A Big Little Life

by Dean Koontz

  We’d just gotten up that morning when Mike’s wife, Edie, called and told Gerda that Mike had been rushed to the hospital, evidently having suffered a heart attack. He was such a big, strong, force-of-nature guy, yet so calm and soft-spoken that we thought surely the cardiac event must have been minor. He and Edie lived within a couple of blocks of the best hospital in the area, and we were comforted to think that Mike was so quickly in the hands of the finest physicians.

  Neither Gerda nor I had showered, but because I wake each day with epic bed hair, looking not unlike Christopher Lloyd playing Doc in Back to the Future, Gerda urged me to shower while she joined Edie at the hospital. Later, when I got to the hospital, Gerda would come home to shower and then return.

  By the time I showered but before I dressed, Gerda phoned me and, shaken by grief and in tears, said, “It’s too late, he’s gone.”

  After calling Linda to give her the terrible news, I left Trixie in her office and drove to the hospital in a light rain.

  Mike was so highly regarded and well liked by so many people that even though he was gone, more than a few wanted to come to the hospital to see him one last time, as there would be no viewing at a funeral home. Weeks later, hundreds would attend his memorial service, where I delivered a tribute to him and served as a kind of MC to introduce others who wished to speak. One of the hardest things that I have ever done was maintain my composure through that event, which God helped me to do for more than an hour, until I lost it at the very end.

  On the morning that Mike died, we stayed at the hospital with Edie, her son, Eric—whom Mike had raised since he was a young child—with Mike’s brother, Jeff, and Jeff’s wife, Judy, to help greet those who had expressed a determination to come.

  Gerda went with me to the holding room to spend a few minutes with Mike, and we were the better for having visited the body. In the face of one deceased, not prettified by a mortician’s hand, you see the awful dignity of death, the transience of all things that requires of you absolute humility. You see as well the truth and the hope of life best expressed in the first and last lines of T.S. Eliot’s “East Coker,” part of Four Quartets: “In my beginning is my end…in my end is my beginning.” I am born to die, but I trust that I die to live again.

  That afternoon and far into the evening, many of Mike’s friends, his son, Jeff, and family members gathered with Edie at their house. We all brought far too much food not only for the practical reason that even mourners must still eat but also because such gatherings are two parts grief, two parts condolence, and one part gratitude to be among the living, which a lavish spread of food best expresses.

  When we got home that evening, Trixie did not greet us in her usual delirious fashion. No wiggle this night, no happy panting. Her tail wagged but not exuberantly. She was eager to cuddle, as always, but more subdued.

  I have said that she preferred to sleep in her dog bed, but I have saved for here the fact that during her seventh and eighth months with us, she decided that our bed was preferable after all. Trix slept at the foot of the mattress, so quiet through the night that we hardly were aware of her presence. At the end of the two months, she changed her mind, returned to her dog bed, and did not come back to ours again, except when the night was rocked by thunder and except for two other nights, of which this evening of Mike’s death was one.

  Certainly, dogs read our mood from a thousand telltales that we do not recognize in ourselves. They may even read us with something like a psychic perception. Trixie’s demure behavior might have meant nothing more than that she sensed our grief and our solemnity. But I think dogs know.

  I spent a large part of the following day with Edie and Eric. We went to the mortuary to make arrangements for the cremation. We went to my attorney—as they were currently without one—to discuss some legal issues regarding the estate, which the government, in its compassion, wants to see addressed before the bereaved can yet think clearly, and we talked through other issues that would need to be addressed. All this was complicated by terrible weather, a downpour of such intensity as to suggest the End of Days. And it was made worse by the bleak storm light, which robbed the day of color and dimension, and flattened our already low spirits.

  After returning Edie and Eric to their place, on the way back to Harbor Ridge alone, I thought of what it would feel like to be returning to our house if Gerda had gone from it forever. And putting these memories on paper, the same dread inevitably settles over me. We have lived under one roof more than twice as long as we lived without each other before our wedding. The world never made sense until we were together, and I can’t see how it would make sense if I had to live without her. There are moments, more of them in recent years, when the world appears to be descending into a hundred kinds of madness, when the sane life we have made for each other is more precious because it seems ever more rare and quaint in this age of unbelief, discontent, and irrationality. Solipsism, the strange conviction that only one’s self is real, does not afflict me, but I can believe that if Gerda were to die before me, she might prove to be the last real thing, so that I and all the world around me would at once be colorless and without dimension.

  That night, with rain beating on the windows, dinner for two and a bottle of wine by candlelight was a greater comfort than any king could derive from all his power and riches. Under the table, lying on my feet, Trixie was again subdued, and also later when she slept just this one more night at the foot of our bed.

  Three days later, under a blue sky, we went to the construction site for a meeting with a few craftsmen and tradesmen who had long been on the project, to determine how we would finish what remained: a handful of simple interior items, some areas of hardscape and additional landscaping. For years, Mike’s office was in a trailer on site, but some time ago he moved into a room in the service building at the back of the property. We would have to clean out his desk and files, separating his personal items from documents pertaining to our house. But this was not the day for that depressing task.

