The pain of `good-byes' is nothing new. Homer knew something of this pain and had the Greek hero, Odysseus, and his dog, Argos, model for all time in The Odyssey the pathos of the ancient Graecian experience. Odysseus had been away for 20 years, long given-up for dead by his family and friends. Disguised, he returned to his homeland to find interlopers conspiring for his lands and his wife. His appearance had changed after so many perils, so many years, and no one recognized him-- except his dog, Argos. He knew his master's voice, the sound of which, after so long a wait, validated the dog's loyalty, and seemed to grant old Argos release from his faithful vigil. Odysseus knew the grief. So did Homer.

In ancient Egypt when one's cat died the owner shaved off their eye brows in a ritual of mourning. When your dog died, you shaved your entire body.

What is new today at the end of the 20th century is not grief over the loss of pets. In every age those who truly bonded have known the pain of grieving over their dog's death. However, because of psycho-social factors at the end of the 20th century, I believe our sense of loss is significantly compounded.

These cultural changes hold important clues why saying good-bye to Scottie companions is such a crisis for contemporary Scottie lovers, and point us toward understanding which can aid healing.

Today's Pain

It is my belief that today's grief over lost pets is both more widespread and more acute than ever before in canine-human history. Odysseus' "salt tear" over Argos, carefully concealed from his peers, is being replaced in our culture by an avalanche of public mourning. There is today an International Association of Pet Cemeteries that lists 100 member locations across the country, who pledge "to help other people and their family pet members, by providing sincere, realistic pet `after care.'" Says Joe Haswell, past director of Hillside Acres Cemetery near Boston, "You ought to see this place on Memorial Day. There are more people over here than over at the human cemetery." There is even a pet cemetery in Baltimore, MD, that permits pets and their owners to be buried in adjacent plots. Even cyberspace has become an arena for pet mourning and grief. The Virtual Pet Cemetery @ http://www.lavamind.com/pet.html, offers grieving pet owners opportunity to post online their pet memorials for all the world to see.

So radically changed is the family status accorded today's household pet that it is not uncommon for persons to grieve more intensely over the death of a pet than over the loss of a relative. The reason, affirms a Massachusetts social worker, is "... our (pet) love and then our grief are pure." Bob Barton, proprietor of W.N.C. Marble and Granite Company, of Marble, NC., agrees. "I've watched big, strong men, who didn't shed a tear at the funeral of a relative, break down and cry their eyes out when ordering one of our gravestones for their deceased dog. It's different with pets," he adds. "Our dogs love us unconditionally; humans don't."

Dog Power

Recent historical research analyzing what Mary Thurston calls "our 15,000-year love affair with dogs," has documented the dramatic rise in the social status of the dog in modern times. The ubiquitous family dog is major business in our culture, and the household Scottie is royalty.

What this new family status means is that the bonding between dogs and humans, which in earlier times was the privilege of the few, has now become the experience of the masses. And this means the grieving over lost bonds of companionship once confined to royalty and the rich is now experienced in the population at large. Our grief may not be new, but it is more widespread than ever before in history.

Hyper Pain

But there's more to our grief crisis than the rising numbers of those experiencing it.Today's sense of loss is more acute and traumatic.

Researchers have found that grief levels are directly affected by the level of attachment of the caretaker with the animal, the suddenness of the animal's death, and whether or not the person lives alone.

The dramatic rise in the attachment status of contemporary family pets since WWII, together with the aging of our population and rising numbers of those living alone, indicate why our culture is singularly situated for extraordinary grief levels.

The relevance of this for Scottie lovers is that everything that can be posited of the general population's new attachment to dogs and the attendant social consequences, must be compounded by a factor of 10 when assessing what Scottie people know as "the Scottie Crazies." In Scottie circles attachments that elsewhere would be extraordinary are not remarkable at all; they are the norm. This suggests that because our attachments are extraordinary, our grieving will be extraordinary as well.

Going Deeper

But modern attachment levels to our dogs are themselves effects produced by deeper cultural changes. Why, after all, are we so attached to our Scotties? There are three larger societal changes which drive our attachments and which profoundly deepen our sense of loss when our Scotties die.

The first of these deeper cultural changes is the shrinking of the family. Quite literally the size of the average American household today is half the size it was 50 years ago. And counting the number of heads present doesn't begin to assess the profounder psychological shrinking of the extended family and its attendant loss of network and sense of belonging.

Upward mobility and career migrations over the past two generations carried the hidden costs of broken ties to place and heritage and loss of the rootedness and attachments which shaped and sustained earlier generations. Today we compensate for our rootlessness by elevating the mini-world of our immediate family-- including especially our Scotties-- to new levels of pride and importance. The selfhood that in the past was vouchsafed by continuity of time and place, today is dependent upon the fragile threads of jobs and immediate relationships.

Experts say there is an inverse correlation between the size of the tribe and the crisis surrounding death-- the smaller the group the more threatening it is to lose a group member.

Because we've all bought into the mobile nuclear family over the rooted extended family of agrarian times, we set ourselves up for great difficulty dealing with death within our shrunken family unit. And when one of our members dies, the loss is disproportionately devastating and we hurt a lot.

Shattered Myths

The second of the deeper cultural factors which ratchets up our grief over the death of our Scotties is modern myths about science and technology. Myth, in the technical sense, refers to the collective consciousness of a people, to the communal sense of what-it-means-to-be-us, often embodied in the stories and icons of a culture.

American myth revolves around technology. The whole globe envies the virtuosity of our science. We are believers in this myth of technology, too, and that is as true for the fundamentalist preacher whose ministry is dependent on high-tech telecommunications, as for the child learning to surf the internet.We make technology, and technology then shapes our lives.

