The Silent Epidemic of Our Times

By Kenneth Ring, Ph.D.

I recently read a very touching story about a woman named Virginia, who is 92 years old, and her cat, Jennie. She adores her cat who is almost always nearby. She likes to look at Jennie’s green eyes. She likes that Jennie is with her in the morning when Virginia wakes up. And sometimes when Virginia feels sad, she just sits in her soft armchair while Jennie rests on Virginia’s stomach. She nuzzles, purrs, stretches and just does her cat-like things.

Talking to an interviewer, Virginia said, "I can’t believe that this has meant as much as it has to me." When she dies, she thought she might bring Jennie with her. 

Jennie is a robot.

I came across this vignette in a recent article in The New Yorker that was written by Katie Englehart, the author of the book, The Inevitable, which I featured in my previous blog. In the article, she was addressing a problem that two English researchers, writing in The Lancet, had characterized in the following way:

Imagine a condition that makes a person irritable, depressed, and self-centered, and is associated with a 26% increase in the risk of premature mortality. Imagine too that in industrialised countries around a third of people are affected by this condition, with one person in 12 affected severely, and that these proportions are increasing. Income, education, sex, and ethnicity are not protective, and the condition is contagious. The effects of the condition are not attributable to some peculiarity of the character of a subset of individuals, they are a result of the condition affecting ordinary people.

The condition to which these authors are referring, as you might have guessed, is loneliness. And, as we also now know, this condition is particularly acute among the elderly,  which is why caregivers have been interested to see whether providing them with robot pets will help to alleviate their loneliness. In fact, as a number of researchers and scholars have recently pointed out, the pervasiveness of loneliness among the old in America has now reached what the Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, was frank to call an "epidemic." But in contrast to the pandemic we have all been through for the last year and half, this has mostly been a silent epidemic. The plight of the elderly, despite suffering unduly from the pandemic and dying in much greater numbers than younger people, did not receive the kind of sustained attention that we gave to families having to cope with children underfoot or workers who had lost their jobs.

This is understandable, of course. As a society, we no longer venerate the old, assuming we once did; all too often, we simply abandon, forget or ignore them. To be sure, individual family members usually continue to care for their elderly loved ones when they can. And we have all heard horrific stories of the contagion of COVID and resultant deaths that plagued our nursing and other old age homes during the first year of the pandemic. But as a society, we no longer provide the kind of social welfare net that permits most older people to continue to live out their lives in relative comfort in the company of other family members.

There was a time, of course, when, even in America, many people lived in extended families, either in the same house or nearby in the same neighborhood. In those days, when grandma became old and frail and could no longer hear well, she would still be cared for, and could still enjoy the loving company of her family. These days, however, grandma is usually shipped off to a nursing home to live among decrepit and often demented strangers, who cry out piteously during the night and during the day often sit, vacantly, strapped into their wheelchairs. This happened to my mother, too, when she had become old (I was living in Connecticut then while she, who had never flown, had to remain in California). During those years, I would continue to visit her as often as I could arrange to come out to California, but every time I had to leave her in her bed alone and without friends or other family, I felt a wracking guilt.

But even when older people can continue to live in their own homes, they are often left alone, and when that happens, they can suffer from acute loneliness and feelings of abandonment. And more and more of our elderly do live alone now – more than ever – as a result of the modern way of family life which has seen the rise of isolated nuclear family settings at the expense of extended family networks. Statistics show that nowadays almost 30% of Americans over the age of 65 live by themselves, most of them women.  And during the period when COVID raged, this isolation, as we all know, was even more of a torment to the old and to their families who could no longer see and comfort them. How many of these elderly died, alone and afraid, without a hand to hold? One can only shudder when one imagines people dying in this way. How many tears have been shed by their helpless family members? Perhaps you were such a person or knew others who had to endure such emotional and traumatic distress.

Even before COVID struck, however, the deleterious effects of isolation among the old were evident to researchers. Let me take just a moment to acquaint you with the range and severity of some of these effects.

To begin with, 43% of the elderly in America complain about being lonely. According to Englehart, loneliness can "prompt a heightened inflammatory response, which can increase a person’s risk for a vast range of pathologies, including dementia, depression, high blood pressure, and stroke." To amplify this point, consider the following statistics that come from a book dealing with the effects of social isolation in older adults:

•  Social isolation has been associated with a significantly increased risk of premature mortality from all causes.

•  Social isolation has been associated with an approximately 50 percent increased risk of developing dementia.

•  Loneliness among heart failure patients has been associated with a nearly four times increased risk of death, 68 percent increased risk of hospitalization, and 57 percent increased risk of emergency department visits.

•  Poor social relationships (characterized by social isolation or loneliness) have been associated with a 29 percent increased risk of incident coronary heart disease and a 32 percent increased risk of stroke.

Of course, old age in itself is hard enough to endure for most of us oldsters, quite apart from the dangers, physical and emotional, of isolation, which I have just briefly adumbrated. The so-called "golden years" are really just the olden years when sentiment is absent and the reality of life as one ages is bereft of any illusory euphemism. Growing old is scary enough when one contemplates the prospect and then the reality of increasing decrepitude, loneliness, illness and then, finally, dying and death. If you have the misfortunate of living long enough, you may even find yourself not only alone but without anyone any longer knowing who you are and what you have been in your life. This is probably the most terrifying kind of existential isolation.

I remember when I was in my early eighties and was writing some (mostly) humorous essays about my own vicissitudes of aging that I eventually collected into a little book I puckishly called Waiting to Die, I had one of those moments of anticipatory existential fright. This is what I wrote at the time:

One day long ago I had a shocking realization. I received a new credit card whose expiration date was November, 2023, when I would be almost 87 years old. Surely, I thought, I would expire long before that. But, then, a horrible thought occurred to me: What if I don’t?! What if I live to 86? Honestly, before seeing that card, I had never imagined such a thing. No, no! Will I still be walking on this road toward death, still waiting to die, for years to come? What a ghastly thought.

