A Big Little Life

David had been so kind as to position it so that Trixie appeared merely to be sleeping, curled with her head resting on her paws. Her eyes were closed, her face serene. Her fur was cool and soft to the touch.
    “She was so beautiful,” Gerda said, “so beautiful,” and in fact it seemed that this golden girl was more beautifulthan I remembered, that only five days could steal from memory some of the full glory that was this dog.
    During the first half of the 150-minute cremation, Gerda and I sat side by side on a couch in the waiting area of the mortuary. We paged again and again through Life Is Good , Trixie’s first book, which contained so many photographs of her. In the cremation vigil, this was a way to celebrate her life.
    Thereafter, we walked the cemetery, where the headstones were carved with expressions of love, devotion, and gratitude. In those grave markers were enough stories to keep a novelist in material for a lifetime.
    We took the ashes home in a bronze urn and put the urn on the fireplace mantel in our bedroom, where it has ever since remained.
    Some will say, “She was only a dog.”
    Yes, she was a dog, but not only a dog. I am a man, but not only a man. Sentiment is not sentimentality, common sense is not common ignorance, and intuition is not superstition. Living with a recognition of the spiritual dimension of the world not only ensures a happier life but also a more honest intellectual life than if we allow no room for wonder and refuse to acknowledge the mystery of existence.
     
    NEVER IN MY career had I suffered writer’s block until we lost Trixie. I sat at the keyboard day after day, in the middle of The Darkest Evening of the Year, a story full ofgolden retrievers, and could not advance the manuscript by a single word.
    An acquaintance, offering condolences for our loss, admitted that she was embarrassed because she had grieved more for a dog of her own than for family and friends she lost to death. I told her that she had nothing about which to be embarrassed. No matter how close we are to another person, few human relationships are as free from strife, disagreement, and frustration as is the relationship you have with a good dog. Few human beings give of themselves to another as a dog gives of itself. I also suspect that we cherish dogs because their unblemished souls make us wish—consciously or unconsciously—that we were as innocent as they are, and make us yearn for a place where innocence is universal and where the meanness, the betrayals, and the cruelties of this world are unknown.
    Saturday afternoon, at the end of the third week of my writer’s block, as two o’clock approached, neither Gerda nor I could bear to be apart or to engage in any mundane task. As we’d done the previous two Saturdays, during the hour that Trixie had passed, we walked together, hand in hand, around these two and a half acres that our girl loved, visiting her favorite places. Three weeks to the minute after Trixie died, as we were walking the larger lawn, a brilliant golden butterfly swooped down from a pepper tree. This was no butterfly like any we had seen before; nor have we seen it since. Big, bigger than myhand when I spread my fingers, it was bright gold, not yellow. The butterfly flew around our heads three or four times, brushing our faces, our hair, as no butterfly had ever done before. Swooping back up past the pepper tree, it vanished into the sky. Gerda, who is the most levelheaded person I have ever known, said at once, “Was that Trixie?” and without hesitation, I said, “Yeah. It was.” We didn’t say another word about the experience until later, near bedtime, when we discussed the incredible thickness of the butterfly’s wings, which were too thick to be aerodynamic. Gerda remembered them as being “almost edged in a neon rope,” and to me, they had appeared to be like stained glass with a leaded edge.
    No landscaper who works here has ever before or since seen such a butterfly, nor have we. It danced about our heads at the very minute Trixie had died three weeks earlier. Skeptics will wince, but I will always believe our girl wanted us to know that the intensity of our grief wasn’t appropriate, that she was safe and happy. After sharing this story on my Web site, I received hundreds of letters from readers who, after losing beloved dogs, experienced uncanny events that were quite different from ours but that seemed to be intended to tell them that the spirits