What my pup has taught me about separation anxiety

Midlife can leave you wondering when the old you is coming home.

A very good girl, 2021

In the last month of 2019, before the first time the world fell apart, I was at Duke University Medical Center spending time with a heart monitor and my father. He was telling me hazy stories under the influence of the contents of IV bags. Old memories: some sweet, some painful, some that I now wish I did not know. I was holding his big, needle-bruised hand, and sometimes he would squeeze mine, and maybe I was 6 again and we were crossing a parking lot at the gym where he played basketball, or we were walking to the IGA to buy milk for my mother.

Sometimes he would pause and wipe his watery eyes between stories. Sometimes he would check mine after I checked his heart monitor.

I checked it obsessively. I was learning the difference between P waves and F waves. Patients who have had coronary bypass operations run the risk of stroke if they experience atrial fibrillation, or afib, in the days after surgery, which he had done two nights before. Half a dozen people in bright blue scrubs had shooed me out of his room at 1 a.m. and moved this and added that to his IV poles, and from then on I knew that we wanted P waves, not F waves. I knew we wanted no more than 100 beats per minute.

“When are you coming home?” my 11 year-old had asked me over the phone one night. Although I lived an easy 25-minute drive from Duke, I had not been home in 5 or 6 days, since the night before the surgery. “Daddy says we have to wait for you to decorate for Christmas.”

“I don’t know, Baby. As soon as they say Pop Pop is ready to go home. But you don’t have to wait for me.”

They waited. I thought of them waiting while I tracked the P waves and the F waves and helped my father move from the bed to the recliner for breakfast. I thought of them when tinsel began to show up in the lobby, when holiday lights went up along all the streets in Durham.

On the morning of the hazy stories and the watery eyes, my oldest called.

Janie had always been quieter with her affection. She often sent envoys to share her thoughts.

Dogs, for example.

“Mommy,” she said, “Luna has been sitting in front of your office door a lot. She’s just laying at the entrance to the attic, wondering where you are. She really misses you.”

“Is Luna really sitting in front of my door?” I asked my husband when we spoke later, doubtful.

“Yes,” he said. “She actually is.”

“Oh,” was all I could say. I wiped my watery eyes.

I had never considered myself a dog person. Though it had been my idea to rescue a puppy the year before, I told myself we were doing it for our animal-loving kids, who were both traveling through the lonely junction of neurodivergence and adolescence. I told myself that a dog would understand them when they felt as if no one else could, help them maintain no more than 100 beats per minute when anxiety hit.

But I had no idea that our little caramel-colored (alleged) Boxer mix—the runt of a litter found under a trailer by a FedEx driver—would become my sherpa through midlife, too.

And yet, maybe part of me hoped she would all along.

Janie and Luna, 2018 (Sarah M. Arneson photo)

Two years later, the second time the world fell apart, I landed on the floor of my bedroom.

It had been a bruising few weeks that saw us forced out of my family of origin while simultaneously throwing every resource we had at advocating for and protecting a vulnerable child. It was all too much on the heels of 2020’s global losses. I was done in by the ferocity of life’s volleys. I doubted my resilience. I wondered what would come next. I cannot describe the whole of 2021, in which I also lost a treasured friend to cancer, without feeling an inner tremble.

I needed a place to curl up and grieve that day, and I thought I was safely hidden from view in a corner of my bedroom, away from the foot traffic of my family. But soon I heard the soft jingle of metal tags and watched as Luna tiptoed toward me with her head low and respectful. She didn’t complain. She didn’t make the pleading pterodactyl noises that indicated she needed me. She simply sat down inside the shape of what was left of me with her back turned, guarding me as only a vulnerable creature can.

She appointed herself my heart monitor.

I know this behavior is not news to dog parents, 53 percent of whom consider their canines to be equal members of the family. And researchers know it, too; it’s one reason why dogs have become a popular focus of human health. “Dogs are very present,” Dr. Ann Berger, who was chief of pain and palliative care at the National Institutes of Health for 24 years, said in 2018. “If someone is struggling with something, they know how to sit there and be loving.”

But I grew up in an actively pet-less home. Before I existed, my older sister had experienced a few run-ins with a lawless gang of neighborhood pups outfitted with switchblades and black leather jackets hellbent on terrorizing toddlers. (Or so I imagined when I was told the stories.) Every Fido was persona non grata in our family, and I was conditioned to be irrationally terrified of all of them, from the Dobies to the Dachshunds.

It had been my job to not be a dog person the way it was my job to track the P waves.

