I spent about half of my book on the quest to heal my permanently broken heart, but it was by far not the greatest journey I wrote about. Rather, the greatest journey Maggie and I had ever been on happened in one of two or three rooms in our old house and I wrote about the whole thing across two or three pages. When I fell to the ground in the park a few blocks from our old house in the old neighborhood during a snowstorm, Maggie escaped, her lead slipping my barely conscious grasp. I got to watch her butt wiggle off into the distance as I lost consciousness and froze to the ground.

I thought it would be the last thing I ever saw as I bled into the ground and rapidly lost my body heat to the concrete beneath me. At some point while I was lying there dying, Maggie came back for me on her own and laid down in the snow against my side to try to keep me warm. When I realized what was happening, I narrowly managed to wake up, paint my dog with my blood and tears, and she helped me back to my feet so we could stumble home together. I’m still not certain that we ever made it. But that day marked the beginning of the greatest journey either of us had ever been on.

Maggie was a rescue with a troubled and traumatic history written across her body in scars. She had extremely negative and self-damaging reactions to confinement. I learned quickly why she had been returned by so many adopting families and finally labeled unsuitable for adoption. I knew that if I was going to give Maggie any sort of chance at a life, I had to help my dog address this darkness inside her under her own power. That night, I took her down to where I kept her crate and I sat blocking the exit to the room.

The purpose was to will her to put herself securely in bed. I told her that I wanted her to go into her crate, something she was not at all willing to do, and I sat there and waited. I gave her no other options and so we waited for hours as I willed her to do what I asked. My body ached and screamed with exhaustion as we counted down the hours before she would even begin to engage with the idea. At some point she tentatively put a single paw in her crate. I found this to be progress, so I shoveled the rest of her body into the crate and closed the door.

She protested, but by this late hour at night having done nothing but resist getting in the crate, she quickly tired and went to sleep. Not having any energy left myself, I collapsed on the floor nearby and fell asleep for several hours myself. We would repeat this exercise for the next hundred nights. One evening she put two paws in the crate on her own. Eventually, three. I would gently manipulate her fourth paw and put it in the crate for her and she’d immediately stick it back out, but some nights she’d let it be.

If you’d look, her eyebrows would be furrowed in concentration, her mind chewing on something profound. She was doing battle with her demons and wrestling them into submission. Some nights she would even succeed if I could give her enough time to do so. Although she would still occasionally have a bad reaction, those were becoming fewer and further in between. Exhausted from battling her demons, by the time she had gotten in her crate and I had closed the door, she might put a paw on the grate in protest, but she would quickly succumb to sleep.

Of all of the things I have seen and done in this world, no other adventure thus far compares to guiding my dog on her journey to beat her demons on their own terms, resolve the trauma that caused her to be abandoned so many times, and to never again let these horrors come between her and the love only people can give to a very good girl.

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
– Lao Zi (老子)

In the case of Maggie and I, that step left a little paw print.