This is a First Person column by Sonja Arsenault, who lives in B.C. For more information about CBC’s First Person stories, please see the FAQ.
My husband and I weren’t planning on fostering a dog. Especially not one that looked uncannily like our little, late Griffin, which we had recently lost to a heart condition after 12 short years together.
We were convinced our grief was too raw and the love for our Morkie-mutt felt irreplaceable. Our hearts didn’t feel strong enough to withstand saying goodbye to another canine-being, even if it was for a good reason like finally being adopted by a loving family.
Then one Saturday in March, a friend who volunteers with a local rescue texted me with a photo of a ragamuffin poodle/Maltese cross named Sammy.
He needed a temporary home where he could decompress and learn the art of house training, how to walk on leash and where he could work on feeling safer and less reactive around food and children. The rescue’s foster homes were filled to capacity, so my friend asked if we could take in the eight-month-old pup.
I couldn’t shake the feeling that Griffin had finally sent me the little cosmic nudge that I’d been waiting for since his passing.
So, we said yes to fostering. Just for a little while. Just until Sammy found his forever home. Just until we could breathe again without missing Griffin in every room of the house.
Along the way, we also fell in love. Sammy, with his fluffy eyelashes and sloppy kiss attacks interrupted by his periodic “give me space” love-nips, obsessively loved us back. As fosters, we got the first option to adopt.
With his delicate soft fur and mischievous antics, it was impossible not to imagine keeping him with us, knowing how comfortable he was in our home and family. You see, Sammy didn’t know he was to be temporary and instead had moved into our home as if he had taken over the mortgage payments.
But my husband and I are a realistic pair.
We wanted to travel once we became empty nesters, and being tied down to another pet for the next 15 years was just not in the cards for us.
We both knew that Sammy needed pet parents who were home most of the day and who had another dog in the home for him to play with incessantly.
The more we leaned into the fostering experience, the more we recognized that fostering fits our lives right now in a way adoption doesn’t. With full-time jobs and almost-grown kids, our hearts want the spark of a dog in the house at times — the joy, the chaos, the little daily moments that make a house feel more alive and us more like a complete and cohesive family.
Fostering has become for us a sweet middle ground; a few weeks or months of pouring all our leftover parenting energy into a dog that needs some extra love and attention. My husband and I get to practise tag-team parenting again like old times except now instead of basketball practice and carpools, it is evening walks, cuddle shifts and late-night “What is that dog up to?” patrols around the house.
And the best part? We get to help more dogs this way. One at a time, we can give them a soft landing, love them like our own and then send them off to their forever families. Loving dozens of dogs instead of just one feels like we are multiplying Griffin’s legacy over and over again.
After several months of consistent routine and patience transformed pee-filled rugs into house-training success, I wrote a Tinder-style dating profile for Sammy’s adoption ad.
The rescue received more adoption applications for Sammy in a day than they had for any other dog in their history. Think the Ryan Gosling of dogs in a Bachelor-style contest of options. We helped find Sammy the perfect match of adopters — including a new dog brother named Baxter and two humans who were already obsessed with him.
And yet, as the drop-off day to his new home came closer, I spiraled. What if Sammy was the sign from Griffin to adopt another dog? What if letting go was the wrong move? What if I was giving away the one connection I had left to Griffin? How do you say goodbye to something that gave you back a piece of what you had lost?
But here’s the twist we didn’t see coming.
When we dropped Sammy off at his new home, he and his new dog-brother Baxter took off in the yard in a game of tag around the pool, tearing up and rolling around on their large patch of fresh-smelling grass.
We had noted his adopting family lived on the same street as Griffin’s beloved dog-sitter. When I asked the adopters if they knew our friends, they said no.
Then as dog-lovers do, I asked the better question: Did they know Douglas, our sitter’s Labradoodle and Griffin’s old giant dog friend.
The adopters’ faces lit up.
“Of course we know Douglas!” they said. “Sometimes he walks alone, sometimes he walks with another little dog.” That other little dog was Griffin.
These people had already met Griffin many times before, when Griffin went for evening walks with his sleep-away family and their own beloved dog. Before they even knew me. Before Sammy. Before any of this.
I knew right then that Griffin, my mystical little matchmaker, had led Sammy — and me — to exactly where we were both meant to be. Teaching us that life is about risks — opening up our broken hearts again and then learning to let go anyway. So no, our hearts couldn’t handle another loss. But our hearts could handle more love. Sometimes the hardest goodbyes are just very clever hellos in disguise.
Sammy was never ours to keep. But he was definitely ours to love.
Now, we will simply add him to those we have loved and lost and bravely prepare ourselves to love again.
I’m thankful to Griffin for the signs and for sending a Sammy-sized reminder that love doesn’t end; it evolves. And, most of all, for teaching us that sometimes learning how to let go is the most loving thing we can do for each other and for ourselves.
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