Good grief, p.4
Good Grief, page 4
I think back to Clueless Little E.B., who stubbornly ignored her mom’s concerns and insisted on a pet, despite the consequences. She may have been naive about death, but she was wise about something else: we can be our most private and personal versions of ourselves around our pets. I grew up without a lot of other kids my age. No neighborhood gang, no crew of cousins, only a small group of Montessori classmates. I panicked around my peers. I always felt like the jokes I made didn’t land, or I would bring up some book no one else had read, or I’d say I didn’t feel like playing kickball and get a weird look. Being around my birds and fish—I could put on a bad Australian accent or belt out lyrics from Jesus Christ Superstar. I could be my most pure self.
In a way it was selfish: my pets were my captive audience. They had no choice but to be there for me. Pets bolster your emotional state; you grab them and hug them and kiss them, and maybe they claw at you or squirm away, but a lot of them just suffer through it. That taco costume you put on your tortoise? He doesn’t know it’s Halloween, he doesn’t care, he can’t even consent to wearing it—that’s all for you. Your dog is not invested in learning every Andrew Lloyd Webber soundtrack—you’re singing for yourself, really. But having pets around is a way to have an audience, to feel companionship, completely without judgment.
And with Kiki there were moments of genuine connection, too. He would flutter his wings, shuddering with anticipation, when I put a new seed stick into his cage. Sometimes he would trill some notes back as I sang him show tunes. The bird accepted me, provided companionship, and quelled my anxiety. The ritual of caring for him, of coming home and sitting on the stool by the kitchen counter watching him, was like a cleansing wash, a meditation, that let the rest of the day fall away. Kiki also taught me how to be myself—or that it was okay to be myself; he liked my being there, no matter what. I definitely learned how to care for and love other creatures through Kiki, but Kiki taught me to love myself, too.
“Animals don’t exist in order to teach us things,” wrote Helen Macdonald in her essay “What Animals Taught Me About Being Human,” in the New York Times, “but that is what they have always done, and most of what they teach us is what we think we know about ourselves . . . We use animals as ideas to amplify and enlarge aspects of ourselves, turning them into simple, safe harbors for things we feel and often cannot express.” We learn powerful messages through our friendships with our pets. Sy Montgomery wrote a whole book about the life lessons she’s learned from her encounters with animals, How to Be a Good Creature. The bonds that so many of us feel with our pets are those of friendship—but animals can also be powerful mentors. “I can tell you that teachers are all around to help you: with four legs or two or even eight; some with internal skeletons, some without,” writes Montgomery in her memoir. “All you have to do is recognize them as teachers and be ready to hear their truths.”
And for children, that is especially true. Children learn a lot from their pets. As psychologist Elizabeth Anderson puts it in her book The Powerful Bond Between People and Pets, “Nothing less than alchemy is involved when animals and children get together, and the resulting magic has healing properties.” Indeed, Hal Herzog, legendary animal behaviorist, writes about studies showing that “growing up with pets is linked to higher self-esteem, cognitive development, and social skills.” Though, of course, in order to have pets in the first place, kids probably already have access to other socioeconomic benefits, which help, too.
Anecdotally, as I researched this book I found that most of the people who wanted to talk to me about their many and beloved childhood pets were white and from upper- and middle-class families, often from the suburbs. The people who have disposable income to spend on pets, of course, have disposable income to spend on other things, too. I understand that the many experiences I have had with pets aren’t available to everyone—from the thousands of dollars my parents spent on my personal pets to the nature-filled vacations I took with my family with Kiki in tow to the fact that I went to schools with the means to have elaborate classroom zoo setups. (I can’t even imagine the electric bill just to heat the giant iguana enclosure at Montessori.) But when these experiences are available to children—and I wish they were available to all children everywhere—they show just how much kids benefit from interactions with animals. Kids learn kindness and compassion from taking care of pets. They have to imagine what it’s like to be someone else, to be gentle, give space and distance, read body language, feed and water and provide health care. The qualities we learn from caring for our pets make us better people. “You cannot care for a pet if you only care for yourself,” writes Meg Daley Olmert in her book about the human-animal bond, Made for Each Other. She describes pets as “an antidote to narcissism,” noting that when people have animals in their lives they feel more generous, act less selfish, and are often generally more approachable, which improves not just their health but the health of their community. When people learn to care about pets, they can learn how to care for other beings outside of themselves, and that in turn can make them more empathetic, more generous, more kind to their fellow humans.
