Hank

A brief remembrance.

When we first adopted Hank he immediately glommed onto me. It was to the point that whenever I left the apartment, he would cry nonstop (except his bulldog cry was more like the low-register screech of a baby dinosaur). My mere presence seemed to soothe him, made him feel moored. He was the moon and I was his Earth.

This was around 2019, shortly after my wife and I got married. It took a while for us to figure out why Hank took to me so quickly. Leafing through his paperwork, we learned that Hank was a four-year-old and unneutered. An AKC-registered purebred English bulldog with a family tree and everything. (One time at a house party, a stoned guy wearing a big backpack stopped in his tracks at the sight of Hank: “That’s a $5,000 dog!”)

Then we came upon the name of his previous owner, let’s call him RJ, who by all appearances was a Filipino man from Queens. I like to think that perhaps he and I emitted the same Filipino pheromones, or perhaps we were of similar skin tone and stature, and Hank, being a dog, thought, “Close enough.” For reasons still undetermined, RJ dropped Hank off at a dog groomer one day with all his paperwork and never picked him up.

We suspect Hank was a breeder on account of how humpy he was, which was only a nuisance because he was incredibly strong and sturdy; the ultimate heavy. His humps rattled nearby furniture. Yet there was a real sweetness to him, an almost dumb innocence to his affection, which spread outwardly from me, to my wife, and then eventually to our son after he was born a few years later.

Hank died this past Monday, suddenly. He was 10. I took him to the vet because he started breathing funny. At every vet visit he was always a beacon of good health until very quickly, in the span of a few hours, he wasn’t.

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It feels strange to grieve a dog. Hank’s predecessor, Bronson, was a goofy-looking French bulldog that we inherited from a friend-of-a-friend a few years prior. He died suddenly and young, due to a rare spinal condition that I still don’t fully understand. When we were ready for a dog again I started spending a lot of my free time browsing the pages of local animal rescues.

I saw Hank on True North Rescue Mission one night after my wife fell asleep on the couch. I’m one of those writers for whom writing is a painful and slow process, but in this instance I was possessed by some divine providence that made me hammer out a gorgeously composed letter that laid out exactly why we were the perfect couple to give this gorgeous bulldog a home. In hindsight I may have exaggerated our then-apartment’s ease of access to outdoor space.

What followed was kismet: It turned out that Hank’s foster, Stephanie, was a member at the Muay Thai gym that I had joined earlier that month; I’d later learn that she even posted Hank’s listing to our gym’s Facebook page. The following night we drove a Car2Go up to her place in Williamsburg, and as we were waiting at a nearby bar, we ran into some old friends from work whom I hadn’t seen in a while—another star-crossed sign—and they were stoked at the possibility of us owning a dog again.

So Hank comes bounding around a corner at Stephanie’s place, and I’m immediately like, absolutely, we can take him home right now. There was one other couple who were scheduled to meet him a few days later, but Stephanie was cool, so she texted them that Hank had found his forever home. I Venmo’d the owner of True North like $400 (not $5,000) and we jumped in a Car2Go and took him home.

Hank was a new name, actually. Stephanie’s edit. His previous fosters called him Spanky. RJ, apparently, named him Ross. One night, just to see what would happen, I blurted out “Ross!” and Hank whipped around and glared at me like I had revealed his secret identity at an elegant gala hosted by the enemy.

I’ll admit, it took a few weeks, maybe even months, for my love for Hank to fully blossom. I think we made the mistake of trying to fit him into the vacuum that Bronson had left behind. Bronny was smart and conniving. We would come home from work and often find that he had somehow gotten into food—say, a bag of dried mango—that we thought was sufficiently hidden and made inaccessible to creatures without thumbs. His aptitude for thievery was impressive.

Hank, on the other hand… well, my wife and I had a running joke.

“Hank may not be the smartest dog…”

And that was it.

He never made a mess, never caused any trouble. He was a goody goody. If he had a talent, he had this singular ability to arrange couch cushions and pillows in creative new ways to suit his needs.

All Hank wanted, really, was to be in the presence of someone who loved him. It was so pure. So sharp in its focus. He was incredibly dense, in both the literal and figurative sense, and completely unaware of how much space he sucked up, especially when he crawled onto us while we were watching TV. It was like cuddling a kettlebell.

When I finally warmed up to him it was like something switched inside of me and I couldn’t love him hard enough. Here was Hank: young and dumb with funny teeth and a seemingly endless reservoir for love lurking within him. He quickly shed his abandonment issues and soon possessed the gravity of a gas giant. By the end we were all his moons.

For a long time we thought Hank was unkillable. When he turned eight, he lost his two front bottom teeth while we were on vacation, and then miraculously, two other tiny teeth from the periphery of his gums moved in, which somehow made him even more handsome. At one point, he seemed to be going blind in one eye—and then the cloudiness dissipated and his vision was perfect again. It was like he was constantly finding new ways to Benjamin Button.

This week, we’ve been trying to use his death as a teaching moment for our four-year-old, to help him understand loss and grief. They were best friends.

While walking him to school the following morning, I told him that Hank had gone away forever to a place called doggy heaven, where he could eat all the snacks he wants, including chocolate. We would never see him again, at least not here, and that made me sad.

When we got to school (late, obviously, I was a wreck from a long night at the emergency vet), my kid cheerfully shouted to all the school administrators in the hallway:

“My doggy died! But it’s okay, he’s in heaven eating chocolate.”

Then he smiled, took the hand of one of his teachers, and skipped off to class. It was so pure, so undiluted in its joy—a fitting tribute to Hank, a most excellent dog.

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