  We were to meet with the interested parties in front of the service building, to tour the exterior of the house and compile a checklist of the remaining work. Since the driveway and walk-in gates had been installed, we could leave Trixie off her leash to enjoy the grass, in the shade of the California live oaks and pepper trees. When everyone had gathered, Trixie was not with us. She usually didn’t wander out of sight, and we were concerned.

  Someone reported having seen her moments ago around the door of the service building. I went looking for her and found her in Mike’s office, standing at his chair.

  Recalling this moment, I can easily go too far attempting to deduce her thoughts and feelings, and so it’s best not to imagine them at all. She was just a dog, standing where Mike could often have been found on the phone, negotiating with suppliers and chasing down overdue orders of urgently needed items. She had thought to go there for some reason, and logically you could say she expected to find Mike, who always gave her a chest rub or a scratch behind the ears.

  I watched her, waiting, and something more than expectation of a chest rub held her there, for she delayed another minute or two. The logical assumption is that memories held her, memories of Mike. But it seems memories would have held her only if she realized the sad context in which she considered them, and indeed her solemn mood seemed to confirm an appreciation of context. At last she turned her attention to me, and I said, “Let’s go, Short Stuff.”

  She hesitated, surveyed the room again, and came to sit before me, head tilted back, ears raised just at the occiputs. This is as much as goldens are able to raise their pendulous ears, but it cubes their cuteness. I went to one knee and massaged her face with my fingertips and then with my knuckles, a pleasure she rated second only to food. Usually she closed her eyes during this boon, but now she held my stare. When I finished the face massage, she led the way out of the office, out of the building, into the sunshine.

  Dogs know.

  One day, befo
re we adopted Trixie, as I came down the back stairs, I heard pitiable wailing, which at first sounded like a young child in misery. The cry might have been as near as the family room or living room, but soon I found the source outside. The neighbors kept two Alaskan malamutes, and one of them was sitting in the fenced run alongside their house, howling in distress. His cries were the most pathetic I had ever heard from an animal, yet no injury or product of illness was apparent.

  The neighbors often had one or both of the dogs in the house, and they were not negligent. If they had been home, they would have heard this wailing and would have been examining the dog to determine its complaint.

  When I went back inside to ask Gerda if she had a cell-phone number for the people next door, we could hear the cries even in her office, which was at the farther side of the house from the afflicted animal. Gerda knew that no phone call was necessary. A short while earlier, she had encountered the neighbors in the street and learned that they were on the way to their veterinarian because one of their dogs was failing fast and needed to be put to sleep to spare it suffering.

  The remaining malamute had often been alone in the run and had not howled. This was the anguished wailing of a grieving creature who knew his friend would not return. For three hours, he cried. After a silence, he cried again at twilight. For more than a month, this pathetic dog held forth two or three times every day, for an hour or more on each occasion. Never before or since have I heard such sorrowful, despairing cries, and nothing could console him.

  And so dogs mourn.

  We have all read the stories of nursing-home dogs that suddenly lavish even more affection on a patient who is apparently no more ill than previously but who passes away within the day.

  And so dogs console.

  In 1858, a shepherd known as Old Jock was buried in Greyfriars Abbey churchyard, in Edinburgh, Scotland. The next morning, his Skye terrier, Bobby, was found sleeping on his grave. Regardless of the weather, Bobby returned to keep a vigil every day for almost fourteen years. Visitors from around the world came to see this loyal terrier, and a monument to Greyfriars Bobby still stands in Edinburgh. Church officials allowed Bobby to be buried next to Old Jock.

  And so dogs mourn not just the immediate loss but also the enduring memory of what was lost.

  In AD 79, Mount Vesuvius erupted, destroying Pompeii, burying it under volcanic ash. Centuries later, excavators discovered a dog, Delta, whose collar described how he had saved his owner’s life three times. Delta’s body was lying over a child he had tried to protect from the volcanic horror.

  If dogs were incapable of grasping the concept of mortality, they would make no effort to save us from death. If they understand that we are mortal, they surely know the same about themselves.

  Skeptics have a reason for wanting to deny that dogs are aware of their mortality. Such an awareness, like an accurate awareness of time and its role in our lives, is a higher order of thinking than mere instinct, which is only pattern programming. Yet because dogs are acutely aware of death before they witness it, the concept has not been learned. Therefore, the knowledge is native to their minds, and we call such knowledge intuition.

  For more than a century and a half, elite intellectuals have pressed upon us theories that try to reason us out of our native knowledge, to encourage us to deny that intuition exists. They are hostile to intuition, but not because by intuition we know that we are mortal or because by intuition we understand the basic past-present-future workings of time, or because by intuition we know that the whole is greater than any of its parts.

  They are hostile to intuition because, as thousands of years of civilization will attest, we are born with a tao, a code of virtuous conduct, a sense of right and wrong, which is ours intuitively. This tao, which we all share, is the foundation for every great religion but also of every great culture that has ever given its people long periods of peace and stability under law, and also of every rational humanitarian impulse and project. If we recognize the existence of this tao, we cannot believe that life is meaningless, and we cannot succumb to nihilism or to cold materialism. If we recognize this tao, we may well accept the existence of the soul, whereafter we will not cooperate with those intellectuals who, in the modern age, have been in mad rebellion against all of human history that preceded them.

