Pack of Two

by Caroline Knapp

  “I’m not lonely,” she says, “but sometimes I think: What the hell did I do wrong in my life? Why am I alone? Why don’t I have a family and children?’ I always thought I was going to have all that, and I can get pretty down on myself, thinking: ‘Oh, you can do fine with dogs but you can’t have relationships with people.’”

  It is so hard to assess motive, to define what really drives a person to make the choices they make. Marjorie sometimes thinks that the dogs caused her to become more isolated than she would have been otherwise, that if she hadn’t had Glen, she might have been more motivated to propel herself out into the world, to look for solace and companionship among people. And yet she’s not at all sure that would have happened. Her career, dominated by women, didn’t bring her into contact with a lot of men. She was never a very gregarious, social person, not the kind of person who would have thrown herself with anything approaching ease into new social situations, into parties or restaurants or dating services. So the same forces that made life with Glen so satisfying—the need for solitude and self-protection, the wariness about the social world—might have been manifest in some other form, kept those same doors shut on their own accord. “If you’re worried about being isolated,” Marjorie asks, “do you go out and meet people or are you just isolated? In my case, it’s quite possible that I would have gone on being single and alone. And then I wouldn’t have had either—not the family and not the enormous gratification of the dog.”

  There are so many ways to carve out a life for oneself, and yet how persistently we hold to the idea that there is really only one way, one valid path. I could hear strains of that feeling in Marjorie’s words; there was an either-or-ness behind them, as though only two roads had stretched before her, a family road and a dog road, and she’d opted for the latter, chosen something fake instead of something real. And yet, perhaps unintentionally, her words also belied that logic.

  Marjorie used the words “other half” and “partner” to describe her relationship with Glen, her first dog. When she described her next three dogs—Kate, Bobby, Jamie—the words “children” and “kids” came up. Bobby and Jamie were like two little kids, two kid brothers—different from Glen, her relationship with them less intense and more playful. And Cory, her current dog? “This dog feels like a grandchild,” she said. “He’s kind of a permanent baby.” Marjorie didn’t use those descriptions consciously—she didn’t sit me down and say, “First I had a dog husband, and then I had dog children, and now I have a dog grandchild”—but as I listened to her, I was struck by the idea that she’d created her own sort of family structure through those dogs, that they’d fit into the arc of her life in many of the same ways family members do, and that there was a lovely sort of symmetry in that effort. Marjorie may have regrets, may worry about the trade-offs she’s made and the experiences she’s missed—who doesn’t?—but she’s also constructed her own path, a private road of powerful attachments and familial feeling and no small measure of solace. In her own way, Marjorie has found a solution. As she put it, “Thank God for the dogs.”

  * * *

  I, of course, am not immune to the idea that there’s only one way to live a “normal” life, so Marjorie both reassured and alarmed me. I sat there and I listened to her and I wondered if all these choices of mine—getting the dog, leaving Michael, coming to favor the world of woods and dog parks over the world of restaurants and parties and future children—represented the first steps down a path like Marjorie’s, a private road with a dog at its center.

  I am mixed about this possibility; I vacillate. I ask myself: Is the dog keeping me from some broader exploration of what’s out there? If I didn’t have her, would I really throw myself into the social world with more vigor, go to Italy, take up needlepoint, enroll in a karate class? Or is she what makes my current exploration, internal and solitary though it may be, comfortable and sane? I worry: Is the dog a balm against isolation or an excuse for it? A symbol of what I fear, or a symbol of who I am? I hear myself getting judgmental, succumbing to self-criticism—am I crazy or am I sane? normal or abnormal? either-or—and when those voices get too loud, I try to view the matter through a different lens. Maybe—just maybe—the dog is something else entirely.

  Grace and I often talk about the possibility that dogs don’t dictate options so much as they help illuminate them: dog as agent of elucidation, dog as vehicle for self-definition. The first time we went for a walk together, Grace said in a perfectly matter-of-fact tone, “Of course, dogs are a metaphor for change,” and I knew then and there that we’d become friends.

  Grace, a painter, is forty-two years old, tall and striking, with auburn hair and high cheekbones. Like me—and like Marjorie—she’s a bit of a recluse, the kind of person who’ll stand in the middle of a social event looking perfectly comfortable and elegant but quietly sinking into despair. Outside versus inside. Grace is a very introspective woman, she loathes small talk, and although she can slip masterfully into a polished social persona (she has the right little black dresses and the right jewelry and shoes and all the right techniques required to make other people feel important), she has also racked up untold hours at gallery openings and dinners secretly thinking: What am I doing here? I have nothing to say to these people. Those thoughts lead to darker thoughts: There must be something wrong with me. Why is it that everyone in this crowded room appears to be having a good time while I’m standing here feeling alienated and estranged, wishing I were home watching ER? Grace lives and works alone, and like me she can pass many, many consecutive nights—five, eight, ten in a row—without a lot of social contact. This worries her, too. She wonders: Am I a hermit? A misfit? Do I have a life?

