Critters Is All Alike

On my 40th birthday, my dog, Nanuk, died. We got her at 1 year old and had her for more than 10 years. I walked her every day for that entire time, unless I was sick or on vacation. For most of those years, we walked twice a day, but we dropped the morning walk when I started running in 2000.

Nanuk was extremely beautiful. Watching her run was a wonder of natural beauty and a pleasure; she was so well-proportioned and graceful. She was also the sweetest creature I've ever met. She loved people, but after greeting you, she wasn't pushy or demanding of attention.

Here she is the day before she died:


I started writing about Nanuk because I wanted to tell this little story about my other dog, Raggs:


We got Raggs when she was 5 months old, and she has always been dominated by Nanuk. She was depressed after Nanuk died and didn't know what to do with herself. She is recovering now, some 7 weeks later.

Nanuk died on the operating table at the vet's. We told the vet we wanted to go by and see her afterwards. We were packing up to go, and we had to take our baby, since we had nothing else to do with him. So, we thought we might as well take Raggs, too. I figured that seeing Nanuk's body might help her understand what was happening when Nanuk didn't come home.

We went to the vet's and saw Nanuk on a table. Raggs sniffed and smelled her, but couldn't see over the edge. So, I picked Raggs up to let her see. She briefly saw Nanuk, but then turned her head away and refused to look. Even when I rotated in place to try to put Nanuk in front of her, she turned her head away.

This demonstrates an interesting trait in humans, which I now know we share with dogs. We don't think very well about death. We just don't think about it at all, if we can help it, and when we must think about it, we don't think clearly. Raggs didn't want to be shown that Nanuk was dead. Humans make up all kinds of stories that deny, in various ways, the reality if death.

Religions all around the world agree on very little. They agree on a minimal set of moral principles, and they agree that death is somehow not real. The moral principles are basic to human nature and are merely adopted by religion (I will write about that sometime), and the incapacity to clearly understand death is apparently also universal. A religion may say we are reincarnated or that we go to heaven (or hell) or that we are influenced by ancestors or that the dead come back for dinner once a year. Whatever it is, the denial that people are really just plain dead is universal in religion.