The Quiet Healers

You take good care of her now. Protect your sister. My mom would whisper into my dog’s ear whenever I left home. In her eyes, we were siblings. Both her children. Wherever our destination–college campus at twenty-one, roadtrip to Utah at twenty-three, or my first apartment at twenty-five–she would say the same thing to Harvey before he hopped into the car with me. 

I always found my mom’s request amusing; my dog doesn’t exhibit an ounce of scary dog privilege. His only redeeming quality in this sense is his deep, loud bark that intimidates strangers when they haven’t spotted him with their own eyes. Any initial fear of his bark is dissipated when they see a thirty-pound Cavalier King Charles Spaniel mix who has eyes as round as his ears are floppy. With this visual in mind, I usually chuckle when my mom tells Harvey to protect me, but her face continues to remain serious as she kisses the top of his soft head. 

In the five years of Harvey and I coming and going from home to embark on different journeys in life, I never quite understood what my mom was getting at. How can this dog take care of me? If anything, it’s the other way around. I feed him better than I do myself, I exercise him with more dedication than I do my own body, and I advocate for his well-being in ways that never came naturally for myself. 

But in the whirlwind of trying to do my best for Harvey, I forgot why he came into my life in the first place. Recently, I was reminded. 

Two weeks ago after my attempts at self-care failed, my nervous system sent me into an anxious panic that culminated into a quarter-life crisis. I had completed my checklist for feeling better: I went to therapy, attended a yoga class, and called a dear childhood friend. Yet, the dark cloud above me refused to budge. I was out of solutions. Why couldn’t I get myself to feel better? What more could I have done for myself? My breaths began to shorten in panic, my tears began to stream in defeat, and my brain insisted on playing a cruel montage of how my life would play out in worst-case scenarios. 

In my frustrating and frantic efforts to turn my day around, Harvey’s needs fell to the wayside. Other than a few potty breaks, he had barely stepped outside of my studio apartment. Guilty, I grabbed Harvey’s leash and with the familiar jangle of my car keys, he stood up and shook off the stillness of his joints. Understanding that it was time to go outside, Harvey did his obligatory biiiiiiig stretch to show me that he was ready. 

When we arrived at his favorite place to dig and hunt for gophers in Griffith Park, Harvey barked with excitement. Usually, I find this behavior irritating, but that day I brushed it off and thought to myself: At least one of us is happy. His nose was glued to the ground the moment we hopped out of the car and my shoulder was being pulled along. Usually I don’t tolerate persistent leash pressure, but that day I chuckled, followed Harvey’s enthusiasm, and walked in circles at the park seemingly deranged. 

In watching the silliness and simplicity of what my dog finds enriching, I began to feel a weight lift off of my chest. Each time Harvey’s dirt-covered nose came up for air from his digging spot, he would look at me with glimmering eyes and a tongue panting from satisfaction. His eye contact seemed to communicate: Thank you for taking me here. Isn’t this so fun? Are you feeling better? 

There’s no way for me to know what my dog was thinking at that moment, but after spending years loving and caring for him, I know when he’s experiencing pure joy. And when that happens, it’s hard not to smile and feel like I’m coming up for air as well. 

Quiet moments like this often invite a sobering reflection on how complicated humans have made finding joy and achieving satisfaction. In a society where the feeling of having, doing, and being enough is hard to come by–let alone maintain–a dog that needs nothing more than the freedom to sniff and dig is magical. Is healing. 

After our evening at the park, my problems didn’t miraculously disappear. I know that my dog will never ask me a string of questions that will lead to an insightful breakthrough like my therapist would. My dog will never relate to me as a twenty-something friend who’s also figuring it out day by day. 

But after that day, I realized that this is what my mom means each time she asks Harvey to take good care of me: There, inevitably, would come moments when the weight of living would feel too heavy and the noise of others would feel too loud–facts of life that can’t be warded off with a loud bark or a scarier-looking dog. But when I’m in the midst of them, when it’s too difficult to talk about, to explain, there would be a dog patiently sitting with her daughter–a soft, unabating presence that would quiet the complexities of the human world and heal her without uttering a word.