Creature Comforts

Patrick is a good dog.

He is 12 years old, a shag-and-wag wheaten terrier, but his job has made him sad lately. And if you believe that dogs can be sad, then science is on your side. And if you don’t believe it, science is still on your side.

But this is not a story about science and Patrick. It’s a story about Patrick and us.

The man is too young for this, maybe 40 years old, lying frail under fresh sheets, too weak for the two steps he needs to reach the recliner.

It is a comfortable place to die, this room, with its softly lit lamps, its patio door glancing out to sun and green. The man has been here a month now, and yesterday was his birthday, but it was not a good day. His doctor visited. The bleeding is bad. He is aware enough to know what that means.

Maybe the dog senses this, too. Patrick seems to know when the end is coming for the people who live here at Beacon Place in Greensboro, N.C. He knows, at least, that every day this young man will hang his right hand off the side of the bed, ready to rub his neck.

So the dog walks around the bed, and he leans into the hand.

“Oh, Patrick,” the man says. “You know, don’t you? You can smell the cancer.”

He dies later that day, and when Patrick sees the empty bed, he walks off to a corner somewhere, and he sleeps for a long time.

What is it about pets that stirs us so deeply, makes us put our cats in family portraits, makes us put our dog’s ashes on a fireplace mantel?

Another truth: Newspapers surrendered long ago to the reality that we can print articles about the most consequential issues of the day and get nary a blink from our readers. But print a story about a cat that dialed 911, and readers will blanket us with calls and e-mails about how their pets can dial long distance.

Such correspondence is invariably accompanied by other correspondence that notes what science has long said about our pets, which is, essentially: They are dumb.

And: They act only on reflex and response.

And: Whatever emotions and smarts we project on our pets say more about us than them.

All of which might be true.

Then along comes a dog like Patrick.

He is brown and gray with dark and soft eyes that look up like a toddler who spilled juice on the good rug. He lives at Beacon Place — a home for dying people operated by Hospice and Palliative Care of Greensboro — and he is leaving for Charlotte, where his owner, Bill Massey, is the new director of the Charlotte Museum of History.

But Patrick is saying goodbye for another reason. He has been a little grumpy lately — and tired — especially after a patient dies. Beacon Place director Pat Gibbons says she knows why. You can believe her if you want.

“It’s grief,” she says.

Patrick has free roam of Beacon Place. He pokes his head into patients’ rooms, his tag clinking advance notice of his arrival. He sniffs in the bushes for rabbits and birds. “He never gets them,” Gibbons says.

Patrick, lying at the door of her office, ignores the affront.

He came to Beacon Place in 1998 with Massey, his owner. Massey, a Hospice board member, thought the home might be a better place for his terrier than the big city.

Gibbons agreed. Pets are common as visitors or therapeutic aides at hospices and other places. The concept is not new psychiatrists have long had pets in their offices to relax patients. Sigmund Freud was rumored to have a dog present for some psychoanalysis sessions, although no one knows that for sure.

Patrick was Beacon Place’s second full-time canine resident. He was a natural.

“He had a sense of warmth about him, as all dogs do,” Gibbons says. “But he sort of knew he had a job to do.”

She has a notebook of Patrick stories - skulking down the hall with a patient’s cheeseburger, visiting Mrs. Shore or Mrs. Lamkin or so many others each morning for a long chat. Good moments, she says, in the swirl of painful ones.

She remembers one man in particular, not more than 40 years old, with a young boy and girl who stayed with him during the day while his wife worked. The children would sit outside his door, reluctant to go in. Patrick stayed with them for hours.

“The boy would say, `My daddy’s sick. I wish he would get better,”’ Gibbons says. “Patrick would just kind of groan the way he does and stay there.

“I think he diffuses the institutional feel of this place. No one wants to come to Beacon Place. Their anxiety is palpable. But they talk to the dog.”

She sits up with a thought. Patrick glances at her.

“I think they talk through the dog.”

That’s exactly what many of us do, yes? We speak through our pets, attribute to them human tendencies, dress them up, make them more like us. But are they? The joy or shame we see in them might be merely what we want to see. Maybe it’s a manifestation of our own joy and shame, which is a whole other box of treats.

The “Does Fido feel?” debate goes back at least to the 17th century, when philosopher and dog owner Rene Descartes said that animals have no soul and act out their lives on instinct and training. For three centuries, science largely concurred - until recently.

“There’s no doubt that animals have intelligence; they can learn and act on what they learn,” says Nicholas Dodman, head of the animal behavior program at Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine. “There’s also some very convincing evidence about animal emotions. I have no doubt they sense fear, and they seem to experience pleasure.”

The next great debate, says Dodman, is over animal consciousness. Do cats appreciate themselves as living creatures? Are dogs selfaware? If so, Dodman says, then we can naturally extrapolate that animals recognize other creatures. To simplify: Fido doesn’t see everything as a tree to pee on. He empathizes.

That might begin to explain why Patrick sleeps in the rooms of Beacon Place patients who are closest to the end of their lives. How does he know? Dodman and others believe dogs have the olfactory strength to smell changes in metabolism in the terminally ill.

Perhaps Patrick knows, too, that something is not merely different, but wrong.

“There are disbelievers,” Dodman says, “but animals can’t talk to us to tell us.”

At Beacon Place, though, workers noticed a change in Patrick this summer. Still a cheerful dog, he slept in the corner for longer stretches when patients died. Occasionally, he snapped at the mailman and delivery folks. “That’s not like him,” Gibbons thought.

She took him to a vet, who pronounced Patrick healthy. Next was a specialist, who came to a different conclusion: The weight of so many goodbyes had worn on Patrick. “He is,” Gibbon says, “just sad.”

But in leaving, Patrick might be doing one more deed for Beacon Place. Gibbons pulls out a blue envelope, a greeting card addressed to “Pet Therapist, Patrick.” On its front is a dog with sunglasses.

“I was sorry to hear you’re going to leave Beacon Place,” the card says. “You were a great comfort to aunt Polly Durham, who passed away May 28, 2000.

“You will always remain in our hearts.

“Enclosed is 2 dollars to buy a bone.”

Gibbons has received dozens of calls and cards for Patrick.

“What this has done for families is given them a way to express their grief and gratitude for us,” she says.

All from a dog.

“I know,” she says. “Our sensitivity to animals is amazing.”

What is it about them that stirs us so? Nicholas Dodman has no sure answer. Perhaps, he says, it’s the way pets seem to absorb our emotions in a nonjudgmental way. Pat Gibbons wonders if it’s purity. Animals offer pure happy, pure mean, pure sad. They are simplicity in the face of so many things that aren’t simple, things we don’t understand, like dying.

She rubs on Patrick’s neck. Bill Massey says he’ll bring Patrick to work at the museum. Gibbons says Patrick has earned it. She says she’s going to miss him.

“But,” she says, “he’ll be happy there.”