Good grief, p.2
Good Grief, page 2
Despite my apparent oblivion, I did have a sense that something wasn’t right. A child can recognize death, even before she might have the words to articulate what’s happened. According to Dr. Allan Peterkin, professor of psychiatry and family medicine at the University of Toronto, toddlers can sense stress and tension in family dynamics after a death has occurred, but they don’t understand its permanence. Children between the ages of four and six, when faced with a dead pet, often imagine that the pet is still alive somewhere else and maybe, just maybe, if they wish hard enough, it will return. But according to John W. James, Russell Friedman, and Leslie Matthews, authors of the book When Children Grieve, once kids hit age seven, they start to grasp the permanence of death and get hung up wondering what happens to the body and soul of the pet once it has passed. Up until that point, there’s a whole lot of magical thinking and willful denial. As author Karen Russell wrote in the New York Times about the death of her childhood pet hermit crab: “I did not want to know what I knew.”
I, too, didn’t want to know what I knew: my earliest dead pets were victims of cannibalism. And so long as there was no overt evidence, I could continue on in ignorant bliss.
But then there was a floater.
The little dead goldfish drifted along the surface of the tank, mingling with flakes of uneaten food, eventually being suctioned against the aquarium tank filter. Such a small, still creature—gray eyes, wilted fins, limp thinness. I could see through the skin to the tiny organs and skeleton. I scooped his body out, and the fish lay motionless on a paper towel in my palm. There it was: cold death, staring me in the face.
I was upset, yes, but during those early pet deaths, my confusion outweighed my sorrow. The idea of forever was still hard to digest. I couldn’t believe that the fish was actually, completely, 100 percent dead, even though I held his body in my hand.
Dad was in Japan, traveling for business, so Mom had to figure out how to talk to me about mortality on her own. She hadn’t even wanted these fish, her biggest fear was how I would react to their demise, and now she had to be the one to explain what happened to dead fish souls. Many experts suggest having conversations with children about pet death long before the pet actually dies so everyone’s more prepared when the day comes. We did not do this. I sat on the kitchen counter next to the aquarium, cradling the dead fish in my kindergarten-sized hand, as Mom stumbled through a short speech about how fish have spirits and go to heaven just like humans do. I don’t remember her exact words, but I do remember feeling like my grief was validated. Mom wasn’t an animal person herself, but she understood what it was like to love and lose a friend.
According to psychologists, the most common losses in a child’s life, in the sequence they are most likely to occur, are: death of a pet; death of a grandparent; major move; divorce of parents; death of a parent; death of a playmate, friend, or relative; and debilitating injury to the child or someone important in the child’s life. (This is, of course, assuming the child comes from generally stable circumstances.) For me, the typical trajectory bore out, beginning with fish death at age five.
The deaths of my fish hit me hard. And flushing that first one only made it worse. There was a gentle splash as his body broke the surface of the water and drifted down, settling at the bottom of the toilet bowl. I said a few words—thanking the fish for his friendship, his service to the aquarium community. As I pressed the handle to flush, the water in the bowl swirled and flipped the dead fish. It seemed at that moment my friend had returned. I stood paralyzed. Had I miraculously revived the fish, only to send him to his death in some underground maze of pipes? As he disappeared down the drain, I breathed fast and shallow, tears soaking my face.
The flushing/reanimation trauma was acute enough that for all future fish deaths, I switched to burial. As a kindergartener, I’d joined the pet aftercare industry; with each new floater I found, I added to a cemetery that I built on the small hill by the side of our house in Lexington. I chipped away at the rocky New England dirt—sometimes for quite a while when the ground was frozen—and created a shallow hole. Then I’d wrap the fish in a piece of paper towel and place the small rolled package into the ground and refill the hole with dirt. I became such a professional at pet burial that I even assisted with animal funerals at school. Other kids’ diaries contain notes about crushes, memories from summer camp; mine brags about my role in a memorial service at school for the class hamster.* I enjoyed hanging out in my pet cemetery—arranging and rearranging rocks, pulling weeds, smoothing the dirt. In a way, in their small fishy graves, my little guys were still with me.
