A Big Little Life

a dumb, goofy, blundering agent of chaos. Nearly always, the problem is not the dog but the owners who cannot or do not botherto teach it as they would teach a child. A movie about dumb, goofy, blundering, agent-of-chaos humans and a wise long-suffering dog who loves them in spite of their idiocies is long overdue.
    Dogs know.
    Mike Martin, our friend and general contractor, who said he usually thought of anal glands when he thought of me, died suddenly of a massive heart attack before our new house was finished. He was only fifty-five years old.
    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 leftTrixie 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 ofMike’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