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

by Sy Montgomery

To begin to understand the life of any animal demands not only curiosity, not only skill, and not only intellect. I saw that I would also need to summon the bond I had forged with Molly. I would need to open not only my mind, but also my heart.

What was it about Christopher Hogwood that seemed to draw everyone to him? Lila later summed it up this way: “He was a great big Buddha master. He taught us how to love. How to love what life gives you. Even when life gives you slops.”

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.

Chris. Tess. Chris: 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.

These beautiful wild animals were not my Chris and my Tess, of course. Nor were they inhabited by their spirits. They were their own complex, individual selves, who loved their unique lives. But also, they were, to me, wildness itself. 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 this spinning planet.

“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.”

People often speak of a lifetime dog, a phrase that may have been coined by the author and fellow border collie owner Jon Katz. “They’re dogs we love in especially powerful, sometimes inexplicable ways,” he’s said. Tess was our lifetime dog.

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

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. ✧

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.