Because I missed them. Sure, my pet fish hadn’t curled up and snuggled with me on the sofa every night, but I loved them all the same, and their absence made me sad. Even after I’d gotten replacement fish, I still thought about the originals. They were part of me, in a way. I was sure that no one else had ever felt so deeply connected to their pets before, that I was alone in my sorrow. What I didn’t know then: mourning pets isn’t a kid thing or an adult thing, an old thing or a new thing—it’s a forever thing.
“I am fascinated by how people haven’t changed in five thousand years. Being so close to a particular animal, not just as a totem but as a friend and companion,” Salima Ikram, distinguished professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo, told me over the phone. Ikram is the world expert on ancient Egyptian animal mummies. If you’ve read anything about animal mummies, you’ve seen her name. Originally from Pakistan, she has helped with the animal mummy collections at the Museo Egizio, in Turin, Italy, and the Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery, in Plymouth, England. She has also collaborated with curators at the British Museum, in London, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York. In summary: Ikram is a global animal-mummy superstar.
When I spoke with her, Ikram told me her interest in animal mummies began when she was a child and first visited the (as it was called then) Room of Flora and Fauna at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. “I was absolutely riveted by it,” she said. She’d always been interested in animals and had pets herself while growing up—a snake, a turtle. “I also had a hamster, but it died,” Ikram added briskly. “We didn’t bond very well.” Even so, Ikram buried the hamster with “great pomp and splendor,” wrapping the rodent up, burying her, adding a tombstone, sprinkling the grave with rose water, even laying out offerings of “that ghastly prepared hamster food.”
And as it turns out, laying out offerings, creating tombstones, and burying a pet with pomp and splendor wasn’t just something that Professor Ikram and I did as children—people have been doing this since at least 3000 BCE. Ancient Egyptians treasured intimate relationships with their pets; it wasn’t uncommon for an entire household to go into mourning when a pet cat died, even shaving their eyebrows out of respect. Cats and dogs were the most common pets, just as they are today. Wealthier, elite families often also kept exotic animals, like baboons, hippos, antelopes, wild cows, and well-bred hunting dogs.
“Animals inhabit a liminal space metaphysically between the world of humans and the world of the divines,” Ikram explained. “Animals can communicate with both worlds, and it gives them special powers. It doesn’t mean you won’t eat them, but it gives them a multifaceted and multilayered status in our world.” Ikram put into words something I’d always felt in my gut but had never been able to articulate, something I’d sensed since I was a kid: to interact with an animal is divine.
And so, just as I wrapped my dead childhood fish in paper towels, the ancient Egyptians wrapped their dead pets in cloth, mummifying them the same way they did with human bodies. The practice of mummification stemmed from the idea that a person’s spirit needed the body as a home, even after death. If the body was destroyed, the spirit would wander, aimless and lost. And the better preserved the body, the better shot the spirit had to make it into the underworld successfully. The ancient Egyptians saw the spirit as made up of three parts: the ka, which remained in the tomb, in the mummified body; the ba, which would fly out of the tomb but always return to it; and the akh, which had to travel to the underworld. And it seems that this belief applied to the spirits of much-loved pets as well. Lady Isetemkheb buried her pet gazelle in her own gazelle-shaped sycamore coffin. Prince Djhutmose commissioned a limestone sarcophagus and offering table for his cat, Tamyt. Abutiu, a guard dog of the pharaoh, was buried in his own tomb, with his own coffin, linen, and incense.
Over the course of three millennia, the Egyptians mummified more animals than any other group of people on earth ever have, and archaeologists have found several million more animal mummies than human ones. Mummies have been found of cats, dogs, birds, crocodiles, lizards, snakes, monkeys, cows, and hippos. But not all of those mummies were pets.
