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.