  Grace lives in a scruffy blue-collar neighborhood of Boston, and these days she often finds herself tramping around the streets at night with Oakley, out for their evening walk. Oakley is a spectacular-looking animal—wolflike, with a black mask and a massive coat—and all manner of people stop to talk to her: big guys with tattoos, mothers with children, other dog walkers. She’ll chat, she’ll answer the predictable questions (no, she’s not a wolf; yes, I have to brush her a lot), and then she’ll wander off down the street, and every once in a while she’ll stop and compare this version of herself out in the world, the dog-walking version, to the version she inhabited pre-Oakley. No cocktail party chitchat; the small talk is about something she actually cares about, the dog. No glasses of white wine or little canapes, either; she’s holding on to a leash, and that seventy-four-pound animal at the other end of it gives her a sense of power and comfort and safety so palpable, it takes her breath away. The dog makes her feel connected to the world in an entirely new way, a way that feels easy and secure, a way that feels true. Grace will stand there and think: But I do have a life. Sometimes it’s a solitary life and sometimes it’s a lonely life and certainly it’s an unconventional life, but this is it, a life with a home and a dog and work and friends, a life that finally feels right.

  Feels right: music to my ears. My therapist has tried to steer me toward that feeling for eons: forget about what you think you’re supposed to do, forget about what others expect you to do; what feels right, to you? That’s the hardest question, because like the question about children, it means separating out so many opposing voices, trying to pay heed to the one that lies hidden at the center.

  Like Grace, I’ll sometimes find myself walking through downtown Boston or Harvard Square, in Cambridge, and I’ll see people out and about, people who look like they’re leading real lives: families with children, or couples strolling hand in hand, or groups of friends huddled at the window table of a restaurant. I’ll struggle for a moment with the voices of social normalcy: Should that be me, that woman with her baby carriage, or that one with her boyfriend, or that one eating out with her ten best friends; should that be what I’m aiming for? And at that core level, the one that’s most fundamental and true, the answers are emerging, the internal voice growing more resonant: I am a person who’s
held babies and felt nothing, who’s walked hand in hand with a man and felt utter disconnection, who’s sat with ten friends in a restaurant and thought: I am so lonely. But the dog: the dog touches some other piece of me, some nascent place inside that feels not only more solid and real but also more open to connection.

  The day I met Marjorie, I’d gotten up and walked around Fresh Pond with my friend Wendy, who’s probably cruised that same two-mile loop with me a hundred times. Wendy—fifty-four, a lesbian, deeply involved in women’s health care—is the sort of friend who’d have never crossed my path were it not for the dogs, the circles we travel are so different, but we met when our dogs were puppies and started walking together on weekday mornings, gabbing away while the dogs chase each other through the brush or amble along beside us. That afternoon I hooked up with my friend Hope, inhabitant of another circle distant from my own (she’s an atmospheric chemist, Harvard affiliated), and we sat at the dog park as we do most afternoons, talking while the dogs played. In the evening I made a couple of phone calls—left a message for my friend Tom, a dog-owning writer friend, and asked if he’d like to walk with me on Saturday; spoke to Grace for a long time, made plans to go to the woods that Sunday.

  This is a lot of dog time—hours walking the dog or sitting while the dogs play—but it’s also a lot of human time. Wendy, who sees me before seven A.M., in the hours before my defenses have had time to gel, has witnessed me at my most vulnerable and tender: we have walked together on our birthdays, on the anniversary of our parents’ deaths, on good days and bad days and mediocre days; we have walked through rain and snow and sunshine, and through the small victories and defeats of our daily lives. Hope, whom I meet at the end of the workday, probably knows more about the vicissitudes of my life as a writer than anyone: in the hours we’ve racked up together at the park, we’ve talked a great deal about dogs but we’ve also talked about work and self-esteem and the link between them, about depression and relationships and families, about the daily challenges of getting by. Tom and I got to know each other through our dog trainer. His father, like mine, died of a brain tumor the summer we met, and we spent long afternoons marching through the woods west of Boston with our dogs, talking about loss and the way it changes you. Death marches, we called them. And Grace—meeting Grace has been like discovering a long-lost sister, a kindred spirit who’s been out in the world all this time forging a nearly identical path.

  And then, of course, there is the dog herself; there is Lucille. That evening, after I’d locked up and fed the dog and made my phone calls, I climbed into my bathrobe and curled up in a chair in the living room, ready to settle down for the night with a crossword puzzle and the television. I pass a lot of evenings this way, hunkered down in that chair, and sometimes I’ll look up from whatever I’m doing, and I’ll watch Lucille for a moment or two. She always knows when I’ve turned my attention to her—she’ll open her eyes and gaze back—and I often revel in the sense of comfort this gives me, the two of us together in our quiet affinity. I almost never feel lonely when I’m in the company of the dog, and acknowledging this has been enormously instructive: she has helped me not only to understand the difference between solitude and isolation, but to live it. Out in the world with her, I have found a path to others. At home with her, I have found a way to be alone without the ache.