There are four types of animal mummies. The first, victual mummies, are animals intended as food for people in the afterlife. Usually these mummies didn’t contain the entire animal, just the part a pharaoh would want to eat for eternity. Votive mummies are animals that carried messages to the gods on behalf of humans. The animals chosen for this service tended to resemble the gods themselves: cats for Bastet, ibises for Thoth, crocodiles for Sobek. Sacred mummies—bulls, cats, crocodiles, ibises, baboons—were thought to be reincarnations of the gods because of their distinctive markings; they were worshipped and cared for in life as if they were the gods themselves. I’ve seen one sacred animal mummy, a bull, at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC. The bull was positioned as if lying down, his legs and hooves tucked under him, but he was wrapped in layers and layers of cloth, mimicking the wrapping of a sprained ankle. The strips of fabric clung tightly to his shape, and I could make out the bumps of his jowls, his ears, his horns. A black-and-white artificial eye, seemingly carved from stone, peered out at me through the glass of the display case. I swear I felt the presence of the bull staring back at me.
The fourth and final type of animal mummy is the one that Ikram calls the “most charming”: the pet mummy.
I asked her how many pet mummies she’d come across in her archaeological career—just four total. She and her crew may have encountered more pets, but so many of the tombs they’ve uncovered had previously been ransacked and robbed, it can be hard to determine exactly what type of animal mummy they’re looking at, because they are missing clues. Though if the creature has its own carved coffin and sarcophagus, and offerings of favorite foods and beloved belongings like collars and saddles, Ikram said, they usually figure that it was a pet. The artwork in tombs can help, too: if the name of the animal is written on the walls, or a drawing depicts the person and the animal together, those clues also suggest a pet. Ikram has seen a tomb painting of a cat sitting on a human’s lap, batting a toy. “It’s quite cute,” she reassured me.
Pets often were buried alongside their humans in the same sarcophagus. Ikram hypothesizes that if pet and person snuggled together in bed at night, this was their chance to continue the practice for eternity. A man named Hapymin was discovered in his coffin with his pet dog curled up at his feet—mimicking a pose they probably spent a lot of time in during their lives. If a pet died before its person, it would be mummified and placed in the tomb, waiting for the person to join them. If a pet outlived a person, the animal usually was allowed to live out its natural life and then was mummified and added to the person’s tomb later. (Some theorize that pets would be killed so they could join their person in the afterlife right away, but Ikram thinks that perhaps some pets died soon after their people from heartbreak.)
Burying people and their pets together is a practice that many pet people would like to continue today. However, the burial of animals with humans was illegal for a long time in the United States and Europe—stemming from Christian ideas that humans are the only creatures that have souls and therefore the only ones entitled to be buried in cemeteries. Some have protested, to no avail—Lord Byron wanted to be buried with his dog upon his own death, in 1824, but he was denied that wish.
There are more cemeteries now that allow all beings—human and nonhuman—to be buried on their grounds. Eric Greene, the founder and president of Green Pet-Burial Society, is an advocate for what he calls “whole family” cemeteries. He first became interested in the idea of pets and humans being buried together when he learned about a Natufian burial site in northern Israel, dating back to 10,000 BCE, in which the skeletons of a woman and a puppy were buried in the same grave, the woman’s hand resting on top of the dog’s head.
Ever since, Greene has been petitioning legislators in his home state of California to change their laws, and many states have already revised their rules: since September 2016 it has been legal for residents of New York State to be buried with the cremated remains of their pets in nonprofit human cemeteries, and other states are following suit. Ellen Macdonald owns the Eloise Woods Natural Burial Park, in Cedar Creek, Texas, which has a section exclusively for pets, as well as seventy-six animals buried in family plots and three pets who have already been buried in the same grave as their people. “It was clear to me from the beginning that people consider their pets part of their family,” Macdonald was quoted as saying in The Atlantic. “For some people, pets are their only family . . . We share our lives together, why not our deaths?”
But while the law catches up with people’s desires, a lot of pet cemeteries have jumped in to fill the void, allowing cremated human remains to be buried alongside pets: Ed Martin Jr., the owner of the Hartsdale Pet Cemetery, in Westchester, has had all of his deceased family members cremated and buried next to their animals at Hartsdale. And even when it isn’t legal, people find a way.
