A Big Little Life

of their dogs lived on.
     
    FOR EIGHT MONTHS after losing our girl, we could not find the courage to have another dog. Finally, I told LindaValliant, the current director of CCI’s Southwest Chapter, that we would be ready in two months if they had a release dog that needed a home. Once you have had a wonderful dog, a life without one is a life diminished.
    In May 2008, more than ten months after Trixie left us, Linda brought another female golden retriever to us. Her name then was Arianna; her name now is Anna Koontz. Linda didn’t know it at the time, but when a few weeks later she gathered the adoption papers on Anna, she discovered that our new girl is the great-niece of our Trixie. Anna’s personality is different from Trixie’s, but the wonder is the same.
    After Trixie’s death, Judi Pierson, formerly of CCI, told me that the way by which the magical girl had come to us seemed to have the kiss of destiny to it. When I told Judi, in 1998, that we were at last ready to accept a release dog, she had said there were a number of mooshy ones available. She was going on a two-week vacation and would have our dog for us the day after she returned.
    As she left on her vacation, she tasked others with reviewing all the available dogs and selecting from them the best of the lot. In mid-vacation, she learned that a strange thing had happened. Most often, if there are numerous release dogs available at the same time, finding the right homes for them in the CCI family can take a couple months or longer. In this instance, all dogs were placed almost within a weekend, and none remained available.
    Having promised us a dog, Judi cut short her vacation,without telling us, and set out to comb through the organization in search of an animal that might have been overlooked. She discovered that Trixie was never certified for release and was still recuperating after she should have healed. Julia Shular, with whom Trixie was then living, had been considering using her as therapy dog in visits to hospitals and nursing homes.
    If all the available dogs had not abruptly been placed in record time, if Judi had simply asked us to wait another couple of months instead of tracking down Trixie, we would have received another dog. That would have been wonderful, too, but it would not have been the same, and another dog might not have wrought in us the changes that Trixie effected.
    Trixie was our destiny. And if we had asked for another dog sooner or delayed another month, we would not have received Anna, Trixie’s great-niece. Do you detect some wonder and mystery in that? We do.
     
    THIS WORLD IS infinitely layered and mysterious. Every day of our lives, we see far more than we can comprehend, and because the failure to comprehend disquiets us, we lie to ourselves about what we see. We want a simple world, but we live in one that is magnificently complex. Rather than acknowledge the exquisite roundness of creation, we take it in thin slices, and we view each slice through tinted, distorting lenses that furtherdiminish its beauty and obscure truths that await recognition. Complexity implies meaning, and we are afraid of meaning.
    The life of a seamstress is no smaller than the life of a queen, the life of a child with Down syndrome no less filled with promise than the life of a philosopher, because the only significant measure of your life is the positive effect you have on others, either by conscious acts of will or by unconscious example. Every smallest act of kindness—even just words of hope when they are needed, the remembrance of a birthday, the compliment that engenders a smile—has the potential to change the recipient’s life.
    If by the example of her joy and innocence, a dog can greatly change two lives for the better, then no life is little, and every life is big. The mystery of life is the source of its wonder, and the wonder of life is what makes it so worth living.
     
    ON THE IMPORTANCE of the human-dog bond and on the reason why we give our hearts to them knowing what is to come, a character in my novel The Darkest Evening of the Year says this:
    “Dogs’ lives are short, too short, but you know that going in. You know the pain is coming, you’re going to lose a dog, and there’s going to be great anguish, so you live fully in the moment with her, never fail to share her joy or delight in her innocence, because you can’t support the illusion that a dog can be your lifelong companion. There’ssuch beauty in