  The dog-as-surrogate view implies that there are only two ways to inhabit the world, with other humans or without them, and it ignores the fact that sometimes you need both and sometimes you need a safe space somewhere in between. Dogs occupy that safe space; they make it possible.

  THERAPY DOG

  ABOUT A YEAR after I got Lucille, I spent an afternoon with a woman named Miranda, a recovering alcoholic who told me about her first dog, a Doberman named Merlin. Merlin, she said, “was my first real relationship.” She’d inherited the dog from a drug dealer on Beacon Hill while she herself was still drinking, and she described coming home one day about six weeks after she’d quit. She was living in chaos at the time, in a cold, barely furnished apartment in Dorchester with a crazed drug addict of a lover. The lover finally moved out, and on that particular day Miranda came home to find the few spare pieces of furniture gone and Merlin locked in a back room. He was so happy to see her, so relieved to be rescued from the enclosed room, and she sat down with him on the cold living-room floor and hugged him, and then she started to weep. She had felt utterly alone walking into that empty apartment, and she realized at that moment that in fact she wasn’t. She held the dog, and she felt, perhaps for the first time in her life, that she was truly needed, truly responsible for another being, truly in relationship with another, and that awareness all but broke her heart. It also represented a tiny shift, as though this understanding set her a few paces down a new path: with that dog in her arms, she began to move away from her past and away from pain and toward a kind of comfort.

  As I listened to Miranda tell that story, I remembered a conversation I’d had once had with another dog owner, also a recovering alcoholic, who’d used the metaphor of an empty house to describe early sobriety. She said, “You take away alcohol, and you take away everything—your identity, your primary way of coping with the world—and it’s like waking up in an empty house, absolutely nothing in it.” She said this to me at a time when I was feeling fearful and bleak about life and hopeless about relationships—much the same way Miranda felt when she walked into her apartment that day—and I nodded into the phone. “Exactly,” I said. “That’s exactly how I feel, like my life is this big empty house with nothing in it, just me and a dog.”

  She paused. “Ah,” she said, “but you’ve got that: this one beautiful, hugely important thing.”

  Yes. Merlin was this one beautiful, hugely important thing to Miranda, and Lucille is this one beautiful, hugely important thing to me, and although I sometimes worry that she’s part of the wall I’ve constructed—my excuse to stay in here and keep the world out there—I also know that her presence is what makes life behind that wall feel meaningful and rich. The dog is the one creature who can, and always does, penetrate the fortress. She swims across that psychic moat and trots right inside, and if I had to boil down what she brings me to one thing, it would be this: solace, a degree of healing.

  * * *

  The clinical literature on dogs as agents of healing is vast. Boris Levinson, an American child psychiatrist, coined the phrase pet therapy in 1964, following observations he made when he began to use his dog, a shaggy creature named Jingles, in sessions with severely withdrawn children. The dog, Levinson noted, served as an ice-breaker, softening the children’s defenses and providing a focus for communication; with the animal present, Levinson could join in, establish a rapport, and begin therapy. Levinson wasn’t the first scientist to study the use of animals in treating psychological disorders—interest in the subject dates back to the early twentieth century—but he was the first to write seriously and extensively about it, and he’s credited with sparking widespread research into the phenomenon.

  Scientists and health care professionals have since put Levinson’s theories into practice in scores of therapeutic settings, and their results are uniformly consistent: animals can improve morale and communication, bolster self-confidence and self-esteem, increase quality of life. Psychiatrists Sam and Elizabeth Corson, two of the first to expand on Levinson’s work, implemented the first pet-facilitated therapy program at a psychiatric unit at Ohio State University in 1977. In their study, fifty patients were allowed to choose a dog from a nearby kennel and interact with it daily at appointed hours. Three patients withdrew from the program; the remaining forty-seven showed marked improvement: the dogs acted as a social catalyst, forging a positive link between patients and staff; patients reported increased self-respect, independence, and confidence. A 1981 study in Melbourne, Australia, the first formal pet therapy program in that country, evaluated the influence of pets on morale and happiness among nursing home residents. Six months after the arriv
al of a former guide dog in the ward, a golden retriever named Honey, the sixty residents were rated as happier, more alert and responsive; they smiled and laughed more often and displayed more optimism about life. Members of a control group with no contact with dogs were less relaxed, more withdrawn, and less interested in others.

  Study after study has supported such findings. Depressed patients in nursing homes have become more interactive and optimistic when visited by dogs and cats; prison inmates allowed to take care of birds and small animals have become less isolated, less violent, more responsible, and have exhibited increased morale (the pet therapy program implemented in a prison, at the Lima State Hospital, in Lima, Ohio, in 1975, has become a national model); visits by dogs and cats have helped ease feelings of fear, despair, loneliness, and isolation among terminally ill cancer patients; the presence of a dog at a psychiatric halfway house has helped residents become more social and more adept at communicating; elderly veterans, emotionally disturbed and learning-disabled children, and troubled inner city kids all have benefited from the presence of animals, becoming by turns more responsive and optimistic, more communicative and responsible, more compassionate.