Pack of Two

by Caroline Knapp

  Playmate, soulmate. My relationship with Lucille has also touched the twin in me, providing a sense of exclusivity and interdependence with another being that I haven’t experienced since childhood, growing up with my sister. This is something I hadn’t quite realized I’d lost, or even missed, until I got the dog—a depth and singularity of attachment, a sense of being truly entwined with another being—and I’m often aware of its return when we’re out walking or hanging out on the sofa together at home. Us, that pack of two. I’m more important to her than any other human; she’s more important to me than any other dog. I suppose this is the way my sister and I felt about one another as kids, before we grew up and began the long, arduous process of becoming distinct individuals, and Lucille has sort of picked up that thread of feeling, reintroduced me to it. She and I are often together, it’s worth noting, in many of the same ways my sister and I were together when we were young—constant companions, playmates, bedmates—and I’m struck by how familiar that brand of proximity feels. I wouldn’t want to be that bonded with an adult human, that inseparable or entwined, but I relish being able to tap in to the sensation with Lucille.

  I imagine lots of us do, consciously or not. Constance Perin, a cultural anthropologist, suggests that the depth of our affection for dogs has to do with precisely that dynamic, with the dog’s ability to help us recreate a brand of closeness we experienced with our mothers as children. “Speechless yet communicating perfectly,” she writes, “the mute and ever-attentive dog is a symbol of our own memory of that magical, once-in-a-lifetime bond.”

  This, Perin suggests, is what gives the relationship its elusive quality of resonance: there is something deeply familiar to many of us about the singularity of a dog’s affection, and something deeply healing about tapping in to the kind of closeness they provide. Loving—and being loved by—this attentive, present creature helps heal the disappointment we felt as kids, when we became aware that we had to cope with the world on our own; it mitigates one of our most primal struggles, between the wish to merge with another and the need to separate.

  And, as it is wont to do, the healing helps, trickles down into our other bonds. I can’t say Lucille is directly responsible for this, but since I’ve had her, and had a chance to bask in the familiar warmth of that old exclusivity, my relationship with my sister has lost some of its more recent strain; my quiet sense of resentment toward her, for going off and leading her own life, has abated; I feel closer to her but in a cleaner, less entangled way than I used to, as though the idea that we’re separate individuals with our own needs and priorities finally makes sense. In the spring of 1997 my sister acquired her own dog—a lovely, genial, four-year-old border collie-black Lab mix named Beamer—and we meet for walks a couple of times a month, outings that are a source of great comfort to me in and of themselves. Unexpected bonus: the dog has restored the twin in me in both real and metaphorical ways.

  So there we are: one human as friend, child, mother, twin; one dog as dog, willing partner to them all. Put those varied combinations together, and what emerges, finally, is the most important role of all: human as human, a creature who’s capable of love.

  One night not long ago, I turned off the TV and got up from my chair in the living room, ready to rouse the dog from her station on the couch and head upstairs to bed. I looked at her. Lucille was lying on her back on the sofa—utterly ridiculous, the hind legs splayed out in either direction, neck craned to one side so that her head was all twisted around, snout pointing down toward her tail. She does this a lot and it kills me every time: she looks so silly, and also so profoundly vulnerable and exposed, forty-five pounds of absurdity and trust. We regarded each other for a moment, me standing above her, the dog peering up at me from this ludicrous position, and then I crouched down by the sofa and started to rub her belly. And then I just melted, some piece of me inside just melted at the sight of her, and I heard myself say aloud, “I love you every single day. Every single day.” This sounds so corny, cooing words of love to a dog like that, but even as I heard myself speak, I was aware that there was something miraculous about it, something miraculous and profoundly healing about the fact that I love this animal and find joy and solace in her presence 365 days a year, without exception. I have never felt that unwavering in my affection, never really felt safe enough to allow it. My human relationships have characteristically been about withholding—keeping parts of me shut down, or held back, or under wraps, protected against disappointment or vulnerability. My relationship with Lucille is about giving, an unrestrained, fearless, expressive kind of giving that’s brand new to me and it makes me feel human, it makes me feel whole.

