Chloe

There’s a hint of sadness, even still, when I think about Chloe. That wasn’t her name, really, only the name I gave her in my head. She wasn’t around long enough to get a name, at least not from us. Chloe, the traumatized lost terrier mix we adopted last weekend from the SPCA in hopes of giving her to my grandmother who, of all people should understand abandonment and trauma.

She seemed to have a very nice disposition, ready to be loved and to love. That’s the first thing everyone who met her said about her, universally, “She seems really sweet.” It was a leap of faith that my 91 year old handicapped grandmother would want her, respond to her; but we thought both could help each other feel slightly less abandoned in this world.

But my grandmother gave her up after only one night. She claimed she was sick, and that she and her housekeeper/companion simply couldn’t take care of her. We’ll never know if it was a real illness like distemper, or just a reaction to the anesthesia from having just been spade earlier that day. Chloe was extremely skinny – she was found on August 29 wandering the streets – and somewhat shy. She might have just needed some love and food, that was our hunch, our bet. But my grandmother refused to play out the other side of it. And so she’s alone now: both my grandmother and the dog.

August 29, the day Chloe was found lost and potentially abandoned and was registered at the shelter, was the same day that my grandmother had to put her old dog down. I wanted so much to think that there was some kind of symmetry in those dates, the confluences of lives and souls running together. But in the end there was none at all. Perhaps there really is no meaning to anything. Or perhaps symmetry is simply what we chose to make of it.

My mother took the trembling terrier to a different shelter the next morning, “returned her,” she said. The second shelter was closer to us but perhaps further from Chloe’s original owners who might or might not have intentionally set her loose, who might or might not still be searching for her, somewhere in this giant spread of a metropolis. All I know, after all of this, is that there simply aren’t enough places of refuge in this city for all that we lose, every day.