XVII
dogs and death
WHEN A BELOVED character in one of my novels dies, I must write about that death with the emotion and the reverence I would bring to a eulogy given for a real person. We all go into that dark, which is the darkness of God, the ultimate humbling of our prideful kind; therefore, death is a sacred subject requiring me to consider the native knowledge with which I was born, whether I am writing about the death of a fictional person, a real person, or a dog.
Current theory claims that dogs are unaware they will die. Theory does not deserve respect when it conflicts with our intuition and common sense, which are native to the mind and fundamental to sanity.
We might take comfort in this claim that dogs are unaware of their mortality because it lifts from dogs the fundamental fear with which we must live. But it’s a false comfort, as anyone knows who has loved and been loved by a dog, and who has not surrendered his common sense.
Worse, in believing such a thing, we rob dogs of the profoundly moving stoicism that gives them immense dignity. When you have dogs, you witness their uncomplaining acceptance of suffering, their bright desire to make the most of life in spite of the limitations of age and disease, their calm awareness of the approaching end when their final hours come. They accept death with a grace that I hope I will one day be brave enough to muster.
We live in death, which is all around us, and waiting in us. Yet modern men and women—meaning not those people of this current age but those who embrace the modern prejudices—live as if death is not a part of life but only an end. They worship youth, live for the moment, in time and of time, with no capacity to imagine anything outside of time. They do not deny death as much as they repress the recognition of their intimate relationship with it. Death is given a place in their thoughts similar to that occupied by a childhood friend not seen in twenty years, known to be still out there in the old hometown, a thousand miles away, but not currently relevant.
A life-altering lesson can be learned by considering what dogs know about mortality and how they know it.
Intuition + common sense = dog wisdom.
Contention One: Dogs know. Dogs know they die.
Contention Two: By intuition, dogs know more about death than the mere fact of it.
A neighbor of ours heard commotion in the backyard and stepped outside to discover that a mountain lion had come out of the canyon and over the fence. The big cat, one of the most ferocious of all predators and seen seldom in these parts, was after the family dog.
Around the yard, across the patio, around the pool, the dog—let’s call him Winslow—raced for his life, spun-jumped-scrambled from one hoped-for haven to another. Happily for both Winslow and his owner, the mountain lion allowed itself to be chased off with loud noise and a makeshift weapon. This is fortunate because the lion could have decided to go for a Big Mac instead of a small burger, and could have killed the owner as easily as it could have chowed down on Winslow, who was a third its size.
If dogs have no concept of their mortality, if they don’t know they die, why did Winslow strive so frantically to avoid the mountain lion? Maybe the big cat only wanted to play. Maybe they could have had a great time with a tug toy.
We could say that instinct inspired Winslow to flee.
Instinct is an inborn pattern of activity or a tendency to action, a natural impulse, genetically programmed. Bird migration in winter is one example, as is the pattern that the spider spins in its web.
Intuition is a higher form of knowledge than instinct. It is a direct perception of truth or fact, independent of any reasoning, knowledge neither derived from experience nor limited by it, such as that the whole is greater than a part, that two things each equal to a third thing are also equal to each other. Intuition also includes perceptions of space and spatial relationships, and an awareness of time.
Although instinct may exist in every creature from human beings to whales to field mice, it’s also a quality of essentially brainless creatures like ants and goldfish, which have no intuition. Common sense tells us a dog is more like a human being than like an ant.
But even if it was just instinct that told Winslow to run from the mountain lion, did it tell him merely to run or specifically to run because he would be eaten?
You might say it doesn’t matter which, because in either case, the action taken by Winslow was the same. But if Winslow knows he will be eaten, surely he knows he is mortal. Therefore, if one wishes to insist dogs are ignorant of their mortality, one must stick with the idea that it is enough for instinct to impel Winslow to run even if he does not know why he must escape the mountain lion.
But there will be many instances when Winslow or another of his kind will have seen a family dog or a house cat attacked and killed if not by the rare mountain lion, then by coyotes, which are more plentiful in these canyons.
So my next question is: Once Winslow has seen Fido or Fluffycat consumed by a coyote, does he finally realize what almost happened to him that day with the lion? Does he now recognize his own mortality?
To be consistent, if we support current theory, we must say no. If it was so easy for a dog to recognize he is mortal, all dogs would be wise to Death.
All right. After Winslow has seen Fido eaten, if he does not reason his way to the concept of mortality, what does he think has happened to the luckless dog? Does he think Fido now lives inside the coyote or that they have morphed together?
Perhaps some will reply that Winslow thinks nothing at all, that his brain is neither large enough nor wired in such a way as to allow him to ponder those questions. Fido was there. Fido is now not there. It means nothing to Winslow, who moves on with his day.