Animals open us up to the unexpected. My friend Mariel was absolutely petrified of dogs growing up. Mariel and I met in high school—the one next to the pet cemetery—where she often felt different and out of place. She was an immigrant, born in the Dominican Republic, and commuted to the school from Boston, unlike the wealthy white kids from the suburbs who made up the majority of the student body. Wealthy white suburban kids who always had dogs. Up until Mariel was in her twenties, she would jump up on a couch if she saw a dog inside the house, even a small, scrawny dog, and she found that her new classmates and their parents were horrified when she politely asked if their dogs could stay out of the room when she was over. “That was one of the first things that made me feel unwelcome and different at school,” Mariel said. In the DR, Mariel grew up understanding that dogs guard the house. They don’t come indoors; they’re either strays or chained up outside, and they all have fleas or rabies or both. Mariel said she had heard about cute small house dogs that rich kids in the DR had, but she’d never seen one herself. Her own personal experience with dogs was much different: “I’ve been chased around the hood by a freakin’ angry dog!” Mariel laughed on the phone. Which brings us to A.J., a little Pomeranian that belonged to Mariel’s aunt and “bruncle” (her mother’s younger brother, only two years older than Mariel, thus brother-uncle). Great, Mariel thought when she heard about A.J. Another house with a dog I have to avoid. But A.J. was always at Mariel’s aunt’s place, so she couldn’t really avoid him.
“I would hear the jingling of his necklace or whatever—his collar? Is that what it’s called?—and have a physiological reaction,” Mariel said. “Just immediately afraid.” But miraculously, A.J. seemed to know this, and treated Mariel with care. Whenever he approached her, A.J. would put his head down and stay very still; he barked at everyone else but not Mariel. And Mariel eventually, tentatively, began to reach out and pet him.
Through the following years, Mariel and A.J. bonded. When she was in grad school, the day finally came when her aunt called to tell her that A.J. had died, and she went running out of her Harvard classroom, tears running down her face. “I was shattered,” she said. “I had never had a pet before. I couldn’t understand what was happening to me. I thought, Oh my God, I’ve become like these white people.” Mariel sat on a bench in Harvard Square and bawled, eventually texting a couple of friends about what had happened. They responded with their own stories of their dogs’ deaths, and Mariel felt a wave of relief—she wasn’t alone. She had surprised herself with the depth of emotion she felt for A.J. He had helped her get over her fear of dogs and tricked her into falling in love with him in the process.
Our connection to animals is essential for all of the reasons above, but for some people it goes well beyond that. Some people are specifically matched with specially trained dogs that are indispensable to those people’s survival. There are diabetic and epileptic people who partner with animals that can detect an oncoming seizure or a blood sugar low, paraplegic people who work with animals that can open doors and fetch objects. There are even animals that are trained to show someone in the throes of a psychotic episode what is real and what is a hallucination. These animals and humans work together as a team, and they rely on each other for survival. The bond that’s made there is unlike any other.
Kate Katulak was born with sight but lost it suddenly after an illness in high school. “My whole world was changed,” Kate told me. Now she had to learn how to move through the world and find her way as she never had before, all with a long white cane. She also, understandably, experienced a lot of anxiety. As she weighed her options for support, Kate was drawn to the idea of a guide dog. She’s loved animals since she was a child, and she was attracted to a guide dog both as a safety tool, like her cane, but also as a source of reassurance and comfort—a service animal and an emotional support animal, all in one.
