Caroline Knapp

When you speak to people about what it's like to live with a dog, you hear them talk about discovering a degree of solace that's extremely difficult to achieve in relationships with people, a way of experiencing solitude without the loneliness. You hear them talk about the dog's capacity to wrest their focus off the past and future and plant it firmly in the present, with the here-and-now immediacy of a romp on the living-room rug or a walk in the woods. You hear them talk about joys that are exquisitely simple and pure: what it's like to laugh at a dog who's doing something ridiculous, and how soothing it is to sit and brush a dog's coat, and how gratifying it is to make a breakthrough in training a dog, to understand that you're communicating effectively with a different species. Above all, you hear them talk about feeling accepted in a new way, accompanied through daily life and over the course of years by a creature who bears witness to every change, every shift in mood, everything we do and say and experience, never judging us when we falter or fail.

Not long ago, over dinner with a non-dog friend named Lisa, I started talking about Lucille, and how important her presence had been to me during the breakup of a long-term relationship. The breakup was recent, and it was long and painful and scary, as such things are, and at one point I said quite candidly, "I'm not sure I would have been able to face the loss if I hadn't had the dog."

-Caroline Knapp

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