I don’t believe anyone who has a much-loved dog can defend current theory past this point. Those who remain certain that Winslow never ponders Fido’s fate may work with dogs in the laboratory but are invariably dogless in their private lives.
When a dog is your companion and not just your lab subject or your pet, when it is a member of the family and as lovingly observed as would be a child, you learn that the smarter breeds—and perhaps all breeds to different degrees—have greater intelligence than they are often said to have. Not only are they smart, they are also immensely curious, more curious than some of the people who speak with authority about them. And if their curiosity is encouraged, they can astonish with their ability to learn.
Thirty-five years ago, Bonnie Bergin realized that dogs were capable of serving as more than guiding eyes for the blind. She created the concept of the assistance dog for people with a wide range of disabilities, and she implemented that concept in Canine Companions for Independence. She later founded the Assistance Dog Institute, which became Bergin University for Canine Studies.
Not long ago she told me: “When I started down this road so many years ago, I would not have believed that one day I might say these dogs can be taught anything.”
She has taught them to recognize the scent of grapevine-destroying pests so early in the infestation of a vineyard that the enterprise is saved, and only the first couple of infected vines need to be removed; large-scale pesticide spraying is not as necessary as it once was. She has taught them to smell cancer in a patient so early that the usual medical tests cannot yet detect the disease, and experiments in this area are ongoing.
“But it’s true,” Bonnie emphasized. “With patience and the right techniques, with reward training and respect for them, these dogs can be taught anything. The more they learn, the more they can learn.”
Because for over twenty years I have seen canine intelligence in action at CCI and elsewhere, I have no patience for movies that sell the dog as a dumb, goofy, blundering agent of chaos. Nearly always, the problem is not the dog but the owners who cannot or do not bother to teach it as they would teach a child. A movie about dumb, goofy, blundering, agent-of-chaos humans and a wise long-suffering dog who loves them in spite of their idiocies is long overdue.
Dogs know.
Mike Martin, our friend and general contractor, who said he usually thought of anal glands when he thought of me, died suddenly of a massive heart attack before our new house was finished. He was only fifty-five years old.
We’d just gotten up that morning when Mike’s wife, Edie, called and told Gerda that Mike had been rushed to the hospital, evidently having suffered a heart attack. He was such a big, strong, force-of-nature guy, yet so calm and soft-spoken that we thought surely the cardiac event must have been minor. He and Edie lived within a couple of blocks of the best hospital in the area, and we were comforted to think that Mike was so quickly in the hands of the finest physicians.
Neither Gerda nor I had showered, but because I wake each day with epic bed hair, looking not unlike Christopher Lloyd playing Doc in Back to the Future, Gerda urged me to shower while she joined Edie at the hospital. Later, when I got to the hospital, Gerda would come home to shower and then return.
By the time I showered but before I dressed, Gerda phoned me and, shaken by grief and in tears, said, “It’s too late, he’s gone.”
After calling Linda to give her the terrible news, I left Trixie in her office and drove to the hospital in a light rain.
Mike was so highly regarded and well liked by so many people that even though he was gone, more than a few wanted to come to the hospital to see him one last time, as there would be no viewing at a funeral home. Weeks later, hundreds would attend his memorial service, where I delivered a tribute to him and served as a kind of MC to introduce others who wished to speak. One of the hardest things that I have ever done was maintain my composure through that event, which God helped me to do for more than an hour, until I lost it at the very end.
On the morning that Mike died, we stayed at the hospital with Edie, her son, Eric—whom Mike had raised since he was a young child—with Mike’s brother, Jeff, and Jeff’s wife, Judy, to help greet those who had expressed a determination to come.
Gerda went with me to the holding room to spend a few minutes with Mike, and we were the better for having visited the body. In the face of one deceased, not prettified by a mortician’s hand, you see the awful dignity of death, the transience of all things that requires of you absolute humility. You see as well the truth and the hope of life best expressed in the first and last lines of T.S. Eliot’s “East Coker,” part of Four Quartets: “In my beginning is my end…in my end is my beginning.” I am born to die, but I trust that I die to live again.
That afternoon and far into the evening, many of Mike’s friends, his son, Jeff, and family members gathered with Edie at their house. We all brought far too much food not only for the practical reason that even mourners must still eat but also because such gatherings are two parts grief, two parts condolence, and one part gratitude to be among the living, which a lavish spread of food best expresses.
When we got home that evening, Trixie did not greet us in her usual delirious fashion. No wiggle this night, no happy panting. Her tail wagged but not exuberantly. She was eager to cuddle, as always, but more subdued.