I realized I’m not afraid to die; I’m now afraid of living too long!

At that time, I could still half-joke about such a prospect, but now that I am halfway to 86, it seems that some of my fears may no longer be a laughing matter!

A few years ago, the well-known physician, Ezekiel Emmanuel (you have probably seen him often interviewed on television where he became a frequent commentator on the pandemic), wrote a now famous piece in The Atlantic, which he provocatively entitled, "Why I Hope to Die at 75." In it, he reflected my own thinking, but took the time to lay out his reasons. This is how his article began:

That’s how long I want to live: 75 years.

This preference drives my daughters crazy. It drives my brothers crazy. My loving friends think I am crazy. They think that I can’t mean what I say; that I haven’t thought clearly about this, because there is so much in the world to see and do. To convince me of my errors, they enumerate the myriad people I know who are over 75 and doing quite well. They are certain that as I get closer to 75, I will push the desired age back to 80, then 85, maybe even 90. I am sure of my position. Doubtless, death is a loss. It deprives us of experiences and milestones, of time spent with our spouse and children. In short, it deprives us of all the things we value.

But here is a simple truth that many of us seem to resist: living too long is also a loss. It renders many of us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining, a state that may not be worse than death but is nonetheless deprived. It robs us of our creativity and ability to contribute to work, society, the world. It transforms how people experience us, relate to us, and, most important, remember us. We are no longer remembered as vibrant and engaged but as feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic.

Exactly. Which is why I argued in my previous blog that people should have the right to terminate their own lives. Emmanuel would not choose to do that, but many people who no longer wish to live doubtless would if they could do so peacefully. Who, when young, dreams of getting old? Instead, we pretend it won’t happen to us. I never really thought it would happen to me either. But one day, after I had turned 81, I realized that my time had come.

Right now, even though I live alone (and have for many years – it’s easier for us introverts), I am lucky to have a loving girlfriend, now nearly 80 herself, who is able to spend some time with me as well as a caretaker who can assist me when I need someone to go grocery shopping or do errands for me. But my three children all live far from me, and I would never want to burden them with my care if one day I should find myself alone in this world. But who knows – it may be that I will eventually be one of those people I have been writing about -- on my own, sick and feeling forlorn, lost in my dotage, just waiting to die. Knowing what I have learned about the effects of isolation, I am not keen on spending my last days like this, even if I should have a robot cat to keep me company. 

Of course, old age needn’t be a drag or a seemingly unending series of tribulations and sorrows. It’s important to keep things in balance after all. As Emmanuel implies, old age can also be rewarding and full of pleasures, including sex. I have an old girlfriend, now well into her 80s, who frequently writes me about her deeply satisfying sex life with her husband. And there are certainly people in their nineties who are happy still to be alive and able to enjoy life.

Since this blog has been grim and uncharacteristically sober (at least for me), suppose we take a moment for a little levity to lighten the mood. One thing that I’ve been struck by is how many comics live to a great age and seem to leave this world laughing, at least figuratively speaking. To take one example, I can choose one of my favorite comics from an earlier era, George Burns, whom you may remember as God since late in life he became famous (again) for playing God in a film with John Denver. I mention him and comics generally because, as I have previously argued in some of my blogs, humor is often the best defense against the trials of aging and the prospect of death.

George Burns died at 100, and like other centenarians, he was asked to explain the secret of his longevity. He was inclined to attribute his success to smoking cigars daily. But there were other factors as well that contributed to his aging well until the end, as witness this obituary:

George Burns died at age 100 on March 9, 1996. Mr. Burns spent his lifetime in show business and created millions of laughs. It is reported that Mr. Burns was buried with three cigars in his pocket, had on his toupee, his ring and watch, which was a gift from his wife, and in the pocket of his suit were "his keys and his wallet with ten 100-dollar bills, a five, and three ones, so wherever he went to play bridge he’d have enough money."

Several years ago, he was asked by an interviewer if he ever considered retiring. "Retire to what?" an amused Mr. Burns asked. "I play bridge for two hours a day to get away from work. Why the hell would I want to retire to play bridge 24 hours a day?" George Burns played bridge every day of his life. He loved bridge. But at 3 o’clock, he could be in the middle of a hand, he’d stand up (and say) "Thank you gentlemen," and go home to take a nap. He used to say: "Bridge is a game that separates the men from the boys. It also separates husbands and wives."

Burns was perhaps one of the best bridge players in Hollywood. Well, if not the best, the funniest.

I loved George Burns, and his raspy voice – from all those cigars, no doubt. He knew how to enjoy himself and when to rest. He also did yoga. We oldsters can all take a lesson from George Burns. Keep laughing and don’t allow yourself to languish – that’s the ticket.

Still, George was the rare exception. Most people suffer when they get very old and often yearn to be free of the burden of living. Nevertheless, even though life is hard for the old and is in end universally fatal, as long as we are still here, we old-timers have to make the best of it. What will help us get through our battles with loneliness if robotic animals aren’t enough?

We are social creatures, and older people, who were so cruelly deprived of that kind of vital contact during the pandemic, are particularly vulnerable to the lack of face-to-face interaction. They can starve psychologically without it, but they can rebound and even thrive again with it.  We must find ways to address the social deficit of the aged in order to forestall, if not completely defeat, the insidious dangers of loneliness.

And social workers and other caregivers have not been slow to realize this. Here’s just one example of this kind of intervention:

The good news is that friendships reduce the risk of mortality or developing certain diseases and can speed recovery in those who fall ill. Moreover, simply reaching out to lonely people can jump-start the process of getting them to engage with neighbors and peers, according to Robin Caruso of CareMore Health, which operates in 8 states and the District of Columbia with a focus on Medicare patients. Her "Togetherness" initiative aims to combat "an epidemic of loneliness" among seniors through weekly phone calls, home visits and community programs.

