Coda, our dog was killed and at the time I’d
been unpicking my mother’s dressing-gown. I received a phone call from a woman
letting me know that she had Coda and she’d been struck by a car. I went into mourning for several days and
didn’t feel like doing anything, particularly that which had consumed me that
morning. In the scheme of things, it
didn’t seem important. During loss, most
things do not seem to have meaning.
Of course, I knew that creating would pick me up but I couldn’t be
bothered. I preferred to mope and some
would say even indulge the hurt I felt for losing Coda. I couldn’t get over how she was full of life
one minute and not the next. She looked
peaceful lying in the back of the car after my partner picked her up from where
he believed two women had dragged her after she was struck.
The driver of the car that killed her didn’t stop. But it must have been a shock when life was
wrenched from Coda. We went through all
the what ifs – what if I’d been gardening that morning she would have to have
passed me on her ‘flight’ towards the back lane and then the main road and she
may have been distracted from her purpose by seeing me. What if Philip hadn’t left the gate open
because he was preoccupied with covering up a hole that Coda had dug under a
wire fence? We realized however that if
not now well – then another day…It was something that was bound to happen
because Coda liked to run and visit her doggie friends up and down the lane. I nursed guilt as well, that instead of being
absorbed in my creative pursuits, perhaps I should have given her more attention. What made Coda the sort of dog unable to sit
quietly at my feet, happy to be near? A
sort of creator’s or philosopher's dog – happy to ‘think’ and dream alongside me? According to a Kato Indian Creation story
when God went forth to create the world, he took his dog with him. As I want to do when I go forth to create
(not the world) but some felt, or indeed, to muse or write.
I perked up when we decided to get another
dog to fill the hole in my heart and the void in our house. So I went back to unpicking those used dresses and the reflection
that it brought. It may seem that
Coda as a dog is replaceable and that the thought of a new dog brought relief
from my grief. I am rushing to replace her and it's related, however, to my incapacity to be with ‘the hole
in my heart’, which makes me want to rush and fill it with something, rather
than attend to the pain. That sort of inability to deal with pain and loss, which caused me to happily have a pet rock for almost a decade, before I could consider having an intimate relationship with a man or indeed, a dog. Granted I was doing it rather backwards on the way towards intimacy (the man and then the dog but if you consider the dog like a child and we its parents, I've got it right)...
Seeking out the chickens |
Is she thinking, caught in reverie? |
While I
don’t think that dogs ‘think’ or examine experiences as we do, searching for
meaning, they must have ‘minds’. What
made her cower when she messed the floor ‘thinking’ that as her previous
‘master’, I would strike her? What made
her seem depressed after she’d been to the dog park? She wasn’t allowed off her lead to socialize
with the other dogs, as it had been her first time. Was that the
reason? Was she reminded of doggie fun and mischief with Tank? Usually full of zest, she moped for several
hours. She was on the mat beside me for
once (not as I created but as I ironed) and it seemed for the wrong
reason. Not to be with me, but because
something else preoccupied her and she was down. Some
people would think I’m batty attributing a ‘mind’ that can reflect to a
dog. She seemed as an individual
sentient being, and one that could seek out the individual company of humans, other four-legged
creatures or even the feathered two legged kind in chickens – the same individual
that I fell in love with at first sight.
Never mind that she had four legs, she had beautiful kohl rimmed eyes and a great smile. She could ring a bell when she needed to go
outside (to the toilet) and she rang the bell to let me know that the cockatoo
was eating from the bird feed. (We don’t
like cockatoos eating from our bird feeder because when there’s no birdseed
they can revert to eating the timber on your house.) What other evidence did I need to suspect
that Coda had a mind? She could
learn. She had memories. I'm sure she dreamed because I watched as she
seemed to have a nightmare once, quivering, and (did I imagine) rapid eye movement…
Did I learn anything about a dog’s mind reading
Gaita’s The Philosopher’s Dog? Well, Gaita would assign sentimentality to my
way of thinking. Very simplistically, because dogs don’t reflect on the nature of death, in the way that humans do,
acutely aware of their mortality, they don’t have a mind. Yet Gaita seems to contradict himself when he
recounts the anecdote of the aged Gypsy (his dog) slinking past a gate behind
which a younger and rather neurotic border collie waits; and the sidelong glance
Gypsy gives, which seems to express her humiliation at being old. Gaita is tempted to say that his dog’s
demeanour expressed an awareness of their common mortality. But he’s sure she does not know that she will
die. I agree that young dogs are too busy
living in the moment to contemplate death, just as young human beings don't reflect on death or feel their mortality. I’m sure that when Coda went through the gate
and towards the garden and running down the lane towards the main road that
death was most further from her mind, as it was from mine. While Philip expected it, I did not. I liked Coda running and exploring, free as butterflies, and I did
not expect her to be stopped dead in her tracks. We were both naïve.
(The Kato Creation Myth is recounted in Raimond Gaita,
The Philosopher’s Dog, Text
Publishing, 2005)