Good Girl

When writer Adam Green found himself sinking into depression, his dog Quincy provided a life raft. The story of a man, his best friend, and salvation.

- Adam Green

TWO THINGS THAT HAVE BEEN A PART OF WHO I AM for as long as I can remember are a love of dogs and a tendency to depression, the first of which can sometimes serve to take the sting out of the second. But around the time I turned 30, I went through a period of depression so profound that I could barely function. Spiraling toward oblivion, I made the painful decision to check myself into a psychiatric hospital and to give away my dog, Lou. Though I eventually climbed my way back to health, I remained shaken by the encounter with my own fragility and ashamed that I had fallen to the point where I was unable to take care of not just myself but a dog who depended on me.

After that, the idea of ever getting another dog seemed out of the question. But in the fall of 2012, my significant other (I’ll call her Charlotte), with whom I’d lived for fifteen years, said that she wanted one. A few years earlier, we had talked about having a child, and for various reasons it hadn’t worked out. Now our relationship was going through a difficult time, and in the way some couples look to a baby to save a faltering marriage, Charlotte and I each hoped that adopting a dog would draw us closer. And as soon as she texted me a picture from the North Shore Animal League of a tiny twelve-week-old terrier mix—fluffy and white with brown and black markings, a black gumdrop of a nose, and giant brown eyes—I instantly texted back,

“Bring that dog home! Now!! I think her name is Quincy!”

When Charlotte arrived at our rented cottage on eastern Long Island, carrying Quincy wrapped in a blanket, I felt a rush of love. As I watched her pad clumsily around the living room—sniffing the skirt of a couch here, mouthing a coffee-table leg there—it seemed to me that this could be a new beginning. It would be my way of putting things right for abandoning Lou all those years ago.