What can you do? It’s obvious: Visit the old. So what if they just natter and chatter – they matter! Now that the COVID cloud is finally beginning to lift, don’t go out solely for your own pleasure. Do you have a loved one or someone you know who is living alone or in a nursing home? If so, visit them. Even better, bring them a pet, a real pet, not a robot, if they don’t have one. And don’t just visit once. Come back. Help to assuage their loneliness. You’ll be doing a mitzvah. You will be old one day yourself. Sew some good karma while you can. It will come back to you.

Englehart found that many older people whom she visited were reluctant to see her leave. They relished the time with her; they wanted her to come back. As she writes about Virginia:

It was the same with almost every robot owner I met. "I haven’t had anybody to talk to for a while, so chatter, chatter, chatter," Virginia said, when I first called. Near the end of my visit to her home, she insisted that I take a doughnut for the road and told me to come back sometime. She thought she would probably be around, though she also wondered if she would die in the big empty house: "Maybe this is the year."

"Your bags are packed, right?" her daughter-in-law said, laughing.

"Gotta go sometime," Virginia said. When she died, she thought she might bring Jennie with her. She liked the idea of being buried with the cat in her arms.

It’s Reigning Cats and Dogs: The Psychic Lives of Our Pets

By Kenneth Ring, Ph.D.

One day several years ago, as my girlfriend Lauren and I were out on her patio, a cute little stray kitten wandered in and stopped to look at us. Lauren who loves cats smiled encouragingly and bent down to greet our visitor who then tentatively approached. I immediately dubbed her "Petunia," though we didn’t then know her sex. That was the beginning of a love affair -- between Lauren and Petunia who quickly became Lauren’s most affectionate and devoted companion, displacing me in that hierarchy to a secondary position.  

Lauren soon discovered that not only was Petunia exceedingly affectionate, but she was clearly psychic, too. She always seemed to know, for example, when Lauren was planning to drive across the bay to visit me. And when Lauren would sometimes bring Petunia with her, the cat would invariably hide on the day Lauren was to leave for home. It got to be so that we would have to mime to each other so that Petunia would not know Lauren’s plans.

There were, in fact, so many instances of Petunia’s unusual, seemingly psychic, sensitivities that a few years later, I actually wrote a little illustrated book about her I called Petunia, The Psychic Cat. Here she is:

Indeed, there is abundant evidence that cats are telepathic. Rupert Sheldrake, an exceptionally creative and curious English scientist, has collected many cases of this kind, and not only about cats, in one of the most remarkable books on animals I have ever read. It has a most intriguing title, too:  Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. But there is a lot about cats in this book, too, and in the first part of this essay I am going to draw on it extensively. It begins with this story about a professor at a university of which I happen to be an alumnus:

When the telephone rings in the household of a noted professor at the University of California in Berkeley, his wife knows when her husband is on the other end of the line. How? Whiskins, the family’s silver tabby cat rushes to the telephone and paws at the receiver. "Many times he succeeds in taking it off the hook and makes appreciative meows that are clearly audible to my husband at the other end," she says. "If someone else telephones, Whiskins takes no notice."

This is not an isolated case. Sheldrake writes that he has collected fifty-nine cases (!) of cats who respond to the telephone when a particular person is calling, even before the receiver is picked up. In every instance, the caller is someone to whom the cat is deeply attached.

Here’s another typical example:

Seven years after she acquired Carlo, my daughter went to teacher training college and rang us infrequently. However, when the phone did ring and it was Marian ... Carlo would bound up the stairs [where the phone was] before I had picked up the receiver. There was no way that this cat could have known my daughter was to ring us ... He never did this at any other time and was not allowed upstairs anyway. 

Many cat owners – about one-third, according to a survey that Sheldrake conducted – believe their cats are telepathic. The examples above and those to come will make it clear why so many cat lovers are convinced that this is so.

As the title of Sheldrake’s book implies, he is particularly interested in anticipatory behavior in animals, especially dogs, who give evidence that they are aware when their owners will be returning home. These reports do not depend on anecdotal accounts alone; Sheldrake has actually carried out controlled experiments to establish the point. Here is a summary of a typical such experiment.

A dog owner is sent into town to wander about. At a certain time of her own choosing, she forms an intention to return home. Cameras have been placed in her home so that the movements of her dog can be tracked. Let’s say the dog has been lying on a sofa. However, at the very moment the owner has turned around and has started her trek toward home, the dog suddenly jumps off the sofa and pads over to the door to wait for his owner to return.

There are many cases of such astonishing anticipatory behavior in dogs in Sheldrake’s book and many other marvelous stories about the amazing things that dogs are capable of, so I highly recommend this book to any of you who are dog lovers. But, as I remarked in my previous blog about animals, since I fancy cats and am actually a bit averse to dogs, the rest of this essay will concern itself with the wonders of cats.

However, before moving on, I should note that cats, too, can exhibit in the same kind of anticipatory behavior as dogs. Here’s just one such example:

When the son of Dr. Carlos Sarasola was living with him in  Buenas Aires, he often came home late at night, after his father had gone to bed with their cat, Lennon. Dr. Sarasola noticed that Lennon would suddenly jump off the bed and go and wait by the front door ten or fifteen minutes before his son arrived home by taxi. Dr. Sarasola made careful observations of the time the cat responded to see if the cat could be responding to the sound of the taxi door shutting. He found that the cat responded well before the taxi arrived. "One night I paid attention to several taxis that stopped at the front of my building. Three taxis stopped and Lennon remained quiet with me in bed. Some time later, he jumped down and went to the door. Five minutes later I heard the taxi arrive in which my son was traveling."

