would be forever grateful to this organization for the opportunity to raise a puppy and for gifting me with such an incredible dog.
I drove to the San Francisco airport to pick up Rina, my patience wearing thin in the crawling traffic. I kept imagining how our reunion would go. I could envision her entire body wagging and I could practically feel her tongue on my face and how soft her fur would be when I hugged her. As soon as we saw each other, I’d tell her that she was coming home to stay with me for good.
At the airport, I called into her crate, “Rina!” expecting her to explode with excitement and relief when she saw me.
But the dog inside didn’t. Instead of wagging her tail and smiling with her wide Rina grin, she kept her head down and wouldn’t meet my gaze. I was crushed. She seemed muddled, her face ashen. Over and over, I apologized for what she’d been through. I knew that during training they would do many things to intentionally stress a dog to see how it would cope in a service situation. And yet the dogs are already stressed from being in an unfamiliar environment, away from their caregivers. Some dogs do poorly under these circumstances, and it appeared that Rina was one of them.
She was not the dog I’d left at the kennel. She was not her normal self. As I walked her out of the airport, she balked when a tall man with shaggy hair passed us, then she slunk closer to me. She didn’t trust people anymore, and I knew I had some work to do to get her back to feeling safe. Safety and trust are paramount for both animals and people, and traumatic events can invade our very souls. I knew what it felt like to have my trust completely shattered, and I would do my best to make sure Rina would feel safe once again.
A few days later, during a break from school, I took Rina to the beach to celebrate her homecoming. She’d always loved romping in the Chicago snow, and I was sure she’d adore the miles of shoreline, sand dunes, and crisp salt air even more.
Near the waves, I took off her leash and released her to run. I wanted her to know that she was free.
She paused, leery of someone walking in the distance, and belted out a few quick barks in that direction. Then I watched as she relaxed, and I squinted as she morphed into a bounding flash of yellow, bright against the steely overcast sky and its reflection in the waves. In the blink of an eye, she was sprinting down the shoreline chasing waves. I caught glimpses of the puppy she had been, as well as the best friend she would continue to be. Reaching down, I found a seashell, and I wrote her name in the sand. Rina. I wiped my eyes. I was still going to keep my promise to her, but now she and I could find a positive way to train service dogs together.
Linda, my healer, was right: Rina was my dog after all. And now she’d be living in a home that was once owned by a woman named Rina, and she would use Rina’s dog run, aptly named just for her.
Once Rina came back to me, I relished our time together, especially our weekend expeditions. We traipsed along dusty river trails and walked through redwood forests, her nose sucking in and sneezing the aromas. We visited dog parks and we waded through the waves at the nearby beach. As I completed my degree, I taught Rina everything I was teaching the other dogs. She was a fast learner and loved to work. To me, she was the perfect service dog.
At night we’d fall into bed exhausted, and I gladly gave up my legroom for her. One night I watched her sleeping, her body heaving in and out in a steady rhythm. She was doggie-dreaming, her legs twitching, eyes flitting, and her throat grumbling a muffled grrff. Was she running through the canyon? Wrestling with her best friend, Zoe? Whatever the inspiration, it was clearly a wonderful dream.
The next morning, as the sun beamed through the blinds, I awoke to see Rina sitting upright on the floor, her tail swishing side to side. As I sat up, her tail-swish became a drumming thump, thump, thump.
“Morning, Rina,” I yawned. I couldn’t believe it: I had actually slept through the night. Unlike the organization that released her, I appreciated her “assertive fear” because she would bark if anyone came near our home, and that gave me a much-needed feeling of security. My nightmares had abated just knowing that Rina was watching out for me while I slept.
My once-in-a-lifetime dog was finally home, bringing with her a sense of safety that I’d never known.