Since When Did Animals Become Synonymous With
Our Grief?

When I think about my mother, I imagine the first time I was scared of a horse. In a foggy north Florida pecan grove, my mom marched into the whiteout with a halter. I followed, hanging onto her hand. When a gray-white horse emerged from mist between the eerily straight rows of trees, I hid behind my mom’s back. Nothing to be scared of, Mom said. She’s just a horse. A large horse, a giant of a beast to my seven-year-old stature. The mist gave her an otherworldliness my mother seemed not to heed. She slipped the halter over the horse’s head without any struggle. Then she did the unthinkable. She told me to get on.

In life, as in literature, a horse is never just a horse. This is because of the weight of history and our own experiences. In the 22 years since that moment, that horse has haunted me. My seven-year-old mind imbued the animal with great feeling. The horse was my mother’s confidence, her triumph in the face of the world’s unknowable chaos. She knew the horse would not buck me even though I was scared, and that was where my love of horses began. Even now, horses represent serenity to me. They are where my mind goes when I need peace. Nothing bad could happen around horses, because nothing bad could happen around my mother. Until it did.

Since my mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia when I was 19, we’ve been separated by more than distance. She does not know who I am. That is a greater loss than I knew with my father’s death. It’s not she who has ceased to exist. It’s me. When I see horses, I think of my mother, the pecan grove, my fear, that first ride; and I grieve her, my still-living mother, the person she was, the safety I knew, and how I can never triumph over the untouchable and invisible chaos of her world the way she did for me.

Writers and nonwriters both cleave to animals, because to do so is embedded in our collective human psyche. In “52 Blue,” a longform essay that is part of her upcoming collection Make It Scream, Make It Burn, Leslie Jamison looks closer at the obsessive fandom surrounding a mysterious whale dubbed 52 Blue, “the loneliest whale in the world.”

After a story about 52 Blue called “Song of the Sea, a Cappella and Unanswered” appeared in The New York Times in 2004, letters from heartsick readers flooded Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, one of the laboratories that had studied the whale. 52 Blue sang at a different frequency than all the other blue whales they had studied before. Normally, blue whale songs measure between 15 and 20 hertz, which sounds like an almost imperceptible rumble to the human ear. 52 Blue sang at 52 hertz, a uniquely high pitch that matched no other whale’s song, leaving him without a mate and constantly moving.

To readers, this sounded like 52 Blue was marching to the beat of his own drummer. The lonely, the heartbroken, the unloved and the lost—they all felt 52 Blue represented an unseen part of themselves, and the whale’s song, Jamison writes, “was quickly becoming a kind of sentimental seismograph suggesting multiple storylines: alienation and determination, autonomy and longing; not only a failure to communicate but also a dogged persistence in the face of this failure.” In her essay, Jamison discusses the romance and poetry of this idea, and what the symbol of the whale has done for peoples’ lives, while matching it with concern for painting over animals with the assumptions of human perception.

The problem with such anthropomorphization as seen with 52 Blue is that it centers humans within the animal narrative. By anthropomorphizing animals, we’re making assumptions about their inner lives, elevating ourselves as a model species, and reducing them to our inferiors. The reality of animal cognition is much more complicated, a major reason why we fixate on them time and again in fiction. In the best stories, human and non-human animals walk side by side and acknowledge that there are some things about each other that we may never know.

Sigrid Nuñez ruminates on the unknowable nature of animal cognition and grief in her National Book Award-winning novel The Friend. After the suicide of one of her closest friends, the novel’s unnamed narrator is tasked with caring for his immense Great Dane, Apollo. The literal and figurative magnitude of the dog spark a discourse within the novel’s pages about the place of animals within the human narrative. Do dogs feel the same emotions as humans do? the novel asks. Do they react the same way when they experience a loss?

