How To Be A Good Creature: A Memoir in Thirteen Animals

by Sy Montgomery

I can tell you that teachers are all around to help you: with four legs or two or eight or even none; some with internal skeletons, some without. All you have to do is recognize them as teachers and be ready to hear their truths.

When I discovered, as a child, that I would forever be unable to conceive or bear puppies, I crossed having babies off the list. The Earth was grossly overburdened with humans already.

He taught us how to love. How to love what life gives you. Even when life gives you slops.”

Christopher helped create for me a real family—a family made not from genes, not from blood, but from love.

“Elle est belle, le monstre.”

The world, I realized, brimmed even fuller with life than I had suspected, rich with the souls of tiny creatures who may love their lives as much as we love ours.

Dogs possess a tapedum lucedum, a light-gathering reflector in the eye—the reason dogs’ and cats’ eyes glow in the headlights of a car.

To me, one of the most heartbreaking conditions of life on Earth is that most of the animals we love, with the exception of some parrots and tortoises, die so long before we do.

I never feared dying. Death was just one more new place to go. We’d all go there eventually. I believed if there was a heaven, and if I went there, I would be reunited with all the animals I had loved. But I deeply dreaded being left behind when Chris and Tess passed on.

Hers was the grace to which we appeal when we need strength or compassion of greater-than-human origin. Grace is not merely athletic prowess or elegance of movement. It is also, theologians tell us, the divine ability to regenerate and sanctify, inspire and strengthen: “I once was lost but now am found / was blind but now I see.”

repeating their names became a chant, a mantra, a prayer—a call to remember my beloved ones with gratitude, and to be in the right frame of mind for this momentous release.

They were their own complex, individual selves, who loved their unique lives.

These two animals carried within them the wild heart that beats inside all creatures—the wildness we honor in our breath and our blood, that wildness that keeps us on

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“Love is not changed by death,” read the quote by British poet Edith Sitwell, “and nothing is lost, and in the end, all is harvest.”

“Oh, but you do feel them,” he said gently. “What you are feeling when you miss them is not their absence. It’s their presence.”

This is the gift great souls leave us when they die. They enlarge our hearts. They leave us a greater capacity for love.

Aquarium, proved that octopuses can and do recognize individual humans, even when the people are identically dressed and even when the octopuses are simply looking up through the water at them. Athena

Dogs, like all placental mammals, share 90 percent of our genetic material. Dogs evolved with humans.

But emotions aren’t confined to humans. A far worse mistake than misreading an animal’s emotions is to assume the animal hasn’t any emotions at all.

But love never dies, and love always matters.

“The universe,” he’s reported to have said, “is alive, and has fire in it, and is full of gods.” Being friends with an octopus—whatever that friendship meant to her—has shown me that our world, and the worlds around and within it, is aflame with shades of brilliance we cannot fathom—and is far more vibrant, far more holy, than we could ever imagine.

He allows us to rewrite, in a way, the early sorrows of our previous dogs.

You never know, even when life looks hopeless, what might happen next. It could be that something wonderful is right around the corner.