  I sat beside the dog for several minutes that night, petting her and looking around the room. I moved into my house four years ago at the most unsettled time: newly sober, still dazed with loss, my sense of self all foggy and my future so uncertain. I chose to buy a house at that time because I needed a way station, a place to rest until the dust from all that death and drink began to settle, and I’ve always loved the structure itself, a small Victorian with high ceilings and odd angles and lots of light. But until the dog came, the house felt in some ways as unformed and empty as I did, and I’d find myself walking around inside it like a visitor at a museum, thinking: Nice place, but do I really live here? Today the living room sometimes looks more like Lucille’s place than my own—dog bed in front of the sofa where a coffee table might be, box of toys on the floor where an end table might be—but that early sense of unfamiliarity has ebbed away, as though the rough, unsettled edges of my own soul have grown smoother. I looked down at the dog, this quiet picture of acceptance and contentment on the sofa beside me, and I thought: Home.

  EPILOGUE

  SHORTLY AFTER I GOT LUCILLE I took her with me to Martha’s Vineyard, to my family’s summer home. This is loaded territory for me: it’s the site of all those long summers I spent with my family, feeling like an outsider, so restless and bored; it’s also the site of a lot of ghosts. My father’s ashes are buried some distance from the house, in a grove of trees you have to wind several minutes through the woods to get to. My mother’s ashes are closer: they’re buried about twenty paces from the front porch, under a cherry tree, and my brother and sister and I put them there deliberately, a few feet away from the ashes of her last dog, Toby.

  It sounds strange to say this out loud—we buried our mother’s ashes next to the dog’s, rather than her husband’s—but the placement made sense at the time, and it still does. My parents’ relationship fell apart in the last year of their marriage, and although we didn’t articulate it quite this way, I think we all had the sense that her bond with the dog was purer somehow than her bond with my dad, more honest and more loving.

  Toby died two years before my father did, quite suddenly, at the age of eleven. He was on the Vineyard at the time, and he’d been racing back and forth across the porch, chasing two of my nephews, sons of my half-brother who was up visiting for the weekend. It was midsummer, very hot, and my mother called out to the kids several times: Be careful with the dog. Elkhounds are not hot-weather dogs; they have thick double coats, and my mother was worried about overheating Toby. She heard a noise at one point. Toby gave out a great heave and collapsed, just collapsed, right there on the porch. My mother raced out, thinking he’d stumbled on something, tripped or hurt a paw. She got to his side, and he lifted his head and let out another eerie, gasping sound, and then he was gone. That afternoon she and my dad wrapped him in a small rug and drove him to the vet, a forty-five-minute trip to the other side of the island. An autopsy revealed that he’d had a heart attack, and we later speculated that he might have had Lyme disease: he’d been kind of achy in the weeks before his death, his joints apparently stiff, which is one of the symptoms; Lyme disease can weaken muscles, including the heart.

  My mother was not a weeper. My whole life I saw her cry only twice, the first time when I was sixteen and she had to euthanize her first dog, Tom, who su
ffered from kidney disease, and the second time over Toby. She didn’t cry, at least not publicly, when her own parents died; she didn’t cry at my father’s funeral. But when she called me up the night Toby died, I could hear her voice quavering. I don’t remember much about our conversation, but I remember her shock and her sadness, the sound of her sniffling over the phone. She had Toby cremated, and she put his ashes in a little urn, and for an entire year she kept that urn on the floor of her bedroom, the spot where Toby used to sleep.

  We buried the ashes the following summer. My father, several months into his illness, was confined to a wheelchair by then and couldn’t join us, so we parked his chair by the porch window, and he watched me and my brother and sister and mother troop out to the cherry tree, where Toby used to like to lie and sniff at the air. We dug a hole and poured the ashes in, and my mother tried very hard, and unsuccessfully, not to cry. Her eyes brimmed and brimmed, and her face got all red, and a few big tears spilled out and ran down her cheeks. We poured the ashes into the hole and covered them over, placed some rocks and shells around the site. Then we stood there for a few moments, honoring my mother’s sadness as much as the dog.

