Conjuring Love

The writer Helen Macdonald said in an interview today that animals are "conjures" in the lives of humans, beings who help them hold and live through times of grief.   That word "conjure" is a beautiful one, I think; it's about transformation and change.  When we are lost, hurt and confused, we can't see how to go forward, and so we simply muddle along.  In a lot of suffering…  This woman's eloquent and poetic book explores her experience of grief as she trains and learns to live with a goshawk, one of the wildest and most savage of feral birds.  She describes letting go of human-ness and becoming as wild as the hawk in the course of this relationship, and I am reminded that our connection to animals, either tamed or wild, can allow us to leave behind our linear mental ways and join them in the mysterious animal realm.  We can touch the animal in ourselves and come to balance.

I had a fifteen year relationship with a dog who changed my life at a time when I sorely needed it.  She was a Golden Retriever and her name was Francesca.  I was living in Northern New Mexico in a brand new relationship with a person who called himself "an emotional cripple," and I was convinced I could transform him by offering my love.  Years unfolded … a house was built, a teaching job was found, and a honey colored dog with wavy hair came to live with me ... and she became my best friend.  She knew a needy person when she saw one!  As my new affair went from good to bad, Francesca and I became bonded.  She went everywhere with me, and watched me incessantly.  He called her a "wimp" and "neurotic," for reasons that eluded me, and I in turn felt accused.  No matter, she was my witness: when I was cooking dinner, walking in the woods, or crying into my pillow.  We were in a car crash together one night where I miraculously escaped grave injury, and my great companion disappeared into the high mesa in terror.  Some loving friends helped me in my search the following day, and she was discovered as she searched the hills for my now defunct car.

Later, when I finally said goodbye to my painful 12 year relationship, she learned to live in a city dwelling after years of exploring the southwestern landscape, and she went to work with me in my jewelry gallery, and at the bedside of the dying at Laguna Honda Hospital in San Francisco.  She became a hospice dog.  She was in her element as she leaned into the frail bodies of patients who were grateful for her golden warm body.  When I took her for walks on the beach, she always stayed by my side, declining the possibility of play with her fellow "four leggeds" racing through wet sand all joyful and smelly.  I always said she saw herself as person in a dog suit, not really a dog.  And she had a job to do:  take care of me.

Her companionship took me through deep grief, as I first tried to forge a life of love and dedication, and then later summon the courage to live alone for the first time in my life.  The baggage I carried was heavy, from the guilt of abandoning a twenty-five year old marriage, to turning my back on kids and home, and trying desperately to believe in the possibility of new love with a person clearly not up for the challenge. It was as though I was following in my mother's footsteps, with her continuous parade of husbands, and the notion that I could be her haunted me and added to the weight of the baggage.  Like her, I was living an illusion, and sadly it took many years to give it all up.  But when I looked into Francesca's dark brown eyes I saw unadulterated love and confidence, and this shored me up much of the time.  Love was present right there.  And looking back now, I feel as though she and I met each other half way; as time passed she became more and more human, always knowing what to do or how to be without ever being told, and I grew closer and closer what I call the essence of dog:  devotion and presence.

She lived a very long life, the last year of it with cancer, and when I finally let her go, my broken left arm wrapped around her emaciated old body, I thought that for sure there would never be a love like that again in my future.  You can't conjure that kind of magic.  I tried and failed with another dog.  I resigned myself to the quiet, easy, exquisite companionship of cats…  And then love came through a doorway unannounced.  On a bright sunny morning recently, I held the phone to my ears and heard a warm, young sounding male voice from across the country conjure our shared young love during a far distant time when life was so much simpler.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live, writes Joan Didion.  We also tell ourselves stories in order to remember love's gifts.  More tales of conjuring to come, I promise...