Kate practiced her cane skills—you have to be an expert with the long white cane before you’re allowed to apply for a dog—and after she passed the required test, she was partnered with a golden retriever named Cabot, whom she described as an “incredible friend, companion, and guide.” While Kate had grown up with pets, she told me that the bond with a guide dog is entirely different. A family pet’s attention is often divided among several people, but a guide dog has just one provider, attention giver, feeder, and petter, and that person and that dog are together 24/7. The connection really seems to be on a different level. Kate’s experience with Cabot is far from unique—so many people have had their lives fundamentally changed for the better after developing a relationship with a service animal.
I had the chance to shadow one such pair, Andrew Johnson and his Seeing Eye dog, Gene, on a spring day in 2021. Gene is a chocolate Lab, bred and trained by the Seeing Eye organization, in Morristown, New Jersey. While people often use the terms Seeing Eye dog and guide dog interchangeably, technically only dogs from the Seeing Eye are official Seeing Eye dogs. I met Andrew and Gene outside their home in Watertown, Massachusetts, and we walked three quarters of a mile down the road to a coffee shop to talk. Even before Gene was in his official Seeing Eye harness, he swiftly led Andrew down the five steps from the front porch. Gene greeted me like any sweet chocolate Lab would—lots of big sniffs and tail wags—but once Andrew slipped the harness over the dog’s head, we were off. And we were off fast. “With Gene I can finally walk as fast as I’ve always wanted to,” Andrew told me over his right shoulder. Gene hugged his left side, and Andrew asked that I walk behind and to the right so as not to distract Gene while he worked. Andrew was born without sight because of a genetic disorder, and he started using a homemade trapezoid-shaped PVC cane when he was two years old. He’d been interested in the idea of a guide dog, but for close to three decades, Andrew continued to use a cane. He was a professional athlete, a five-time member of the US national rowing team, and a competitor in the 2012 Paralympics in London, so he was traveling a lot. “I was also young and staying out late,” Andrew laughed. The circumstances didn’t feel right for a dog for a while. But then in fall 2018, as he settled into his late twenties, Andrew decided it was time. He submitted his application to the Seeing Eye, and in May 2019, he headed to Morristown for training and to meet Gene.
Walking with Gene and Andrew down Mount Auburn Street—I had to hurry to keep up—I would have guessed the pair had been together a lot longer than two years. “I’ve gotten to a place with Gene that I’ve never gotten to with any dance partner in my entire history,” Andrew told me over our fancy coffees. On our walk to and from the coffee shop, Gene would occasionally get distracted—he loves babies in strollers and always wants to pull Andrew into the playground on the corner of Arlington Street—but with gentle steering of the harness or a few stern words, Andrew could always quickly get Gene back on track.
At each intersection, Gene would stop at the curb cut, and Andrew would extend his foot to feel for the edge of the sidewalk. Once we had the walk signal—or when, at an intersection without a light, Andrew didn’t hear any cars coming—he would tell Gene to go forward, and the two would confidently forge ahead. A few times, Gene did not move when Andrew commanded him onward, because he saw a car or bicycle or pedestrian that Andrew did not. This is called intelligent disobedience.
“It’s really a fifty-fifty partnership,” Andrew stressed. “There is a bunch of stuff the dog does really well, but then there is stuff that I need to drive the bus on. You have to have a bit of a conversation through the harness, through your voice, through your posture, all these things. You have a conversation with the dog and work it out.” At one point on our walk, the three of us approached a sign that had fallen down near the entrance to a parking lot. At first it seemed as if Gene was going to walk Andrew right into it, and I was about to speak up when Gene stopped. Andrew tugged the harness a bit, to tell Gene he wanted to keep moving, and Gene gently tugged back but toward the left, to steer Andrew around the obstacle. Andrew followed the dog’s direction, and in seconds they were around the broken sign and sprinting ahead. “There are people with all the good intentions in the world, who try to jump in and help,” Andrew told me. “But it’s actually very important for me and Gene to make mistakes and learn from them.”