  I couldn’t have appreciated the quality of her loss at the time. I remember thinking: Yes, this is very sad, losing the dog, but I also remember speculating that some of her grief was deflected, that my mother was crying for Toby because it was easier than crying for my father, simpler somehow. I looked across the porch and saw his silhouette against the window, my dying father in his wheelchair, and I thought: There’s the real sadness, it’s for him, for their marriage.

  I’ve come to believe I was wrong, that the sadness was, in fact, for Toby, and for the crater in her world left by his absence.

  A year or so after I got Lucille, I had dinner with a friend, and I started to talk, somewhat casually, about a conversation I’d had with Carole Fudin, the New York psychotherapist who’d spoken to me about some of the bereavement counseling she’s done with people who’ve lost pets. My friend sat bolt upright in her chair. “Bereavement counseling? For pets? Oh, Jesus.” Then she laughed out loud. I sat there feeling a little stung, as though she’d slapped me, and I thought about my mother that day on the Vineyard, her tears. I thought about the way she’d sit at the kitchen table and scratch Toby, the one being in the household she felt free to touch. I thought about the constancy he’d provided her over the years, the sense of presence he’d offered this private and solitary woman. The one imperfect aspect of this near-perfect relationship, our bond with dogs, is its lack of longevity. They live such brief lives, and if there’s one thing that intensifies the sense of loss we experience when they die, it’s the fact that our grief tends to be pathologized, considered excessive and misdirected, even silly.

  Last spring I spent a few hours with a couple who’d lost their dog, a beautiful, slender sled dog named Kimmi, in a freak accident in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Kimmi was more like a spirit than a dog. I used to see her at Fresh Pond from time to time, and I’d watch her run: she had long legs and perfect proportions, a silvery gray coat, wide soulful eyes, and the most light-footed agile gait I’ve ever seen. People used to stop and stare at her the way they stop and stare at a beautiful woman, she was that unusual and that breathtaking. Her owners, a couple named Tom and Sue, went fly-fishing with Kimmi when she was just about a year old. They hiked alongside a river, and something happened—some trees came dislodged from the hillside along the river-bank, came avalanching down and hit Kimmi, breaking her spine. Tom and Sue spent hours trying to rescue her: Sue sat with her at the bank of the river in the most abject horror, and Tom raced off to get help, and when they talked to me about her death (Kimmi didn’t survive) nearly a year later, they were still reeling from it, stunned by its depth. Tom, a psychotherapist, went back into therapy, his sadness was so profound. “I have seen death with patients, and I’ve had both my parents die, and I’ve had a friend that died, so I’ve been around death some. But I haven’t grieved for anyone, not even my parents, the way I grieved for that dog,” he said. “I don’t normally cry, but I’d sob, and at night I’d wake up at two in the morning and—ugh, I can remember just waking up and gasping. And I’ve never done that for a human.”

  That’s the sort of description only people who love their dogs deeply understand. I couldn’t have understood it before I got Lucille, didn’t understand it when my mother lost Toby, but I do understand it today. The loss is as particular and profound as the intimacy, and the depth of mourning it sets off can shock people, for we’re often not fully aware of how many voids the dog has filled until he’s no longer there, no longer filling those spaces in his able, silent way. When Marjorie lost her first border collie, Glen, she could not say his name for an entire year, literally could not utter the name Glen without bringing on a migraine headache. She told me that, and I just nodded: I can only imagine, I said. In fact, I can barely wrap my mind around the idea that I am likely to outlive Lucille, although a part of me lives in secret terror of the prospect all the time. “I’ve been worried about this dog’s death since she was twelve weeks old.” I say that to people a lot, and I’m only half kidding.