But now I wonder what having a dog might have given me as a child, what an animal who was hardwired to understand me, who was incapable of hiding its affection or rejecting my emotions, might have taught me.

Might have taught all of us.

“The foundations of mindfulness include attention, intention, compassion, and awareness,” Berger said. “All of those things are things that animals bring to the table. People kind of have to learn it. Animals do this innately.”

More than 20 years ago, Randy surprised me by bringing his dog, Molson, on our first date. This was before the advent of dating apps. If we had met online instead of at a kickboxing class, I imagine I would have read the words “must love dogs” on his profile and he would have read “no dogs please” on mine, and we both would have swiped left into different futures.

And yet, after we had been dating for a few months, he caught me hugging his docile Dalmatian-Lab mix when I thought no one was looking.

“Ah, see?” he taunted me. “You said it would never happen, and look at you. You’re becoming a dog person. You are.”

“I am not.”

“OK. But I don’t believe you.”

“I promise you I am not, nor will I ever be, a dog person,” I said, scratching Molson behind his ears.

But, of course, I was. I am. Have likely always been at heart.

Molson has been gone a long time, but Luna came into my life when I was 45. I see now that she represented one of the first declarations of my independence from my discordant parts, those incongruent pieces of ourselves that we stubbornly protect and defend for years until we enter middle age and gain the courage to slough them off. Midlife, as many women in particular have noted on Substack lately, is when we finally separate from who we were taught to be in favor of just being us. It’s when we defibrillate and normalize our own ventricular rhythms.

And of all the learned roles I have released myself from over the last decade in pursuit of a truer version of myself, Not Being a Dog Person was the easiest to leave behind.

Because often, dogs are just better at being human.

Better than meditation.

Luna, who turned 7 this week—or 47 in human years—is middle-aged now, too. She receives a shot in her backside once a month for her arthritis, and I see a functional movement coach who shows me how to reach for the high fiber cereal on the top shelf at Food Lion without dislocating my shoulder.

Science even supports that humans and canines are in this aging thing together. Researchers in Vienna discovered a few years ago that dogs go through many of the same activity and personality shifts across their life span that we do. As they age, they generally become slower and more set in their ways. They are less interested in novelty.

And I have anecdotal evidence to support that they also become a little grumpy. Last week, I sat down beside Luna as she napped in my office. I laid my palm on her side. She swiftly donkey-kicked my elbow with her stubby back leg to get rid of me.

Who was I to complain about her mood? A health history form I was handed last week included the question, “Have you been unusually touchy or sensitive lately?” On the tiny line beside it, I wrote: “What kind of a question is this?”

I handed it back to the receptionist, who was about my age, and she nodded approvingly.

This is a hard season of life in any timeline. What they tell you about how to be a 52-year-old woman is woefully inadequate to begin with, but no one can prepare you for experiencing 52 while also dealing with the effects of disownment and the dismantling of democracy—which includes the backslide of women’s rights, DEI, scientific discovery, higher education, compassionate systems to aid the vulnerable, diplomatic alliances, a humane rule of law, and leaders with functioning spines. Oh, and that whole economy thing.

All on the heels of a pandemic.

No one can prepare you for watching your world fall apart for the third time in a decade.

Do I have brain fog? Yes, I have brain fog. There is not enough Botox or SSRIs or kale or quinoa or ashwagandha in the world to manage the symptoms of middle age in the year 2025. No mountain pose is high enough, no dumbbell squat is low enough.

It’s a doubly easy time to feel irrelevant—even easier if you’re a Gen Xer who chose to follow your creativity instead of the tech money, in case you missed this cheery story from The New York Times a few weeks back.

But I would submit that, for all of these reasons, midlife also is the right time to fall in love with dogs. No one understands separation anxiety more keenly than a canine. You may find yourself splitting with an old career or an old version of yourself, understandably fearful of what’s next; but dogs have been waiting at the door or the window forever, just hoping you’ll come home in whatever shape you can.

They have never stopped hoping.

After he was released from the hospital all those years ago, my father and mother stayed at our home for a week while he continued to recuperate. We were closest to the medical facilities, and we had a bedroom and bathroom on the first floor. Luna had to live upstairs that week, safely away from the humans who didn’t want her near.

But when we brought her downstairs to let her outside, my father often smiled at Luna as she walked by. And once or twice, I saw him do something else, too, when he thought my mother wasn’t looking. He held out his big hand, the one that used to help me cross from one side of the street to the other, and oh-so-gently patted her head. ♣