Cats seem to be very sensitive not only to the emotional state of their owners – there are countless examples of that and this is well known – but are especially telepathically attuned to accidents, illness and death. Here are a couple of illustrative cases that Sheldrake provides.

In May 1994 I sat outside on the veranda, and my three-year-old cat, Klaerchen, lay beside me purring comfortably. My eleven-year-old daughter had gone out with her girlfriend on her bicycle. Everything seemed harmonious, but suddenly Klaerchen jumped up, uttered a cry we had never heard before and in a flash ran into the living room where she sat down in front of the telephone. The phone soon rang and I got the news that my daughter had had a bad accident with the bike and had been taken to the hospital.

We had a beautiful Carthusian tomcat that we all loved, but he loved my husband most of all. In the summer holidays we went camping in Denmark and left the cat at an animal home in Switzerland [where we lived]. In Denmark my husband, who was forty-eight years old and had never been ill, died of a heart attack. When we went to pick up our cat the lady told us she knew exactly when a tragedy had happened to us and then gave us the exact day and hour, which she could not have known! Our tomcat had withdrawn into a corner and whined in a way he had never done before, staring at a certain point in front of him as if he observed something special, his whole body shaking.

Cats seem to sense the onset of death, even when there may have been no discernible sign of it beforehand. Again, there are many examples of this kind of premonition in cats, and we will soon consider in detail a couple of such cases, but for now, here is one last brief such account from Sheldrake’s book.

Dorothy Doherty says that the day before her husband collapsed and died, their cat continually rubbed around his legs. "I remember him saying, 'What’s wrong with her today?' As she had never been so persistent before, I have often wondered if she knew what was to happen."

About the certainty of that kind of presentiment, there was no doubt in the case of Oscar the Cat, whose remarkable story was sent to me by colleague. It was originally written by Dr. David Dosa, a geriatrician at Rhode Island Hospital and an assistant professor of medicine at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, and published in a journal in 2007. Here’s the story, which was entitled "A Day in the Life of Oscar the Cat." You will find it charmingly written, almost like a fable, but it nevertheless is based in fact.

Oscar the Cat awakens from his nap, opening a single eye to survey his kingdom. From atop the desk in the doctor’s charting area, the cat peers down the two wings of the nursing home’s advanced dementia unit. All quiet on the western and eastern fronts. Slowly, he rises and extravagantly stretches his 2-year-old frame, first backward and then forward. He sits up and considers his next move.

In the distance, a resident approaches. It is Mrs. P., who has been living on the dementia unit’s third floor for 3 years now. She has long forgotten her family, even though they visit her almost daily. Moderately disheveled after eating her lunch, half of which she now wears on her shirt, Mrs. P. is taking one of her many aimless strolls to nowhere. She glides toward Oscar, pushing her walker and muttering to herself with complete disregard for her surroundings. Perturbed, Oscar watches her carefully and, as she walks by, lets out a gentle hiss, a rattlesnake-like warning that says "leave me alone." She passes him without a glance and continues down the hallway. Oscar is relieved. It is not yet Mrs. P.’s time, and he wants nothing to do with her.

Oscar jumps down off the desk, relieved to be once more alone and in control of his domain. He takes a few moments to drink from his water bowl and grab a quick bite. Satisfied, he enjoys another stretch and sets out on his rounds. Oscar decides to head down the west wing first, along the way sidestepping Mr. S., who is slumped over on a couch in the hallway. With lips slightly pursed, he snores peacefully -- perhaps blissfully unaware of where he is now living. Oscar continues down the hallway until he reaches its end and Room 310. The door is closed, so Oscar sits and waits. He has important business here.

Twenty-five minutes later, the door finally opens, and out walks a nurse’s aide carrying dirty linens. "Hello, Oscar," she says. "Are you going inside?" Oscar lets her pass, then makes his way into the room, where there are two people. Lying in a corner bed and facing the wall, Mrs. T. is asleep in a fetal position. Her body is thin and wasted from the breast cancer that has been eating away at her organs. She is mildly jaundiced and has not spoken in several days. Sitting next to her is her daughter, who glances up from her novel to warmly greet the visitor. "Hello, Oscar. How are you today?"

Oscar takes no notice of the woman and leaps up onto the bed. He surveys Mrs. T. She is clearly in the terminal phase of illness, and her breathing is labored. Oscar’s examination is interrupted by a nurse, who walks in to ask the daughter whether Mrs. T. is uncomfortable and needs more morphine. The daughter shakes her head, and the nurse retreats. Oscar returns to his work. He sniffs the air, gives Mrs. T. one final look, then jumps off the bed and quickly leaves the room. Not today.

Making his way back up the hallway, Oscar arrives at Room 313. The door is open, and he proceeds inside. Mrs. K. is resting peacefully in her bed, her breathing steady but shallow. She is surrounded by photographs of her grandchildren and one from her wedding day. Despite these keepsakes, she is alone. Oscar jumps onto her bed and again sniffs the air. He pauses to consider the situation, and then turns around twice before curling up beside Mrs. K.

One hour passes. Oscar waits. A nurse walks into the room to check on her patient. She pauses to note Oscar’s presence. Concerned, she hurriedly leaves the room and returns to her desk. She grabs Mrs. K.’s chart off the medical-records rack and begins to make phone calls. Within a half hour the family starts to arrive. Chairs are brought into the room, where the relatives begin their vigil. The priest is called to deliver last rites. And still, Oscar has not budged, instead purring and gently nuzzling Mrs. K.

A young grandson asks his mother, "What is the cat doing here?" The mother, fighting back tears, tells him, "He is here to help Grandma get to heaven." Thirty minutes later, Mrs. K. takes her last earthly breath. With this, Oscar sits up, looks around, then departs the room so quietly that the grieving family barely notices.

