I lost my dog and my marriage pretty much at the same time.

My husband and I had been going through a cordial separation process for half a year when Jessie, our 12-year-old rescue lab, got sick. Her breathing became labored, she was losing weight without explanation, and she would stick close to me with a persistent melancholy that I couldn’t ignore.

The vet found a large tumor in her lungs. When she died four months later, I was bereft.

Jessie represented our family’s happiest times, a reflection of us when we were younger and still intact. She was the one consistent and loving connection we all had before the children — and then the marriage — grew up and moved out.

No matter that we had an amicable divorce and still communicated frequently, even had some holidays together. When Jessie died, there was no denying that our once intimate family of four — no longer connected legally or together physically — was, if not quite over, then irrevocably changed.

Our grief over Jessie bound us once more, sharing stories, tears, photos (“this is the cutest” “no, this is!”) before we again scattered.

The malaise that followed stayed with me. I would wake up with a pit in my stomach, missing the rattle of Jessie’s collar luring me into her first foray of the day. It took me forever to throw out the rest of her dry food. Sometimes I would sit on my back steps with a stack of tennis balls and imagine us playing fetch.

After a few months of mourning, though, I began to crave a new puppy. I missed having the companionship, another creature’s need and unconditional love. And it didn’t help that, post-divorce, despite friends taking me out for cocktails and firepit conversations, I was spending more time alone on the couch than I had in decades.

So I opened a Petfinder account and searched for “mid-sized, less than one-year-old, within 50 miles, short hair, pleasant disposition.”

I lurked on the site for a few weeks and figured I would know when true love hit. Browsing the photo gallery of wayward pups one afternoon, I came upon Charlene, a five-month-old hound, her tilted head staring at me.

Floppy ears, wide eyes, an intoxicating plaintiveness. Right size, right age, right look. According to her profile, she was found abandoned in the woods of Tennessee with two siblings, but they carried no obvious anxiety about people. In fact, they appeared eager for emotional connection.

So was I.

I submitted my application to the rescue league, made an excuse for my partially fenced yard, pitched the convenience of my work-from-home setup and pledged my canine devotion. It was oddly similar to marketing myself as a dating prospect; throwing humility to the wind, I put myself out there as an “active 54-year-old writer” who had “a lot of love left to give.”

Within 24 hours, I was invited to an open house to find out if Charlene and I were truly a match.

I brought my friend Miriam. Under a large white tent, a dozen chairs had been arranged in pairs for the hopeful couples. The two women in charge brought out Charlene, who quickly burrowed into my lap. After ten minutes of embrace, I took her to the mulch yard to play with the other canine adoptees. She burst into action but kept coming over to make sure I was still there, then burrowed into my lap again. This was flattering but also, well, rather fast for someone who should probably, given my recent losses, be taking new relationships very slow.

Miriam took photos of us, since it seemed like an open-and-shut dog-human match. But as the rescue league women were filling out the forms, eager to close their event with this final adoption, something didn’t feel right.

“Wait a minute,” I said, petting Charlene while my eyes welled up.

I just didn’t feel ready to love another creature so deeply, to be so needed. I wasn’t prepared to give up my newly obtained freedom or to tolerate that grip of worry for another being — especially an abandoned pup likely to have “special needs,” as the pet profiles warn. Should something happen to her (her health history was unknown), I wasn’t sure I could endure another heartbreak.

“I’m sorry, I’m just not ready,” I told the organizers, who seemed both annoyed and perplexed. How could I give up such a great dog when I was in no position to be picky? After all, there must be many more middle-aged single women than there are cute dogs for adoption.

The next day, I closed my Petfinder account and opened a new one — on OkCupid.

Joining a human dating site seemed, frankly, to be lower stakes. I can see the irony now, but at the time, replacing a 24-year marriage (with two grown children) seemed less fraught than getting a new pet. After all, a human companion would (presumably) be able to feed himself, walk off leash and stay home alone while I traveled.

Within a couple weeks, after a few false starts, I thought I found my human version of Charlene: an age-appropriate, funny, affectionate man with similar taste in books and music.

CJ’s profile was clever, confident and self-deprecating (he bragged about his daily fitness routine while admitting he’d just downed a piece of cake). And he had two cats. Given my post-pet wistfulness, that seemed like a good sign.

With a man, more than with a puppy, I figured I could keep up my emotional guard and maintain what I liked about single life. CJ lived an hour away so I wouldn’t have the pressure of meeting another person’s daily needs. He had his own full life but seemed genuinely interested in and attracted to me. We could just have fun.

And we did. Until our third date, when, on a walk along the Connecticut River, he suddenly expressed his need for a serious relationship — and a belief I might fulfill that need.

“Will you go steady with me?” he asked.

I really liked him, but that felt faster than the deal I had made with myself. I wanted to trust that we were getting to know each other on a pace that matched our individual expectations.

“Optimism really isn’t your strong suit,” CJ had texted me when I balked at him buying us tickets for a concert that was many months away.

Still, it didn’t take long for my guard to come down; I couldn’t resist our strong connection, affection and touch. I told myself that love does sometimes work out, so why not now? Why not us?

It was a lovely three months. We texted and talked all day, spent weekends together, hiked, made lists of movies to watch, sang from his ’70s songbook, easily fit in the crooks of each other’s bodies.

But over time, our puppy-love infatuation made way for life’s complications. He had a series of stressors — a bad respiratory infection; the death of one of his beloved cats; a painful conflict with an old friend — that brought on a persistent melancholy. I struggled to figure out how to support him emotionally, and he struggled to tell me.

Then one day, CJ emailed me to say he was breaking up because he felt too vulnerable around me, because I didn’t seem to know how to console him on his worst days. He didn’t want to talk about it and wasn’t willing to work on things.

As I had feared from the beginning, the unspoken needs of another being outpaced my capacity to fill them.

My defensive walls, already cracked, now crumbled. Another pit became lodged in my stomach; I could barely eat or sleep. Wasn’t this exactly the heartbreak I had worked so hard to avoid?

And yet, after licking my wounds for a few weeks, I began going out for drinks with friends again and regaining my solitary composure. When the painful edges dulled, I could look at the relationship as something that had, for a time, added joy to my life.

As the poet David Whyte wrote (yes, I bought all the love-grief poetry books): “Heartbreak, we hope, is something we can avoid; something to guard against, a chasm to be carefully looked for and then walked around …. But heartbreak may be the very essence of being human, of being on the journey from here to there, and of coming to care deeply for what we find along the way.”

Maybe I was able to handle love. At least some kinds.

I closed my OkCupid account — and reopened Petfinder, with a newly expanded list of search terms: “Short or long hair, any age, within 100 miles, and pleasant disposition. Special needs OK.”

Karen Brown is a radio and print journalist in western Massachusetts.

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