After Andrew gushed about Gene for the better part of two hours, I finally asked him if he’d ever go back to using a cane or if he was a dog person for good. What was he going to do when . . . you know. (Despite the topic of my research, I still hate asking about this directly.) Andrew assured me he’s a “guide dog user now.” He will definitely get another one, and he also wants to do everything in his power to keep Gene with him after he inevitably has to retire.
In general, guide dogs don’t live as long as pet dogs—apparently the stress of decision-making wears on them. But guide dogs keep working until they can’t anymore, retiring only once they get too old or if they develop a physical or cognitive issue or are suffering from a lot of pain. Some people choose to keep their retired guide dogs as pets, but that isn’t always an option. Landlords have to allow their tenants to have service animals if they need them, but if that guide dog is demoted to pet status? The landlord can evict you. There’s also the question of money: if you partner with a new guide dog after your first retires, the financial responsibility of caring for multiple dogs—especially if one is old and sick—can be too much. And psychologically, it can be hard on retired guide dogs when they’re unable to work anymore, especially when they’re around their person. They don’t understand why they’re suddenly being left behind. Andrew said his hope is to own his own place by the time Gene has to retire, so the landlord factor won’t be an issue, but if it is, Andrew said, he already got his parents to promise to take on Gene as a pet.
Kate, unfortunately, already had to go through all of this with Cabot, who got cancer when he was six and had to retire. Kate adopted Cabot out to a family she knew because she felt it wasn’t fair to keep him at home alone all day, especially while she went out with her new guide dog, a black Lab named Hosta. “The dog’s whole life has had purpose,” Kate said. “The dog puts on a harness and does a job. To be without the harness—it can be devastating for the dog.” Cabot died not too long after he retired, and Kate put together a box of his things—collar, leash, and other items that she can touch and be reminded of him.
When I spoke with Kate in April 2019, she told me that she felt her bond with Hosta was so strong that she didn’t think she could get another guide dog after her: “I can’t bear the idea of replacing her.” When Kate and I talked on the phone, she was at work—she’s the assistant director of college success at the Perkins School for the Blind—and Hosta was snoozing on her dog bed in Kate’s office. (“Counting down the minutes to dinner, I’m sure.”) At the time, Hosta was ten, and Kate said she still could have the energy of a puppy, especially in the instant that Kate would put on her harness. But Hosta was starting to slow down. She had been trained as a walking and running guide dog, but now when Kate ran triathlons, she used a (human) running guide. She was also using her cane more and more, to give Hosta a break when she would get tired, and Kate told me she had decided that when Hosta needed to retire, she would live out the rest of her life with Kate as a pet, and Kate would rely on her cane. Kate told me she was willing to sacrifice having a new guide dog until Hosta’s death, to allow the dog a happy retirement by her person’s side. Unfortunately, Hosta didn’t get many retirement years—she died about a year and a half after Kate and I spoke, and the experience was so painful for Kate that it was difficult for her to reply to my messages about Hosta afterward. She did eventually get another guide dog—an “incredibly silly yellow Labrador” named Dodger—which, I like to think, is what Cabot and Hosta would have wanted her to do.
Maybe there is something too special about the bond with a pet, something too essential about the support they give us, to give up on it—to never love again. My first and only (as of this writing) canine student was a goldador (half golden retriever, half Lab) named Orda. During our three-hour creative writing classes, Orda lay silently under the table in his blue vest, reminding the group of his presence only when he shifted his position with the slight clank of his collar. Orda is the service animal of one of my students, Francis—a photographer, writer, and retired US Army veteran who fought in two wars and covered a third as a journalist—and until I spent three hours a week with them for six weeks, I don’t think I fully appreciated the bond between a service animal and its human. “We go everywhere together,” Francis said, “a married couple in love.”