On his way back to the charting area, Oscar passes a plaque mounted on the wall. On it is engraved a commendation from a local hospice agency: "For his compassionate hospice care, this plaque is awarded to Oscar the Cat." Oscar takes a quick drink of water and returns to his desk to curl up for a long rest. His day’s work is done. There will be no more deaths today, not in Room 310 or in any other room for that matter. After all, no one dies on the third floor unless Oscar pays a visit and stays awhile.

Note: Since he was adopted by staff members as a kitten, Oscar the Cat has had an uncanny ability to predict when residents are about to die. Thus far, he has presided over the deaths of more than 25 residents on the third floor of Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, Rhode Island. His mere presence at the bedside is viewed by physicians and nursing home staff as an almost absolute indicator of impending death, allowing staff members to adequately notify families. Oscar has also provided companionship to those who would otherwise have died alone. For his work, he is highly regarded by the physicians and staff at Steere House and by the families of the residents whom he serves.

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Moved by this story when I first read it, I sent it to my daughter Kathryn who, like her father before her and possibly because of him, has always loved cats and lived with them for most of her life. Kathryn was not surprised to read his story in part because she had one to match it.

This is what she wrote to me after reading about Oscar the Cat. In it, she will describe what she witnessed after she brought her mother, Elizabeth, who was ill with cancer, to live with her and her husband, Bill.

When we first brought Elizabeth back to the house, she was extraordinarily sick -- barely functioning, barely talking. We set her up in the little bedroom and she stayed in bed. Little Princess was a cat that lived down the street. She didn’t have a good home life and for a while before Elizabeth came, she would come up to our house and we would pet her on the back patio, but she would never come in and we would never feed her. Then she would go home and come back when she wanted -- sometimes that next day, sometimes a few days later. The day that we brought Elizabeth home, Princess came up came on the back patio, walked in the back door and went right straight to Elizabeth’s room. The cat had never been in the house. She jumped up on the bed and she walked around Elizabeth and then settled right down next to her. 

Elizabeth had had surgery and her stomach area was very tender. But this cat knew not to walk on her stomach. Princess would walk across her shoulders, would curl up by her head, by her side, and by her feet, even lying on her legs but never on her stomach. Princess stayed with Elizabeth so long that the neighbor who owned the cat started calling around the neighborhood trying to find the cat. The cat finally decided that she should go home. But the next day she was back and she continued to come back every day and stay with Elizabeth all day.

Elizabeth loved cats. Even in her befuddled state she was absolutely thrilled that the cat was with her and she would smile when the cat walked in the room and was just happy to have her there. This went on for a couple of weeks. But Elizabeth was so bad that I had to put her in a nursing home and while Elizabeth was gone the cat would come in and go to her room and look for her.

Sometime during this period when Elizabeth was in the nursing home, the woman who owned the cat was going to move and she was looking for somebody to take all of her animals -- she had three cats and one dog. Bill and this neighbor did not get along at all, but when we heard that she was going to give the cats away, we contacted her through a different neighbor and they told her that we were interested in taking the one cat. She finally called Bill and said that we had to take two cats because they were sisters but we said that we only wanted the one cat. She told us "Well, you can’t have either one then." A couple of weeks later she called us and said we could have the one cat and she would leave the paperwork in the mailbox and we could have the cat when she moved. So she left the paperwork in the mailbox and was supposed to bring the cat by but instead she called us and said "Well, sorry -- the cat jumped into the moving van with us so we just took her." We had already told Elizabeth that we were getting the cat for when she came home and she was, of course, devastated. 

Two weeks later our neighbor (who had facilitated the deal) called us at the apartment and said "Aren’t you taking care of your cat?" "We said, what cat?" He said the cat you got from the neighbor. We said we didn’t get the cat -- she took her with her. He said "Well, the cat is right here in my yard and she looks terrible -- she’s all messy and matted." We said we would be will be right there! 

We went the home and there’s the cat. We took her to the vet, got her cleaned up, shaved and she became our little Princess. Elizabeth was thrilled -- couldn’t wait to get home to see the cat. The cat immediately recognized her, stayed with her constantly and they were a happy couple for the entire time that Elizabeth was there. Elizabeth was definitely this cat’s charge. 

Elizabeth had gotten well enough during part of the time that she was home to use her computer. She had a printer, and after she died, I noticed there was a printout on the printer that was entitled "When cats grieve." The article from the Internet was all about how to take care of a cat after their master died. So goes the story of Princess and Elizabeth. But it didn’t stop there.

Nita [Bill’s mother who also lived in the house], who did not like cats and put up with the fact that we had adopted little Princess really did like little Princess a little bit. When Nita got sick and started to go downhill, Princess would jump up on her lap and sit with her during the day and comfort her just like she had done with Elizabeth. And when Nita was much closer to death, little Princess would climb up on her bed and stay with her just like she’d done with Elizabeth.

So believe me, we know that cats really do understand when people are sick and they do try to take care of them in a lot of cases. Elizabeth was happier and I believed lived longer because Princess cared for her. 

After Elizabeth died [she had to be moved to a hospice before her death], Princess constantly went into her room looking for her. It was probably the better part of a month before she stopped. She did the same thing when Nita died, but not for as long. 

Princess knew she was supposed to find and take care of Elizabeth and she did. It’s not like we brought her into the house. She marched right in the open back door and ran through the house like a kitty with a purpose to find Elizabeth. Elizabeth suffered a lot while she fought her terminal battle and little Princess softened her struggles. She could bring a smile to Elizabeth’s face when no one else could. She was one of Elizabeth’s last thoughts as she left us that article so we could take care of Princess’s own grief. As we found out, cats grieve too. 