I have said that she preferred to sleep in her dog bed, but I have saved for here the fact that during her seventh and eighth months with us, she decided that our bed was preferable after all. Trix slept at the foot of the mattress, so quiet through the night that we hardly were aware of her presence. At the end of the two months, she changed her mind, returned to her dog bed, and did not come back to ours again, except when the night was rocked by thunder and except for two other nights, of which this evening of Mike’s death was one.
Certainly, dogs read our mood from a thousand telltales that we do not recognize in ourselves. They may even read us with something like a psychic perception. Trixie’s demure behavior might have meant nothing more than that she sensed our grief and our solemnity. But I think dogs know.
I spent a large part of the following day with Edie and Eric. We went to the mortuary to make arrangements for the cremation. We went to my attorney—as they were currently without one—to discuss some legal issues regarding the estate, which the government, in its compassion, wants to see addressed before the bereaved can yet think clearly, and we talked through other issues that would need to be addressed. All this was complicated by terrible weather, a downpour of such intensity as to suggest the End of Days. And it was made worse by the bleak storm light, which robbed the day of color and dimension, and flattened our already low spirits.
After returning Edie and Eric to their place, on the way back to Harbor Ridge alone, I thought of what it would feel like to be returning to our house if Gerda had gone from it forever. And putting these memories on paper, the same dread inevitably settles over me. We have lived under one roof more than twice as long as we lived without each other before our wedding. The world never made sense until we were together, and I can’t see how it would make sense if I had to live without her. There are moments, more of them in recent years, when the world appears to be descending into a hundred kinds of madness, when the sane life we have made for each other is more precious because it seems ever more rare and quaint in this age of unbelief, discontent, and irrationality. Solipsism, the strange conviction that only one’s self is real, does not afflict me, but I can believe that if Gerda were to die before me, she might prove to be the last real thing, so that I and all the world around me would at once be colorless and without dimension.
That night, with rain beating on the windows, dinner for two and a bottle of wine by candlelight was a greater comfort than any king could derive from all his power and riches. Under the table, lying on my feet, Trixie was again subdued, and also later when she slept just this one more night at the foot of our bed.
Three days later, under a blue sky, we went to the construction site for a meeting with a few craftsmen and tradesmen who had long been on the project, to determine how we would finish what remained: a handful of simple interior items, some areas of hardscape and additional landscaping. For years, Mike’s office was in a trailer on site, but some time ago he moved into a room in the service building at the back of the property. We would have to clean out his desk and files, separating his personal items from documents pertaining to our house. But this was not the day for that depressing task.
We were to meet with the interested parties in front of the service building, to tour the exterior of the house and compile a checklist of the remaining work. Since the driveway and walk-in gates had been installed, we could leave Trixie off her leash to enjoy the grass, in the shade of the California live oaks and pepper trees. When everyone had gathered, Trixie was not with us. She usually didn’t wander out of sight, and we were concerned.
Someone reported having seen her moments ago around the door of the service building. I went looking for her and found her in Mike’s office, standing at his chair.
Recalling this moment, I can easily go too far attempting to deduce her thoughts and feelings, and so it’s best not to imagine them at all. She was just a dog, standing where Mike could often have been found on the phone, negotiating with suppliers and chasing down overdue orders of urgently needed items. She had thought to go there for some reason, and logically you could say she expected to find Mike, who always gave her a chest rub or a scratch behind the ears.
I watched her, waiting, and something more than expectation of a chest rub held her there, for she delayed another minute or two. The logical assumption is that memories held her, memories of Mike. But it seems memories would have held her only if she realized the sad context in which she considered them, and indeed her solemn mood seemed to confirm an appreciation of context. At last she turned her attention to me, and I said, “Let’s go, Short Stuff.”
She hesitated, surveyed the room again, and came to sit before me, head tilted back, ears raised just at the occiputs. This is as much as goldens are able to raise their pendulous ears, but it cubes their cuteness. I went to one knee and massaged her face with my fingertips and then with my knuckles, a pleasure she rated second only to food. Usually she closed her eyes during this boon, but now she held my stare. When I finished the face massage, she led the way out of the office, out of the building, into the sunshine.
Dogs know.
One day, before we adopted Trixie, as I came down the back stairs, I heard pitiable wailing, which at first sounded like a young child in misery. The cry might have been as near as the family room or living room, but soon I found the source outside. The neighbors kept two Alaskan malamutes, and one of them was sitting in the fenced run alongside their house, howling in distress. His cries were the most pathetic I had ever heard from an animal, yet no injury or product of illness was apparent.
The neighbors often had one or both of the dogs in the house, and they were not negligent. If they had been home, they would have heard this wailing and would have been examining the dog to determine its complaint.