The trouble is today's glitzy special effects are so realistic and advances in science so amazing we foster the unexamined myth that our science is omnipotent and our technology invincible. We are in control, affirms the myth, if not in our jobs and careers, then at least in the larger more important sense of the supremacy of our technology over disease and death.

But the death of a beloved Scottie companion shatters the myth and our confidence, and awkwardly confronts us at painful existential levels with the truth of our personal powerlessness and mortality. Science is weak and clumsy in the face of death, and when it's bad science, it is death's terrifying accomplice.

To experience this helplessness in your bones as you watch your companion Scottie die is, in our culture, to lose more than companionship; it is to lose faith in our culture's gods.

Security Blanket

The third of the deeper cultural changes which exacerbates our grieving over the death of our Scotties is the unrecognized `security blanket' syndrome in which we wrap our dogs today.

Psychologists have long recognized that pets hold significant roles in many children's lives as transitional objects to adulthood. Similar to the blanket that the toddler must have when it goes to sleep, the family dog, as loyal companion, helps youngsters find psychological anchor in the midst of change. This is why adolescents may have a more difficult time than younger children in resolving their grief over a pet's death-- they have a shared history which is peculiarly tied up with their sense of who they are and what it means to be them.

What is not adequately recognized is the contemporary role of dogs as transitional objects for adults in our culture. Alvin Toffler, in his many books, has taught us that what is overwhelming today is not merely the quantity of change all around us, but the unprecedented rapidity of change. He called it "future shock," and the notion of stunned disorientation is an apposite picture of the way many feel in today's world of prized high-tech gadgetry and throw-away relationships. A recent New Yorker cartoon pictured a professional in a job interview where the boss says, "We expect little loyalty, and in return we offer little job security." The brutal frankness here is both humorous and alarming.

Wrenching life-change, or the threat of it, is pervasive: in the job market, in our marriages and relationships, in our health, in our neighborhoods. And in the midst of all this `future shock' it is not just children who grope for some kind of security blanket.

In a profound sense today's unprecedented attachments to canines in general, and to Scotties in particular, reflect our adult gropings after `security blankets' to relieve the relentless shock of overwhelming change. Our Scotties' loyalty and devotion are oases of security in a world at risk. Today's pandemic loss of security, loss of relational glue, loss of innocency, and loss of connection to Nature leave us painfully in need of `transitional objects' to cushion the shock in our lives. Many find that `object' in their Scotties.

That's asking a great deal of our Scottie relationships, to virtually serve as surrogate nurturers in place of community and social structures which filled those roles in earlier times. It's a credit to our dogs' great-souled spirits that they so effectively rise to the demands of today's higher-order companionship.

But to see this new role for our Scottie relationships is to see clearly why losing them is such a blow. It's not just difficult; it means facing life without the one thing amidst all the craziness which made sense.

Conclusion

Saying good-bye has never been easy. And there are compelling reasons why it's harder today than ever. Our world of lost security, troubled relationships, lost innocency, and isolation from Nature, drives us to exceptional attachments, and to profound crisis surrounding death.

The elevation of modern Scotties to family status has brought rewards of profound companionship, but it also has brought unprecedented grief. Because we think the world of our Scotties, it's our world which crashes when they're gone.

But that is love's price. Real love is not about risk management; not about rations and limits and holding back out of fear of pain. Love is about pouring it all out, and then wishing there were more to give.

Argos knew such devotion on the dung heap of ancient Ithaca. He loved even in disgrace to the very end.

And in the same way that Argos' sad plight in Homer's story mirrored Odysseus' tragedies, so today our Scotties and the way we bond with them tell much about our spiritual and emotional evolution as well.

To love without reservation while knowing the end that awaits is the human predicament. It's also our noblest calling.

To the wise, the Scotties in our lives offer more than fidelity, consolation, companionship. They offer a profound and challenging model of what it means to give your heart with little thought of return. Perhaps it's not too late for them to teach us in death some important truths about love and life.

Recommended Reading:

Christine Adamec, When Your Pet Dies: Dealing with Your Grief and Helping Your Children Cope. NY: Berkley Books, 1996. 180 pp, pb. The best inexpensive resource on this topic. Marjorie Garber, Dog Love. NY: Simon & Schuster, 1996. 346 pp. Chapter 7 on `Dog Loss' is excellent. This is a major work well worth reading and pondering. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, On Death and Dying. NY: Macmillan, 1977 (many editions). 289 pp, pb. This is the seminal `text' on death and dying (human) which launched the modern field of research and writing. Herbert A. Nieburg, Ph.D., & Arlene Fischer, Pet Loss: A Thoughtful Guide for Adults and Children. NY: HarperCollins, 1996 ed. 151 pp, pb. Useful section on `frequently asked questions.' Mary Elizabeth Thurston, The Lost History of the Canine Race: Our 15,000-Year Love Affair with Dogs. Kansas City: Andrews & McMeel, 1996. 301 pp. Excellent chapter on pet death, and the best overall treatment of human-canine evolution I've read. Thurston loves dogs, writes eloquently, and has made a serious contribution in this book to all dog lovers. If you can afford only one book on canine history get this one. Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave. NY: Bantam, 1981. 537 pp, pb. This is Toffler's second book, and I believe, his best. Returning to it now almost 20 yrs after first reading it, I am amazed at his prescience. Toffler is the best `map' I know to help you make sense of our modern maelstrom we call life. Lloyd M. Wendt, Dogs, A Historical Journey: The Human/Dog Connection through the Centuries. NY: Howell Books, 1996. 258 pp. Not as useful as Thurston, but sprinkled with fascinating historical detail.

©1997 Tartan Scottie. All rights reserved. Reprinted from Great Scots Magazine, Vol 2 No 3 (May/Jun) 1997.