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.