Actually, that’s another sentiment I’d alter: in human form, even the best of friends may clash, disappoint one another, or grow apart, and nearly all close adult relationships require periodic tune-ups and reassessments. Not so with the dog. “The thing I love best about my dog,” a woman once told me, “is that she will never walk into a room and say, ‘Honey, I need some space.’” Amen. There will be no couples therapy for you and your dog, no three A.M. dialogues about who’s angry and why, no relational bombshells at the breakfast table. In a world of social unpredictability, where you never know who’s going to walk out on you or move to a new city or veer off in some unexpected direction, this is another great relief: the dog will never wake up one day and tell you he’s been rethinking his whole life, needs some time off, wants a change, or wants to change you.
Over time the snapshots accrue; an album of constancy is amassed. Last spring I spent a few hours with a woman named Ann, who showed me pictures of her dog Claude, a standard poodle who lived to the age of sixteen, and died when Ann was fifty-six. The photos were a small testimony to the dog’s unwavering presence in the midst of major life changes: there are Ann and Claude in 1965, standing in front of a moving van, poised to move from Chicago to Boston. There they are in 1968, right around the time of Ann’s divorce. There they are in 1973, the day of Ann’s father’s funeral. There they are in her living room in 1975—Ann is recovering from chemotherapy treatments, her head swathed in a scarf, the dog by her side. Ann shook her head, paging through the album. “So many changes,” she said, “and that dog was right with me through all of them.”
I have lived with a dog for only a heartbeat by comparison, but already I know what she means. Every night Lucille pads up the stairs behind me, then creeps rather shyly into the bedroom and sits by the bed until I invite her to jump up. This is the start of an evening ritual that never fails to please me, at least in part because it’s so invariable. Lucille is at her sweetest and most polite at this time of day. She jumps onto the bed and lies down, head flattened against the blanket between her front paws, ears back, eyes shining. I get under the covers, and she observes me with an expression of delight and mild surprise, as though she’s amazed that we’re both here yet again, repeating this same behavior. Then I pat the covers by my hip and say, “Come here, you,” and she squirms up next to me, pressing herself against the length of my legs. We spend several minutes together like this, the two of us in our niche. I scratch the dog’s chest and shoulders; she stops me periodically, hooks a paw over my wrist and spends a moment or two licking my hand. After a while I’ll pick up a book and begin to read; she’ll lay her head down on my lap then and heave a great happy sigh.
Lucille and I relive this scene every night, and I’m often struck by the fact that no matter what kind of day I’ve had—good, bad, indifferent—it always ends with this, this tender sameness. My human relationships are unpredictable, sometimes volatile, always subject to complication and flux. But my dog stays the same, her reactions to me constant. In a sea of changeable emotions and circumstances, she is a small anchor, a steady presence who bears witness to the most private details, the monumental shifts and incremental changes, who remains right there.
I lie there and I pet her and I breathe.
“This is the only nonpolitical relationship I’ve ever had,” Ann said, a comment that struck me as odd and also perfect. Dogs represent the one relationship in life where consistency is never questioned, never doubted, never compromised by the vicissitudes of human moods and circumstances and priorities. And so we get to experience something else that’s rare in human affairs: trust. Talk about healing. Dogs are there with us, as Jack Stephens found, the way we wish our spouses were, for better and for worse, in sickness and in health.
They may even be with us in death. Jonathan, the self-described codependent owner of the basenji named Toby, lost his lover, Kevin, to AIDS in 1994. In the last weeks of his illness, Kevin was nearly comatose, suffering from an extremely high fever and unable to maintain consciousness for more than a few minutes at a time. Toby, then a little more than a year old, maintained the most careful vigil over him. For the full course of his illness, Toby would lie on Kevin’s chest like a cat, or curl up tightly against his feet, and he’d growl whenever anyone approached, even Jonathan; if Jonathan tried to pull him off the bed, Toby would resist and hurl himself back.
Kevin was hospitalized the night before he died, and as he neared death, he began to call out to the dog, who of course was not physically present in the room. “Toby, stop chewing that!” he’d say, or “Stay away from there, Toby!” Or he’d lift up the covers on his hospital bed and appear to be letting the dog under the sheets. Jonathan says, “Kevin had this funny little thing of blowing on the dog’s face, and Toby would do this fly-swatting thing in response, batting him in the face. In the hospital Kevin was doing all these things—blowing in the air, smiling. I was on one side of him, and our friend Susan was on the other side, and this imaginary dog was in the middle. And at the very end, Kevin said, ‘Toby! Toby!’ And he was kissing the air, and then he died.”
There is no doubt in Jonathan’s mind that Toby was there with Kevin in some spiritual sense, that the dog made his presence felt, that he helped him to die.
In turn, Toby helped Jonathan to live. Jonathan was stunned with grief, but there was this animal, Kevin’s beloved dog, serving as a connection to the person he’d loved. There was this animal, who needed to be fed and attended to, who’d bat his paws in the air at him when he wanted to be taken out for a walk. There was this dog, leading him out into the world, helping him navigate the landscape of loss. “After Kevin’s death,” Jonathan says, “Toby was the only thing I wanted to be with. After about six months I did this grief workshop, and they asked us to write down all the things that were really important in our lives. I couldn’t think of one person to put down, but the one thing I could say, unconditionally, was Toby.”