  When we acknowledge that dogs are well aware of their and our mortality, we acknowledge they have intuition. From the skeptic’s point of view, this is dangerous because it inspires us to regard our dogs with greater enlightenment, whereupon we may see that dogs, by intuition, also have a tao.

  We have seen dogs slinking under a weight of guilt after they have turned the daily newspaper into confetti or chewed a slipper from which they were previously warned away. We have seen dogs in a state of shame, as Trixie was when she crawled on her belly and pressed her face into a corner after peeing on the carpet—even though the fault lay with me. We have seen dogs grin and prance with pride after performing a task as they were trained to do, which is a proper pride in the virtue of cooperation. When dogs risk their own lives to save one of us, they reveal their native knowledge expressed by Saint John in these words: “Greater love hath no man than this: that he lay down his life for his friends.”

  If we have been reasoned out of a belief in our intuition and therefore in our mind’s native knowledge of wrong and right, we might wake from our trance of nihilism and discover that, after all, life does have meaning. If our dogs have a tao, we must have one, too, because dogs would not love us so much if we were nothing but meat machines without principles or purpose. Like human beings, dogs can be imperfect judges of characters, but they can’t be wrong about all of us.

  Most of us will never be able to live with as much joy as a dog brings to every moment of his day. But if we recognize that we share a tao, we then see that the dog lives closer to that code than we do, and the way to achieving greater joy becomes clear. Loyalty, unfailing love, instant forgiveness, a humble sense of his place in the scheme of things, a sense of wonder—these and other virtues of a dog arise from his innocence. The first step toward greater joy is to stop fleeing from innocence, begin retreating from cynicism and nihilism, and embrace once more the truth that life is mysterious and that it daily offers meaningful wonders for our consideration.

  Dogs know.

  XVIII

  elbow surgery and meatballs

  TRIXIE BEGAN SECRETLY limping. I stepped out of a room and caught her hitching along the hallway as if she were auditioning for an all-canine version of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. Crossing the bedroom, Gerda happened to glance back at Trix and saw that she was favoring her left forelimb. When she knew you had stopped to watch her, she made the effort to walk normally.

  We checked her paw first, searching for a wound or an embedded splinter, but found nothing. After that examination, she made a heroic effort to avoid being caught in a limp, walking without hitch or hobble for the rest of the day.

  Soon, however, she couldn’t conceal that her left leg troubled her. Bruce Whitaker X-rayed her and suggested she might have the same congenital problem in her left elbow that, in her right elbow, forced her into early retirement from her assistance-dog duties.

  A surgeon was recommended. On our first visit to him, he led us out to a service alley and asked me to walk Trixie thirty feet away and then back toward him while he watched how she moved. “Elbow,” he declared.

  He reached between her hind legs, feeling her pelvic bones. Then he suggested that I feel there as well and tell him what I found. Not having attended veterinary school, I considered myself inadequately educated to offer a second opinion or even a first. And I began to wonder about the surgeon’s credentials, too, because he had said the problem was the elbow, which was at the other end of the dog from the pelvis.

  Because he was wearing a white lab coat, possessed an air of authority, and resembled Ernest Hemingway, I did as he instructed. Hemingway drank the equivalent of a fifth and a half of booze e
very day, frequently went through six bottles of wine with dinner, was a notorious and perhaps pathological liar, and behaved monstrously to nearly everyone who befriended him, so I’m not sure why a resemblance in this case impressed me. Yes, at his best, Hemingway could write like a wizard, but so can David Mamet, whom I would nevertheless forbid to operate on my dog.

  I felt at once that the left pelvic bone was thicker than the right. Trixie had been compensating for elbow pain for a long time, continuously shifting her weight backward, stressing the pelvis on that side until it thickened. Yet she had only begun to limp a few days ago.

  In the examination room, the surgeon manipulated the elbow joint, trying to make Trixie whimper. When he told me what he was doing, I wanted to pick up a surgical clamp and work on his nose until he whimpered, but I restrained myself. He needed her response to confirm his diagnosis, because this kind of congenital disorder didn’t always show up clearly on an X-ray.

  Trixie refused to whimper. She didn’t wince or start anxiety panting. She just smiled at me while the doctor forced her elbow into uncommon positions.

  “She’s a very stoic little dog,” he said.

  I had heard that comment before.

  IN FEBRUARY OF that year, Trixie had been bitten by a German shepherd that I am convinced was a trained attack dog. She reacted to the bite as if it had been no more than a kiss.

  On a Sunday afternoon, we were out for a walk. As always I had a little canister of pepper spray. I carried it in my right hand.

  We turned a corner and started up a sloped street we had often walked before. A boy of about nine hung by his arms from a tree limb in a front yard to our right. He looked as innocent as a choirboy, but as we drew closer, something about his attitude suggested there would be black candles on any altar where he served.

  Two steps farther, I saw what the property wall at the adjacent house had concealed during our approach: a huge German shepherd lying in the yard, back from the tree in which the boy did his monkey act. It was not on a leash or restrained by anything.