The book tour is only a week old, but I have already seen and heard a breathtaking amount of pain, loss, guilt and sorrow.

I have to say I feel like a tadpole up against a tidal wave. So much pain, much of it hidden, and  I’m not sure anybody much noticed or ever said it was okay for people to feel this way.

I think the book can help and I’m sure it will – and hearing that it does –  but I am still adjusting to looking at rooms full of people with tears in their eyes when I speak and sorrow when they hand me books to sign. I guess I knew this was so when I researched the book, but you do have to see it day after day to really grasp it. I am looking forward to the book tour, but it is different, intense. I’m figuring it out. Seeing this pain will change me, I suspect, and for the better. Tonight, Maria turned to me, tears in her eyes,  and asked me where the idea for “Going  Home” came from.

Many people have asked me about the title, where did it come from and what does it mean? It comes from a letter I wrote, in which I imagined a dog (in my case, Lenore the Hound of Love) writing me a letter as  she approaches death.  A goodbye letter. I do not show emotions to others, but I am beginning to in my writing – I have my editor to thank for this – and I cried quite a bit when I wrote this chapter. The process also crystallized a long-standing and important idea of mine, a spiritual and mystical idea about the place of animals in our lives.

I have had some experience with animals who have died naturally, and some who I have decided to kill for different reasons. Some of those decisions were and are controversial, but all of them opened different windows and shadows and insights for me when it comes to grief. I don’t believe I can ever really own an animal or fully understand them. I never see them as mine, but belonging to a mystic nation I cannot ever enter. I believe their spirits – I see them as magical helpers, guides, whirpools of love, connection and support – come and go.  They mark the passages of our lives. They help us in the ways we need. They become what we need them to be. I have no idea if they or we go to heaven or cross that bridge, but I believe they enter and leave our lives at times  of their own choosing. They come and they go. To have the gift of living with them is to know that, one way or the other. That is the toll, the price.

A shaman came to the farm one day to talk to the spirit of Orson, the dog who began this life for me and she found him sitting across a river in a sea of blue lights. He had, she told me, finished his work here and had decided to go home.  His biting people, she told me, was his way of separating. He would enter the life of another human when he was ready. He had, he told her, gone home.

I loved this idea of animals going home. It is presumptuous for me to think my dogs or donkeys want to go to heaven with me, or that this very human idea is one animals would seek to follow.  She said it didn’t really matter to them how they left the world, they left when they were ready, when they were done, and they made room for others to follow. They have different needs, wishes, senses and instincts. They might wish to go to their own place, as the shaman said Orson had done. I think for me it is a bit selfish to always think their departure is only sad. Perhaps it is sad for me. Perhaps not so much for them. I don’t really know. In many ways, they are just beyond us. We are too simple.

I am grateful for every minute I have spent with the animals in my life and I see my life with them as marked by joy, love and growth. Every dog I have had has changed my life and made me a better human and a more productive and creative person, and if the blog is a visual and textual monument to anything, it is perhaps that.

Beyond that, they have all given me the greatest gift of all, they have taught me, shown me, opened me up to love. I feel sad when they leave, but I can’t grieve for that.