  When Lucille was a puppy, I used to see a man named Charles at a local park every morning. Charles was an older guy, mid-fifties I’d guess, and he had a big old lumbering black Lab named Ben, and they’d stroll into the park together, Ben off-leash but glued to Charles’s side, and hang around for a little while, ten or twenty minutes. Ben was all gray around the muzzle, as big and sturdy as a sofa, and he adored Charles: he’d stand there and gaze up at him, tail doing a slow, perfect wag. Charles would give him a biscuit, and then they’d wander out of the park and head home.

  Ben died this past March. I ran into Charles on the street several weeks later, just after an early spring snowstorm. He was standing near his front porch clutching a shovel, and he seemed grateful for the opportunity to talk about the loss, the way you’re grateful after a human’s death to run into someone who can appreciate how bereft you feel. Charles is a man of rather few words, but he talked about his sadness, and about what a special dog Ben had been, and then he pretty much summed up what life in the aftermath of his dog’s death felt like, what it was like to reach instinctively for the leash and realize you no longer need it, to feel that empty space where the dog used to be: “It’s like you have to reprogram your whole nervous system,” he said.

  I stood there, Lucille by my side, and my heart just went out to him. Loving a dog deeply does have a cellular quality, as though the most central part of you—your whole nervous system—gets tied into the bond, into the life you create together. You do get reprogrammed: a person with a dog becomes a dog person, with all the change that implies.

  I suppose I’ve been aware of that from the beginning, the power of the dog to change who you are. Lucille was only about thirteen weeks old when I brought her on that trip to the Vineyard; I’d had her for only ten days, and I remember leading her out to the cherry tree on our first morning, to the site of those ashes. I watched her sniff around the two circles of stones, and I had the sense as I stood there that I was introducing her around: Mom, this is Lucille. Toby, Lucille. There was a quiet, sad feeling to this, and also a sense of uncertainty, as though I were standing on the edges of things unknown, a transition perhaps, or several transitions. I had not been to the Vineyard since the previous summer, when we buried my mother’s ashes, and standing there with Lucille, I was jarred anew by the sense of how much had changed in such a short time. Both parents, gone. Drinking, gone. New life, new dog, sense of self still a blank.

  So it was really me I was introducing around: Mom, here I am with a puppy. Toby, here’s your successor. That was the sense I had: Here I am showing you the outlines of some new identity. Only I wasn’t yet sure what that meant, what that identity would turn out to be, or what role Lucille would play in its development, the outlines felt so vague and ill defined.

  Today, nearly three years
later, the outlines are a little clearer, the picture emerging in sharper detail. There is still a lot to be filled in, a great deal of fuzziness around the outskirts: Is that woman in the picture a solitary person or an isolated one? What else will fill up that big empty house of early sobriety? Who else? But at the center I can see the clearest image, the most important one: a woman holding a leash instead of a drink; a woman with a dog by her side, this dog.

  It’s often said in recovery circles that it’s very hard to give up an addiction without finding something to replace the loss, something that feeds you and fills you up and identifies you in some of the same ways the initial substance did. I’m too much of a romantic to see Lucille in such clinical terms, as a “replacement” for alcohol, but I can say that in loving her I have had that sense of being filled anew and essentially redirected, an old identity shattered and a new one emerging in its stead. A sense, as Charles might put it, of being reprogrammed.

  Lucille has never seen me drunk. Simple enough statement, but it means volumes to me; she is a central part of the solace and peace I derive from being a sober person. I look at her sometimes at night, and I think about what a mess I’d be if I were still drinking, about how compromised my ability to care for her would be, about how she’d look at me and know that I wasn’t really there. She is a symbol of something that was unavailable to me in the throes of addiction, an emblem not just of what I’ve been able to give to another being but of what I’ve been able to give to myself: consistency, continuity, connection. In a word, love.

  Mystery novelist Susan Conant has written, “I feel the same spiritual comfort holding a leash that others feel holding a rosary.” I know exactly what she means: put a leash in my hand, put Lucille by my side, and something happens, something magical; something clicks inside, as though some key piece of me, missing for years, has suddenly slid into place, and I know I’ll be okay. The feel of that leash is as grounding and vital to me as a glass of white wine used to feel, the dog as central to my sense of well-being in the world as drink once was.