A Big Little Life – and Spirit Communication

Six years ago, I bought Dean Koontz’s book A Big Little Life: a memoir of a joyful dog named Trixie. It was about a Golden Retriever that he and his wife, Gerda, had for nearly twelve years, a dog that transformed their lives. The book caught my eye not only because it was by Koontz, but because of the retriever on the cover with the reddish gold fur.

We’ve had two Golden Retrievers – Jessie, who was with us for nearly 12 years and whom we had to put down in 2007, and Noah, whom we adopted in 2009, after I bought Koontz’s book. I was never able to read the book because the first few pages left me choked up. But those pages prompted me to visit the site of the Golden Retriever Rescue of Palm Beach County. And in November 2009, we adopted Noah. The other dog in the photo below is Nika, our daughter’s dog.

Noah  spent the first nine months of his life crated. His Miami owners intended to use him as a stud because both of his parents, whom they also owned, had such pure bloodlines. But the family went bankrupt and mom, dad, and Noah were surrendered to the rescue organization.

He’s large for a Golden – now over 100 pounds of muscle, back then about eighty pounds, with these massive paws and a head as big as a cat. His first night with us, he helped himself to a raw chicken breast Rob had left on the counter to cook for dinner and gobbled it down before we even realized what had happened. The next day when we returned from the gym, we found our living room filled with feathers from couch pillows Noah had torn apart. We discovered he was terrified of young kids. We enrolled him in dog training lessons and started taking him to the dog park to get him socialized. The dog park made the difference.

Today, he’s the king of the dog park, one of the largest dogs in the park, and his primary interest is chasing Frisbees and balls unless there’s a squirrel nearby, and then all bets are off. He’s still shy around kids, doesn’t like dogs that get in his face as he enters the park, but never bullies puppies or female dogs. He doesn’t tolerate the male dogs who haven’t been neutered, the ones who strut up to him as if challenging him to prove who and what he is. When there’s a fight somewhere in the park, he keeps his distance, unless the dog involved is Nika, or another dog he likes, and then he runs the offender down. Submit, surrender, his stance says, and the dog does.

I mention all this because in the book on precognition that Rob and I recently sold, there’s a chapter on animals as natural precogs. I happened to pick up Koontz’s book from my desk, and paged through it. I figured Koontz had to have a story about Trixie and precognition. This was the author, after all, who had written one of the best thrillers I’d ever read – Watchers, about a genetically altered Golden Retriever. What I found was a spirit communication story that blew me away.

After Trixie’s death, Koontz encountered writers’ block for the first time in his many decades as a writer. He sat in front of his computer day after day, and couldn’t write a word. Few things are more terrifying to a writer than this inability to scribble a single word. Koontz realized “that few human beings give of themselves as a dog gives of itself. I also suspect that we cherish dogs because their unblemished souls make us wish – consciously or unconsciously- that we were as innocent as they are…”

Trixie died on a Saturday. On the third Saturday after her death, Dean and Gerda walked the acres the dog had walked, as they’d done the previous two Saturdays, during the hour that Trixie had passed on. They visited her favorite spots. “Three weeks to the minute after Trixie died, we were walking the larger lawn, a brilliant golden butterfly swooped down from a pepper tree. This was no butterfly like any we had seen before; nor have we seen it since. Big. Bigger than my hand when I spread my fingers, it was bright gold, not yellow.”

Koontz describes how the butterfly flew around their heads, wings brushing their faces and hair, then flew off. Gerda immediately asked if that was Trixie and Koontz, said, Yeah, it was.

“No landscaper who works here has ever before or since seen such a butterfly, nor have we,” Koontz writes. “It danced about our head at the very minute Trixie had died three weeks earlier. Skeptics will wince, but I will always believe our girl wanted us to now that the intensity of our grief wasn’t appropriate that she was safe and happy.”

Koontz posted this story on his website and received hundreds of responses from others who had lost their beloved dogs and experienced “uncanny events that were quite different from ours but that seemed to be intended to tell them that the spirits of their dogs lived on.”

Now I’m going to read this book from beginning to end.

PS Have been reading it at the gym and am nearly done. As one reviewer said, It’s a love letter from Koontz to his dog. Just beautiful.