When I went back inside to ask Gerda if she had a cell-phone number for the people next door, we could hear the cries even in her office, which was at the farther side of the house from the afflicted animal. Gerda knew that no phone call was necessary. A short while earlier, she had encountered the neighbors in the street and learned that they were on the way to their veterinarian because one of their dogs was failing fast and needed to be put to sleep to spare it suffering.
The remaining malamute had often been alone in the run and had not howled. This was the anguished wailing of a grieving creature who knew his friend would not return. For three hours, he cried. After a silence, he cried again at twilight. For more than a month, this pathetic dog held forth two or three times every day, for an hour or more on each occasion. Never before or since have I heard such sorrowful, despairing cries, and nothing could console him.
And so dogs mourn.
We have all read the stories of nursing-home dogs that suddenly lavish even more affection on a patient who is apparently no more ill than previously but who passes away within the day.
And so dogs console.
In 1858, a shepherd known as Old Jock was buried in Greyfriars Abbey churchyard, in Edinburgh, Scotland. The next morning, his Skye terrier, Bobby, was found sleeping on his grave. Regardless of the weather, Bobby returned to keep a vigil every day for almost fourteen years. Visitors from around the world came to see this loyal terrier, and a monument to Greyfriars Bobby still stands in Edinburgh. Church officials allowed Bobby to be buried next to Old Jock.
And so dogs mourn not just the immediate loss but also the enduring memory of what was lost.
In AD 79, Mount Vesuvius erupted, destroying Pompeii, burying it under volcanic ash. Centuries later, excavators discovered a dog, Delta, whose collar described how he had saved his owner’s life three times. Delta’s body was lying over a child he had tried to protect from the volcanic horror.
If dogs were incapable of grasping the concept of mortality, they would make no effort to save us from death. If they understand that we are mortal, they surely know the same about themselves.
Skeptics have a reason for wanting to deny that dogs are aware of their mortality. Such an awareness, like an accurate awareness of time and its role in our lives, is a higher order of thinking than mere instinct, which is only pattern programming. Yet because dogs are acutely aware of death before they witness it, the concept has not been learned. Therefore, the knowledge is native to their minds, and we call such knowledge intuition.
For more than a century and a half, elite intellectuals have pressed upon us theories that try to reason us out of our native knowledge, to encourage us to deny that intuition exists. They are hostile to intuition, but not because by intuition we know that we are mortal or because by intuition we understand the basic past-present-future workings of time, or because by intuition we know that the whole is greater than any of its parts.
They are hostile to intuition because, as thousands of years of civilization will attest, we are born with a tao, a code of virtuous conduct, a sense of right and wrong, which is ours intuitively. This tao, which we all share, is the foundation for every great religion but also of every great culture that has ever given its people long periods of peace and stability under law, and also of every rational humanitarian impulse and project. If we recognize the existence of this tao, we cannot believe that life is meaningless, and we cannot succumb to nihilism or to cold materialism. If we recognize this tao, we may well accept the existence of the soul, whereafter we will not cooperate with those intellectuals who, in the modern age, have been in mad rebellion against all of human history that preceded them.
When we acknowledge that dogs are well aware of their and our mortality, we acknowledge they have intuition. From the skeptic’s point of view, this is dangerous because it inspires us to regard our dogs with greater enlightenment, whereupon we may see that dogs, by intuition, also have a tao.
We have seen dogs slinking under a weight of guilt after they have turned the daily newspaper into confetti or chewed a slipper from which they were previously warned away. We have seen dogs in a state of shame, as Trixie was when she crawled on her belly and pressed her face into a corner after peeing on the carpet—even though the fault lay with me. We have seen dogs grin and prance with pride after performing a task as they were trained to do, which is a proper pride in the virtue of cooperation. When dogs risk their own lives to save one of us, they reveal their native knowledge expressed by Saint John in these words: “Greater love hath no man than this: that he lay down his life for his friends.”
If we have been reasoned out of a belief in our intuition and therefore in our mind’s native knowledge of wrong and right, we might wake from our trance of nihilism and discover that, after all, life does have meaning. If our dogs have a tao, we must have one, too, because dogs would not love us so much if we were nothing but meat machines without principles or purpose. Like human beings, dogs can be imperfect judges of characters, but they can’t be wrong about all of us.
Most of us will never be able to live with as much joy as a dog brings to every moment of his day. But if we recognize that we share a tao, we then see that the dog lives closer to that code than we do, and the way to achieving greater joy becomes clear. Loyalty, unfailing love, instant forgiveness, a humble sense of his place in the scheme of things, a sense of wonder—these and other virtues of a dog arise from his innocence. The first step toward greater joy is to stop fleeing from innocence, begin retreating from cynicism and nihilism, and embrace once more the truth that life is mysterious and that it daily offers meaningful wonders for our consideration.
Dogs know.