The narrator asserts that animals do experience grief, but in a way that is entirely animal and mysterious, one that does not fit inside the constructs of human emotion. Some humans, however, assume less of them; both of these ideas come together in a flourish as the deceased friend’s wife is trying to force the dog on the narrator:

“I put him in a kennel,” she says, bristling at my tone, “because I didn’t know what else to do. You can’t explain death to a dog. He didn’t understand that Daddy was never coming home again. He waited by the door day and night. For a while he wouldn’t even eat, I was afraid he’d starve to death. But the worst part was, every once in a while, he’d make this noise, this howling or wailing, or whatever it was. Not loud, but strange, like a ghost or some other weird thing.”

And so, to save him from this kind of life, the narrator takes the dog, and of course, as is expected when someone brings a 100-pound plus dog into a tiny New York apartment, hijinks ensue. Interspersed with these scenes, the narrator contemplates man’s best friend, his place in history, and how literature remembers him.

The dog, Apollo, comes to represent grief not by force or assumption but by sheer juxtaposition, by the fact of the scenario, and by the dog’s own recognizable grief. As readers and as humans, we are ready to place this weight on animals, dogs especially, because of our experience with them in our own lives.

“Who doesn’t know that the dog is the epitome of devotion?” Nuñez writes, a rhetorical question. Dogs have taken on such weight and meaning in part because they have been with human society for so long that they occupy an unassailable place in stories and myths from around the world. The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, a compendium of analyses on symbolism in world myth, devotes seven pages to the dog. (By contrast, the equally charismatic dolphin has earned only one.)

Ask anyone to name a story about a dog, and they will without skipping a beat: Lassie, Rin Tin Tin, Balto; books like Where the Red Fern Grows, Old Yeller, The Art of Racing in the Rain, Call of the Wild, White Fang, Marley & Me, Because of Winn-Dixie, Shiloh, Cujo, The Hound of the Baskervilles. You can probably think of more. All of these stories rely on the bond between humans and dogs, even the horror stories among them, because what’s more terrifying than a trusted friend turned foe?

Over the course of our world’s myths, dogs have guarded us from more than the unknown enemies lurking beyond the light of our fires. “There cannot be a mythology which does not associate a dog, be it as Anubis, T’ien k’uan, Cerberus, Xolotl or Garm, with death,” the entry for dogs begins in The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols. “Evidence of the primary mythic role played by the dog, that of psychopomp, is worldwide. Having been man’s companion in the light of living day, the dog becomes his guide through the darkness of death.”

We readily place heavy emotions on dogs because they already have immense mythic significance. The same can be said about other animals that have been domesticated from ancient times, such as horses and other equids, which have borne many a plow and carried many a load, thus associating them with strength, the providence of the harvest, and divine assistance. Horses are also associated with the feminine, the mysterious, chthonic power of the fertile earth, death and life, the World Mother: on discovering the vast mythic history of horses, I am both amazed and unsurprised that they have come to represent my mom, who has become lost in the chthonic world of her own mind.

Grief, especially, touches something in us that is wild and unknowable. In those moments, when wild grief pulls us toward the dark, we seek out these unknowable creatures, ones who are more at home in the wilderness that we ourselves may fear. Animals are the familiar, the eternal, even as our alienation from nature and the wild continues to grow. They have always been here with us, watching, even as we destroy their homes. What would we do in a world without them? I hope we never have to find out.

Beyond their mythic stature, animals are significant in and of themselves. Anyone who has encountered a whale in the ocean can say they felt surprise and awe, and perhaps a little humility. Dog owners know the joy of being greeted at their door by a wagging tail and a little furry face that seems to smile.

As I write this, my black lab starts barking as if to make a point. I put my finger to my lips. She gives me a side eye, sighs and puts her head down. Brat, I think, rolling my eyes. I wonder where she gets it from. I’d like to say I don’t anthropomorphize my dog, and I don’t assume what she’s thinking. She is more than a symbol in my life. She is my companion, my best friend. But sometimes it’s impossible to resist.

Aptly, Nuñez’s narrator references Rilke: “Once again I come upon his famous definition of love: two solitudes that protect and border and greet each other.” Thus our journey beside animals goes. Perhaps they, too, wonder what we’re thinking.