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Our pets grieve for us when we die, and God knows that when one of our beloved pets die, we are broken-hearted and mourn for them. I have seen so many women weep with anguish on such occasions, and we men, too, are not immune from deep grief on suffering the loss of pet. Indeed, the death of a pet with whom we have shared such an intimate life for many years can be more devastating than the death of a person, and often is.  

We form such deep bonds with our pets, and they with us, that to experience a final, wrenching separation is often hard to endure. Never to see our pets again? That is a sorrowful thought indeed.

But.

For many people, whether they have heard of near-death experiences or not, the thought that we may after death be reunited with our own loved ones is a powerful source of hope and often a deep-seated belief. And the many accounts of NDEs we now have where such encounters have been reported only bolster those beliefs. I know that, for my part, I cherish the hope that when I die, assuming I can ever get around to it, I will see members of my family again, particularly my father whom I lost, seemingly for good, when I was a child.

But then we love our pets, too. Is it too much to hope that we will never see them again as well? Or is it possible ....

Be sure to check out my next blog to find out the answer to the question whether when a pet dies, does he or she really disappear for good?

Confessions of a Retarded Animal Lover

 By Kenneth Ring, Ph.D.

Nature and I are two. - Woody Allen

I’ve always loved that quip of Woody’s, probably because I identify with it. For much of my life, and even to some extent today, I have felt not only removed from nature but alien to it. Some years ago, I wrote a memoir about my father from whom I was separated at an early age and who died when he was scarcely forty years old. I called it My Father, Once Removed. If I were to write about my life in nature, I could give it a similar title.  

Didn’t Thomas Carlyle, who was not a fan of things mechanical, somewhere assert that "machines are inherently aggressive?" Well, I could say something akin to that sentiment about nature – that it is inherently frightening, at least to me. But I know I’m not the only one who thinks this way about nature. I remember when I was young reading the books of a man named Eric Hoffer – he was a self-educated longshoreman whose books were very popular when I was a kid – where he said much the same thing about nature in trying to counter the typical romantic blather about it. Nature is fine on a sunny day in the park, but if you get caught in a sudden thunderstorm in the woods, it is not your friend; it could kill you. 

I don’t know how I got to feel this way, but unlike many kids, I did not grow up with animals. In neither my mother’s home nor that of my aunt’s where I also spent a lot of time when I was growing up were there any pets. Not having a father, no one took me camping, fishing or hunting either. I even flunked out of cub scouts because I couldn’t figure out how to tie a knot properly. I knew that I was descended from a long line of Lithuanian rabbis; what I was good at was reading books and studying. That was the world where I felt at home. Jews are urban people anyway. We didn’t farm; we made money (although I was never much good at that either, come to think of it).

I also had another problem growing up that helped to make me a misfit in nature. I was born with a congenital nystagmus that left me with very poor vision and a wayward sense of balance. No one even discovered my visual problems until I was six years old. Before that, I guess I was walking around like a child version of Mr. Magoo.  

You can’t become much of a naturalist if you can’t see. I can’t tell you how many times I would be walking with a friend who would suddenly stop to point out a beautiful bird in a tree. I could see the tree. Or I remember a time when I was walking by the Pacific Ocean in Monterey with a good friend when she stopped to look at how the sea lions were cavorting. I could see the water. I could never see well enough to make out anything. In order to learn to appreciate nature, of course I had to read books about it, such as Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I could be in nature, but I could never experience it the way most people could. Where nature was concerned, I was a hopeless retard!  

But that was to change when I was in my mid-thirties. It was then that I had my first LSD experience, which took place mainly when I was ambling around in the woods not far from the University of Connecticut where I was teaching.

That experience was a revelation to me at many levels, and it totally changed my feelings about nature. I remember looking at a certain tree and realizing as if for the first time that it was alive – and holy. For a long time after that experience, I could no longer look at trees in the same way I had been used to. And after that, I spent a lot of time tramping through the nearby woods. I would go there as often as possible, both for pleasure and as a place of refuge. I would drag my kids there, too, who were not keen to go and would complain. But I was at home in nature now, and when I could travel to places, such as Colorado, where there were mountains, I learned to love to hike up them. Of course, I was never much of a hiker, given my physical limitations, but hiking became one of the supreme recreational pleasures of my life. It’s only been in the last few years that I was no longer able to hike. I miss it terribly.  

My views about animals have changed, too, and I will get to that since that is what I really want to focus on in this essay but first I need to say a little about my feelings about the two types of pets we are most familiar with – cats and dogs.

It’s often said, simplistically, that there are two kinds of people in the world: dog people and cat people. Well, I am definitely a cat person. And I always have been. Even though I didn’t grow up with them, once I got married and had kids of my own, cats became a part of my life. I feel about them the way the ancient Egyptians did. They are divine creatures, and truly one of the jewels of evolution’s experiments. There’s an old song from South Pacific, "There is Nothing Like a Dame." For me, there is nothing like a cat. Nietzsche said "Without music life would be a mistake." I would say the same for cats. A catless world would be an abomination. I trust I have made myself clear. 

As for dogs, I would be happy to live in a world without them. They may be "man’s best friend," but they are not mine. Oh, I know there are touching stories about men and their dogs, one by Thomas Mann called in fact "A Man and His Dog," or the famous story by J. R. Ackerley, about his dog Tulip (though it was actually named Queenie), and many others. Fine, to each his own. But, frankly, some dogs look like unmade beds to me, and I really can’t abide their slobbering tongues, their panting, their fearsome teeth, their annoying barks, and their slavish loyalty. When my second wife suddenly arrived one day with a large matted four-legged thing, who proceeded to jump on me, seeking out my gonads, I immediately named him Albatross, and his name, shortened to Alby, stuck. I’m sure he was responsible for our fighting like cats and dogs ourselves (you will know who was who) and in part for our later divorce. I’m sorry if I have offended you, if you are a dog lover, but I hope to redeem myself in my next blog when I will have some wonderful things to say about dogs who don’t live with me.  