Dogs can help us heal past wounds as well as present ones. My friend Mary and I, who’ve both racked up many years of struggle in psychotherapy, talk a lot about how hard it is to move past old sources of pain, about how you can spend eons with a therapist and relive in the most wrenching way the deepest disappointments and hurts, and how in spite of that kind of work, the distress never fully abates, the voids never really fill. You think you really understand the ways your mother let you down, understand finally and fully the ways you felt misunderstood or undervalued or disregarded as a kid; you think you’re past all that at last, and then you go shopping with your mom, or walk into her house for dinner, and you regress in about ten seconds, one minor empathic failure tapping in to an ocean of older, larger ones.
Mary has a four-year-old Chesapeake Bay retriever named Georgia, a beautiful female with a soft, curly brown coat and large greenish-yellow eyes. Out to dinner at a restaurant recently, Mary’s mother kept referring to the dog as “he.” “How is he doing?” “Does he shed a lot?” Not a huge transgression in the grand scheme of things, but her mother’s refusal to remember the one simple fact of the dog’s gender felt like a slap; it opened all those psychic memory banks, harkened back to countless episodes, big and small, that had left Mary feeling disconnected and minimized in the past. She doesn’t get it. That’s how she felt, for the nth time. My mother doesn’t get the things that are most deeply important to me; my mother doesn’t get me. She sat there and she clenched her teeth and she wanted to scream.
But this is the thing: Mary got home that night, and as she pulled into the driveway, she heard her dog—her big, beloved female dog—barking from the upstairs window, anticipating her arrival. She headed up the stairs, and she heard Georgia’s toenails scratching against the floor behind the door, heard her high expectant whine: You’re home! You’re back! She opened up the door, and she felt sixty-two pounds of retriever hurl itself into her arms, and she sat down in the hallway with that dog, and she felt loved and needed and valued, and she loved that dog right
back, sat there and rubbed the dog’s belly and scritched her ears and giggled and cooed. You can’t fully transcend old pains, can’t inure yourself completely against the times when they emerge from their buried places, but you can find new ways to soothe them, to ease the blows. Mary can love that dog in a way she herself was never loved, and—just as amazing—the dog can love her back. “This dog loves me,” she says, and she shakes her head in wonder at that simple notion, at how comforting the knowledge is, how much it fills her up.
You hear this a lot among people who have very intense relationships with their dogs: the dog offers a kind of corrective emotional experience, allows us to both give and receive what we haven’t quite gotten in our human relationships. Sometimes dogs are the mothers we always wanted, sometimes they are the children we never quite got to be, often they are both. Kathleen, the woman who’s been known to prepare a special plate of pancakes for Oz, her Australian shepherd, grew up in the most chaotic household. Her father was a jazz musician who worked nights, her mother was a registered nurse who worked days, and both were needy and rather childlike people who really didn’t have a clue how to raise a kid. Kathleen went into day care when she was only a year old; her mother used to joke that Kathleen “raised herself”; and although her parents were basically well-intentioned, kind people, Kathleen never had the sense that they were looking out for her, that anyone in the world really put her first.
Today Kathleen lives with her own share of chaos—she’s divorced, a single mother who struggles to make ends meet—but she also has this dog, Oz, this wonderful creature who literally stands up beside her at the kitchen counter when she cooks dinner, his front paws on the butcher block. She has given Oz an unchaotic place to live, a lifestyle that’s simple and predictable and calm. She has loved him with an eye toward his needs: when Oz was a puppy, Kathleen worried about stifling his shepherd instincts, his need to herd, and so she used to take him to a park near her house and pretend to be a sheep. She’d stand there and say, “Baaaa! Baaaa!” and then she’d run, and Oz would tear around and chase her. That purity of love you give a dog—a feeling we all long for in relationships and so rarely experience—has not wavered since she got Oz, and Kathleen finds this deeply satisfying, this ability to love another being in such an uncomplicated way. And the receiving is as corrective as the giving. Dogs, after all, do resemble ideal mothers in some important respects: they’re totally interested in us, totally accepting, fascinated by just about everything we do, and this reality is not lost on Kathleen. Oz is as much her parent as she is his, more attuned to her than her real parents were, far more available and consistent. “He totally comforts me,” she says. “And I don’t think I’ve ever had a relationship in my life that’s been a comfort.”
Dogs allow us to rewrite the childhood script. Emily, a thirty-six-year-old woman who was badly neglected and abused as a child, has created with her dog a model of care that eluded her as a girl. The dog, a chocolate Lab named Riley, has a good diet, regular exercise and medical care, the very cleanest ears and eyes and teeth, and nurturing him this way has been life-saving for Emily in the most literal sense. Her upbringing left her with a dissociative disorder and a long history of depression, and as she tells me, through tears, “Riley is what keeps me sane. Suicide is always on my mind, and I can’t do it—I know I just will not do it—if I have Riley. I can’t abandon him like I was abandoned. So it’s sort of like how I stay alive is because of my dog. He keeps me going.”