My aunt Christine never had children. Her Rhodesian ridgeback, Clyde, was her baby. Clyde went everywhere with Christine—to holidays, birthdays, and all family events. Often Clyde had to wait outside in her truck, but he was always there. Christine loved that dog more than anything, and I still vividly remember where I was (stepping out of the library at Wellesley College into a dark, starry October night in 2009) when she called to tell me she’d had to put Clyde down.
My aunt didn’t last long after that. Not even two years later, Christine died, at the age of forty-nine, from a rare and fast-moving type of cancer. Before she died, she made it clear that she wanted Clyde’s ashes in the coffin with her when she was buried in a seaside cemetery in Maine. As Maine has no specific laws prohibiting humans and animals from being buried together, decisions are made at the discretion of individual cemeteries and funeral homes. But the cemetery where Christine was to be laid to rest objected. My uncle Ed, Christine’s husband, was distraught and asked the director of the funeral home if there was any way around the cemetery’s decision, any way to fulfill Christine’s wish.
“Well,” the funeral director said, “it’s going to be a closed-casket service, right?”
Right.
“You can have some time alone with your wife before the funeral, and once you close the casket, we will not reopen it.”
Got it.
And so Ed smuggled Clyde’s ashes into Christine’s casket, tucking them into the crook of my aunt’s arm before she was buried.
I find comfort in the idea of being reunited with my pets in the afterlife. As a child, I was always imagining a heavenly reunion with my dead pets. My version of the afterlife was based on my dad’s hippie concept of souls—that we have an energy that gets released back into the universe and joins with everyone else’s to form a warm, pulsing force. I imagined bright points of light: something like comets, zooming around space together for eternity—me, my grandfather, my fish, and Cinnamon the school hamster. Even if my fish didn’t look exactly like fish anymore in this extraterrestrial version of heaven, I would know their spirits were there. We would all be together again. No, I hadn’t mummified my fish, but I hoped their spirits would make it to the afterlife anyway.
I had no idea then that mummification was already making a comeback. If I had wanted to seek out mummification for my pets, and if I had a little more disposable income as a young child, I could have contacted the Summum, a contemporary religious group in Utah that practices modern mummification of humans and pets. The religion was founded in 1975 by Claude Nowell, later known as Corky Ra, who claimed he’d been visited by “advanced beings who revealed to him the nature of creation.” Nowell began to share the knowledge these beings had imparted to him, and in 1977, he and a group of followers built a pyramid in Salt Lake City. This pyramid is where the Summum gather, teach, and practice a modern version of mummification. Corky Ra, upon his death in 2008, was mummified himself, making him officially the first person to undergo modern mummification treatment. The Summum believe that “death does not snuff out a person’s awareness or ability to feel. Though bereft of a body, our consciousness, or essence, sticks around—and gets thoroughly confused by the change in circumstances.” Preserving the body through mummification gives our consciousness a space to rest—not all that different from the ancient Egyptian idea that the body is the spirit’s house.
The Summum’s practice is not restricted to humans. Su Menu, president of Summum, had her poodle, Maggie, sealed in a beautiful, lifelike bronze “mummiform” (what the Summum call a sarcophagus)—designed and engraved to look just like Maggie had in real life, down to the way her fur curled. I learned about Maggie and Menu through Amy Finkel’s incredible documentary Furever. Finkel was welcomed into the Summum’s orange pyramid in Salt Lake City, where she filmed Summum counselors Ron Temu and Bernie Aua mummifying a cat. In the documentary, Menu explained that she wants to be mummified one day and that she wanted that same care and attention given to Maggie in her death. Watching the footage of Temu and Aua carefully washing the deceased cat, smoothing the fur with the preservation gel, and then wrapping her in long white bandages, I could see the appeal of the process. There was a reverence in their motions and a love, even if this cat was not their cat.