In fact, I will soon have some wonderful things to say about animals, period, because in recent years I have become fascinated with books about animal intelligence (or "animal cognition," as it is now usually called) as well as the emotional life of animals. Indeed, I now have a slew of books in my library – well over a dozen – dealing with various facets of the lives of animals and am currently reading a new one on animal languages. For somebody who didn’t grow up with animals, I am now growing old with them, and what I have learned about them has been a source of endless wonderment and enchantment. Of course, I admit I am really not spending my time with actual animals; I am limited merely to doing my usual thing – reading about them. But that’s been enough to thrill me with what I’m learning about them and why I’m keen to share some of that knowledge with you in the remainder of this essay.   

The thing that’s new in animal studies, and what has particularly excited me, has been the focus on the inner lives of animals. Perhaps surprisingly, in recent years animal researchers have learned a great deal about how animals think, what they feel, what kind of emotional lives they have, and most intriguingly, about the structure of the languages they use to communicate with one another and to us. Consider, for example, the titles or sub-titles of the following books, which are representative of these new directions in the exploration of the lives of animals.

Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves by Frans de Waal. (De Waal is world famous for his forty years of research on chimpanzees.) In this illuminating book, de Waal shows us how similar the emotional lives of chimps are to our own. After beginning with the very moving story of the death of the chimp, Mama, de Waal shows us that humans are not the only species with the capacity for love, hate, fear, shame, guilt, joy, disgust and empathy. There is no sharp dividing line between us and them; we all animals after all and we share a continuum with all life.   

Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel by Carl Safina.(Safina, a MacArthur Fellow and a marvelous writer – I even wrote him a fan letter and he responded most graciously – in this book writes about the inner lives of elephants, wolves and killer whales.)  I can’t resist quoting just a short passage from the book jacket, which echoes de Waal’s sentiments: 

Beyond Words brings forth powerful and illuminating insight into the unique personalities of animals through extraordinary stories of animal joy, grief, jealousy, anger, and love. The similarity between human and nonhuman consciousness, self-awareness, and empathy calls us to reevaluate how we interact with animals.

The Soul of An Octopus: A surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness by Sy Montgomery. (Montgomery is another accomplished writer and naturalist. She lives with a flock of chickens and a border collie – and did you know that one border collie learned the names of a thousand toys and understands grammar? Yes!) Of course, when it comes to octopuses (yes, that’s the plural – not octopi!), we encounter a creature vastly different from ourselves. For one thing, their brain is distributed through their arms, but Montgomery, too, wants to explore their emotional lives and how they come to experience and navigate the world. I defy anyone not to be amazed and utterly captivated with the story that Montgomery tells of these extraordinary beings whose evolutionary history is so different from ours. And yet…. 

Modern research into the lives of animals has taken us a long way from Descartes (or Des-car-tees, as my best friend, Stan, in junior high was wont to call him until I gave him some French lessons) who thought that animals, because they could not speak and therefore could not think, were soulless creatures, mere machines (in fact, he called animals bêtes-machines), incapable of experiencing pain. 

Did that man ever look into the eyes of a dog?  

Of course, Descartes was famous for his dictum, cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am. But why doesn’t someone ever pose this question: If Descartes had said instead, "I do not think," would he then conclude that he didn’t exist?

I think Descartes, as great a philosopher as he may have been, is over-rated. He may have been a smart cookie, but at least where animals were concerned, he was an arrogant anthropocentric nincompoop.  

But he got his comeuppance. The fabled Queen Christina of Sweden, who was fascinated by Descartes’ ideas, invited him to come to Sweden so she could learn from him. Against his better judgment, Descartes allowed himself to be lured there in the fall of 1649. As a brutally cold winter set in, he was obliged meet with the queen in her unheated library very early in the morning, and because she was the queen, Descartes had to appear bare-headed. Naturally, he developed influenza, which turned into pneumonia, which turned into death. So ended the life of a great philosopher who knew everything about how to think but would die without knowing that animals could think, too, and would never be stupid enough voluntarily to venture into territory which could be expected to be a mortal threat. 

Well, so much for our Cartesian diversion. Let’s return to more intelligent creatures. Take bats, for instance.

Free-tailed bats use echolocation to navigate and to catch prey. They emit sounds that are too high-pitched for human ears to detect. And they sing, too. In recent years, digital technology has revealed that bats are now believed to be the mammals with the most complex form of vocal communication after humans.

These bats not only sing, but each male bat creates his own distinctive song to court females. And these songs are extremely complex and varied, and are constructed like human sentences. The language of bats, therefore, has its own syntax.  

I learned all this from reading a fascinating book I alluded to earlier on the language of animals by a Dutch researcher and philosopher named Eva Meijer. She also revealed to me the secret lives of the lowly prairie dog.   

Prairie dogs live in underground tunnels with different areas for sleeping, giving birth, and getting rid of bodily wastes. Because they have to be vigilant for predators when they surface, they have developed various complex alarm calls that sound a bit like the twittering of birds. Did you ever wonder why these animals are called prairie dogs? It’s because when they are out in force vocalizing their alarm calls, it sounds like the barking of dogs.

But these calls also contain information about the predator, and it is so highly specific as to be almost unbelievable. According to Meijer, in the case of a human predator, for example, they can communicate that it is a human, what color clothes he is wearing, and if he is carrying something like an umbrella or a gun. Different parts of the call change meaning depending on the order of its elements, so that the language of prairie dogs has a simple grammar. Meijer says that research into the language of prairie dogs shows that they use verbs, nouns and adverbs in meaningful ways.

Take that, Descartes!