Debbie, forty-nine, has invented perfect siblings of sorts. The middle child of three girls, she was the family caretaker as a kid, the great mediator, and fairness has always been, she says, “a huge issue” for her. When she talks to me about growing up, she uses the phrase “game warden” several times: “I was the game warden for the three of us”; “That was my role: game warden.” Today, she lives with three female Rhodesian ridgebacks, and the phrase comes up again when she talks about them. “There are three of them, always vying for attention or fighting over a bone, so in a sense I’m always having to be the game warden.” This transfer—mediating dogs instead of sisters—has been marvelously effective. Debbie’s role as family healer backfired in human form (when she finally stopped taking care of everybody else and started putting her own needs first, she ended up estranged from both sisters), but the dogs have allowed her to recreate her early family experience without the attendant costs. Debbie understands the canine hierarchy—which of the three dogs is the alpha, which comes second, and which comes third. She respects the pack system, knows that the dogs will be happiest if she comes into a room and pets the alpha dog first, ignoring the other two. She knows how to keep the peace, and the act of doing this—of ensuring that everyone is treated fairly, that everyone’s needs are met—is as satisfying to her as the act of attending to Lucille with such care is to me; it hits some central note of familiarity, answers the oldest longing.
What’s funny about these historical revisions is the elusive, serendipitous way they take place. Kathleen and Emily didn’t set out to recreate their own upbringings through their dogs; Debbie never sat up one day and thought: Well, gee, I wonder if I could be a different kind of game warden if I were working with three female dogs as opposed to three female humans. It just sort of … happened. I hear these stories, and I’m reminded of the way I stumbled toward Lucille, of the semiconscious way I managed to acquire not only a dog but this dog. All dogs can be guide dogs of a sort, leading us to places we didn’t even know we needed or wanted to go.
Sometimes a dog can lead you to several different places at once.
Consider a scenario:
The dog and I are playing soccer. We are deep in the woods, and I am standing in the middle of a trail, a blue ball under my foot.
“Ready?” I say. “Are you ready?”
Lucille leaps ahead, dashes about four feet in front of me, and plants herself in the middle of the path, facing me. Then she crouches into a play bow, her whole body tense with concentration. She watches my foot, waits. I see her paws tighten against the dirt path, see her tail sweep up behind her. I step back, give the blue ball a swift kick in her direction, and she pounces on it, the goalie in action. Sometimes she stops the ball as it comes toward her, scoops it up in her mouth, and prances off, great pride in her step, but usually the ball flies past her and she has to dash off in pursuit. Several times the game has ended in near disaster. This particular ball—small, with a bell in it—is of great importance to Lucille: it is the only ball she will play with, the only ball she ever loved, and it appears to be irreplaceable. Throw a substitute ball, even an identical one, and she will sniff it disdainfully and walk away. So I live in fear of losing the blue ball. I have also inadvertently kicked it into barely retrievable places and have had to mount heroic rescues to save it, wading through pond scum to pick it out of a marsh, plunging my arm, shoulder high, into December waters to pluck it out of a lake, even scaling a seven-foot chain-link fence to retrieve it when it disappeared through a hole. But no matter; the effort pays off. Armed with the blue ball, Lucille gets to run, and I get to act like a kid. I shout—“Good save! Yes!”—and I run after her, and I tear off my jacket and scale fences, and I laugh out loud.
I also get to slide in and out of about six other personae. Sometimes I am the dog’s playmate; other times I am her coach, enthusing over a successful catch or a well-executed command; still others, I am the disciplinarian, tramping through the brush to retrieve her if she refuses to come when I call (yes, this still happens). The dog can feel like a sister, or a best friend, or a protective older brother, she can feel like a mother or a child or both at once, and there is a quality of effortlessness to the way we adapt and exchange these varied roles, as though we’ve both learned how to doff Hat A and replace it with Hat B without so much as a flicker of negotiation.
I suppose this is my own haphazard form of pet therapy, this steady dipping in and out of different sides of the self, and on balance I’d say it’s bee
n effective: little pieces of me, some of them long dormant, have been cultivated, crystallized, comforted in the process.
I have relearned something about play on those walks, something that got drained out of me for a while in all those years of drinking and grief. Sometimes this hits me as an awareness of absences: I’ll walk along beside Lucille and realize—oh!—I’m not clenching my teeth, not stiff with tension, not chewing over a worry, and this is so different from my prior state, I barely recognize the sensation, which is ease. I also smile a lot more than I used to. Last fall I scheduled a session at my therapist’s home office so that I could bring Lucille, whom he’d never met. My therapist’s dog, a charming, seven-year-old West Highland white terrier, joined us, and Lucille, who has a very vivid enthusiasm for terriers (they bring out the devil in her), appeared to consider this a fifty-minute play session in her honor. She was rapt: she wrestled the terrier, she pawed at him, she threw herself on the floor on her back in front of him; to my horror, she got up on her hind legs and humped him. The hour was in some respects useless—we gave up trying to talk about anything but dogs after about seven minutes—but I found myself doing something I hadn’t done in thirteen years of psychotherapy, which is laugh through an entire session.
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