Cinny

Late last week, in the early morning hours of October 24th, a fire ripped through the kennels at the No Dogs Left Behind facility in upstate New York, burning unnoticed until a passerby alerted the local fire department. By the time first responders arrived on scene, it was too late; nearly four dozen dogs inside the facility had perished.

Every one of those dogs was special. Every one had a remarkable story. And if I’m guilty of focusing on one dog above the others, it’s because, in a sense, I owe that dog my marriage. 

In February, 2022, a dog named Cinnamon arrived in Vancouver with 285 other dogs and cats on a Russian cargo jet from Kabul. They were evacuees, refugees from the collapse of Afghanistan into the hands of the Taliban. They would be housed in a converted airplane hanger at Vancouver airport, and I was one of the people tasked with caring for them until they could find homes.

Cinnamon was one of the smallest dogs, a skinny, wiry street dog with a bad eye and infected ears and a deep mistrust of nearly everyone. But for some reason I’ll never understand, she warmed to me, as she did to a select group of other staff and volunteers. 

Among her favourites was a pretty, funny, hardworking woman with a gorgeous smile, a bewitching accent, and a selfless and seemingly limitless reserve of love for the animals in our care.

For more than three months, I lived in that airplane hangar with Cinnamon and her fellow evacuees. I spent hours with her, applying her eye drops and ear medication, walking her around the grounds of the airport’s private jet terminal, making sure she was safe and tucked in for the night.

I fell for Cinnamon—how she stood to greet met at her kennel when I came near, poking out her snout for nuzzles, how she rolled over on her back for belly rubs and cuddles, how she bounded and careened, awkward and chaotic, like a baby deer around the exercise pens when we brought her out to play.

And I fell for that pretty volunteer, too, who always seemed to be near Cinny during the shelter’s rare calm moments. Who wasn’t fazed by Cinny’s moments of reactivity or her unpredictable bursts of energy, who didn’t blink at cleaning up a particularly green and grisly lake of diarrhea Cinny left in her cage on one memorable day. 

We got to walking together, the volunteer with Cinny and me with one of the bigger dogs, whom Cinny was always eager to wrestle with. We contrived to spend time together, with each other and with our wiry little baby deer. And by the time Cinnamon left that shelter for a series of other rescues and sanctuaries, that volunteer and I were well and truly in love.

I married that volunteer this summer, on pretty plot of land in southwest England where we’d often talked about bringing Cinnamon someday, to live out her years with the rest of our pack as we settled down and started a family together. 

Maybe that was just a silly dream. Maybe it was unrealistic. But it brought my wife and I such comfort to believe that one day the dog who’d brought us together would find her home, her family. Her forever place in the world.

But that wasn’t to be. Cinnamon was a tough dog to those she didn’t trust, and despite numerous attempts, she was never adopted. She lived the last years of her life among friends both four-legged and two-legged, in a shelter where she had space to run and people who cared deeply for her.

But she ended every day in a kennel, in a room full of other dogs waiting for their chance at forever. And last week, those forevers all disappeared, quite literally gone up in smoke.

I try not to think about the awful stuff. The heartbreaking, terrifying last moments. The unanswered questions. 

In my grief, I try to focus on the joy that those dogs brought to the world, the shining examples of resilience and unconditional love they presented to the world.

I feel grateful, profoundly and eternally, that Cinnamon trusted and accepted me as she did few other men. That out of some cosmic mystery, she chose me as one of her pack.

And that she chose my wife, too. 

My wife and I will plant a tree to remember the dogs who died. We will hold Cinnamon, Naughty, Admiral, and the others in our hearts for as long as we live. We won’t forget them, and the impact they had in their brief time on this earth.

And someday, we’ll bring dogs just like them to a sanctuary on a pretty plot of land in southwest England, where a dog named Cinnamon might have lived out her days running carefree through green fields and rolling hills, if only her forever had been a little bit different.