I wish I had the space to talk about the wonders of larger animals that are more familiar to us, such as chimps and elephants (I have read a number of books about each of them, which have been fascinating to me), but for now, let me mention another creature that is familiar to us all on a daily basis: the crow.  

Crows are among the most intelligent of birds. A number of studies have shown that they can solve complicated puzzles and devise and use tools. They are extraordinarily clever and tales of their prodigious memories are legion. If you threaten or actually injure a crow, that crow will never forget you and will attack you on sight. I have read a number of accounts of this sort of thing, but one of the most fascinating comes from one of the best books on birds you could ever read, Jennifer Ackerman’s The Genius of Birds.

I just can’t resist quoting this story, which I will lightly edit and slightly abridge here:

A brilliant string of studies over the past five years ... at the University of Washington has revealed the extraordinary abilities of American crows not just to recognize individual humans by their faces but to pass along to other crows information about those whom they deem dangerous. In one experiment, teams of people wandered through several Seattle neighborhoods wearing different sorts of masks. One type of mask in each group represented the "dangerous" mask. The people wearing the dangerous mask captured several wild crows. Other people, wearing "neutral" masks or no mask at all just meandered along harmlessly.

Nine years later, the masked scientists returned to the scene of the crime. The crows in these neighborhoods – including those who weren’t even hatched at the time of the capture -- reacted to the people with the dangerous masks as if they were a threat, dive-bombing, scolding, and mobbing them. 

Moral: Never mistreat a crow or you will pay for it. And also don’t volunteer to carry out any such experiments wearing a threatening mask. You may decide that some scientific experiments are just not worth having to fend off savage crow attacks!

Well, there are so many remarkable stories about animals I would love to regale you with, but this blog can’t go on forever, anymore than I can, so let me conclude with one more topic, which many of you will know has long played a special role in my life: death. In this case, the death of animals.

Can animals actually die?  Of course, they can, you would say. That’s obvious!  But not to some philosophers. Martin Heidegger, who along with Ludwig Wittgenstein, is generally regarded as the most important philosopher of the first half of the twentieth century, famously held that animals, because they presumably have no concept of death, cannot die; they simply disappear.

Honestly, these philosophers! Some of them deserve to be attacked by a swarm of vengeful, screaming crows.

I have already referred to the fact that animals are capable of empathy, so it won’t surprise you to learn many animals mourn those who have died. Chimps, for example, and the mourning rituals of elephants are well known. (I could easily write pages about elephants in this connection; the stories I have collected about them are deeply moving.) What isn’t well known is that giraffes and foxes also mourn their dead. There is even a remarkable story about a gorilla who used sign language to describe the death of his parents by poachers.   

And there are our crows again whose mourning of their dead comrades is especially affecting. I have read several very touching stories, especially in Ackerman’s book, about the way crows gather around the body of a dead crow, and often return to drop twigs or a piece of grass over its body.  

In fact, when I was talking about such rituals to my girlfriend Lauren a few days ago, she volunteered that she already knew all this from her own experience and proceeded to tell me about something she had witnessed herself a few years ago. After listening to her account, I asked her if she would be good enough to write it out for me so that I could use it in this essay. Lauren indeed was "good enough," so here it is in her own words:

There is a set of wires that intersect in front of my house. One goes to my home, and another is attached to a pole across the street that crosses in front of my view, which would otherwise be exposed to a panorama of the Golden Gate Bridge and the bay. One day I heard a terrific uproar at the front of my residence and wondered at the commotion. As the cacophony continued, I investigated only to find crows sitting on the wires abutting one another bawling, rocking back and forth, and in utter distress. There must have been forty of them in lamentation. Why were they crying so piteously?

In a moment of bravery, I walked out my front door, down my steps, and peered into the street at the object of anguish. There to my surprise was a huge crow without a mark on his body, but dead. I looked up at the mourners and said to them, "I am so sorry that your friend has gone." With those words, the crows inexplicably and suddenly became quiet. I picked up the body, which was surprisingly heavy, and said, "I will take care of his body. You may lament him, but I will take guardianship over him." The crows reciprocated with a soothing cooing sound. I was stupefied that my words and actions had such an impact on these beautiful highly intelligent avians. 

I walked with their friend to my backyard noticing that five of them followed me up the driveway and settled in a tree under which I placed his body. They bobbed and swayed and cooed quietly while I went about my preparations. Inside I found a length of fabric with which to wrap his body and returning I picked up a shovel with which to dig his grave. I dug as deep a hole as I could, perhaps a foot and a half deep all the while the mourners remained unchanged, quietly grieving. When I had completed my regrettable task, I covered the grave with an old doormat knowing that one of the night creatures might dig him up. I then placed an antique fireplace grate over the mat to make sure the gravesite would remain untouched.

This is the biggest surprise of all: five of the crows returned each day for five days and remained all day to mourn their friend. Then I noticed that there were only three who came to lament his passing, and they too remained all day for three days. While I can never be sure, I suspect that one still comes each day to pay her respects, and I welcome her.

I need to bring this blog to an end soon, but not quite yet.

Obviously, I could offer you here only a few tidbits, as it were, about the lives of animals based on my reading of books about them. But I hope I have said enough to intrigue some of you to read some of these books yourself. (If you would like a complete list of such books in my own library, please write me.) Of course, books are no substitute for actual physical encounters with animals, but most of us can’t easily arrange to have an elephant in our backyard or to burrow underground looking for prairie dogs. Anyway, in my case and at my advanced age, I am pretty much forced to follow my usual practice – to spend time learning about animals, once removed, in my belated efforts to become an animal lover after all these years malgré moi. It is never too late for an old dog to learn new tricks. 

And speaking of dogs, I haven’t forgotten my promise to say some good things about them in my next blog, which will be about the psychic life of dogs and especially cats, wherein more wondrous stories will be told about the amazing sensitivities of those we call our pets, including what happens to them after they die.