Category: Pop

Faithful Unto Death, by Paul Koudounaris (256 pages, Thames & Hudson)

Traveling in rural Ecuador a few years ago, I looked out the car window to see a woman throw the corpse of a dog into a fire in her front yard. It wasn’t an act of cruelty — the dog was clearly dead — but it was still shocking to see an open-air cremation about to take place.

It was likely the best and cheapest option the woman had, faced with a decision that has confronted families ever since we started viewing animals as companions: What do we do with their bodies? In Faithful Unto Death, Paul Koudounaris walks us through the macabre history, making clear that what seems like the obvious answer — bury or cremate them — wasn’t often an option.

In Europe in the 19th century, many people took deceased dogs to rending sites where the bodies were broken down with chemicals, along with dead livestock. Terrible as that sounds, other people opted to throw their deceased animals into rivers. “In Paris, about five thousand dogs a year wound up in the Seine, the tragedy for their owners compounded by the civic cost, with the bodies polluting the river and resulting in 4,000 francs in annual cleanup fees,” Koudounaris writes.

When the rare individual tried to confer dignity on a deceased pet, things could get ugly. In 1855, a woman in Glasgow tried to inter her beloved cat in a cemetery plot she owned; an outraged mob gathered and broke open the cat’s little coffin, and police had to be summoned. It was considered blasphemous to think animals warranted the same burial customs as human beings.

But cremation wasn’t the answer either, as even for humans cremation was not yet widely accepted. So when an English family lost their beloved Maltese in 1881, they pleaded with the gatekeeper at a local park where they used to walk the dog and convinced him to let them bury him in his backyard garden. Word spread, and others began to make the same request. “Slowly his little plot was transformed into something that not only London, but also the entire Western world, had been unaware that it desperately needed.” Eventually there were more than 300 graves, animal corpses stacked on top of each other, in the gatekeeper’s garden, and he kept up the burying until he himself died in 1899.

Around the same time, pet cemeteries began cropping up in other places in Europe. In the United States, the problem of what to do with animal bodies was not so pressing, since there was plenty of undeveloped land, and you could bury anything you wanted on the frontier. Still, by the 1920s the U.S. had more than 600 pet cemeteries, and the U.S. today has more than the rest of the world combined, Koudounaris says — including one that is, bizarrely, only for coon hounds.

Some people are so enamored of their pets that they want to treat them like humans, even after death. Koudounaris tells the story of a mortician who was hired to embalm a dog that had been hit by a carriage (apparently streets were just as dangerous for dogs before cars) and bury him in a mahogany casket with a glass top. And at a mausoleum in New York, a metal box once came open, revealing not human remains but those of a parrot.

Earlier this year the New York Times published a fascinating piece about how a woman came to be buried at one of America’s most famous pet cemeteries, which is in Hartsdale, New York. Hartsdale is among the pet cemeteries that Koudounaris looks at, along with Pine Ridge, in Dedham, Massachusetts, where the fox terrier of South Pole explorer Richard Byrd is buried. The dog’s name was Igloo, appropriately enough, and his gravestone, larger than that of most humans, is shaped like an iceberg. Pine Ridge is also the resting place of three Boston terriers owned by Lizzie Borden.

Some of the most interesting stories in Faithful Unto Death, however, aren’t told in words but through photographs of monuments and epitaphs: “In remembrance of Smut, for 12 years, our much beloved cat”; “Alas! Poor Tiplet”; “Scott, who really smiled when pleased, faithful friend, guard of Anne”; “Witt – Best friend I ever had, died June 1895”; “In memory of a loving pet, Judy, killed by a tractor”; “Bingo, 1934-1950 – Let a little dog into your heart and he will tear it to pieces.”

In fact, anyone who still harbors grief for a long-gone pet may be brought to tears in solidarity with the animals memorialized here. That said, there are also some pictures I would rather not have seen, such as the mummified corpse of a dog that was found stuck inside a tree by loggers. “Stuckie” is now a tourist attraction in Georgia.

Toward the end of the book Koudounaris takes a look at what happens to pets of celebrities and animals that are celebrities in their own right. You’d think the dog that was Toto in The Wizard of Oz would have had one of those glass-topped mahogany caskets, but in fact the cairn terrier was buried at the home of her trainer, which later was razed when the Hollywood Freeway was built. “Cars now speed by above the gravesite, which is trapped under tons of concrete,” Koudounaris writes.

Grumpy Cat, the internet sensation who died in 2019, fared better and has a memorial (with a photo) at Sunland Memorial Park in Sun City, Arizona. (Even in death, Grumpy Cat has 1.4 million followers on X.)

Credit is due to Koudounaris for taking this macabre subject matter and making it engrossing; the only thing perplexing about the book is its presentation: It’s a heavy doorstop of a book, dictionary-like in heft, and maybe not the thing most people would want to display on a coffee table. That said, for people with good arm strength who don’t mind encountering a photo of a dead animal every now and then in a book, it’s a surprisingly compelling read. Kleenex recommended. B —Jennifer Graham

How to Winter, by Kari Leibowitz (Penguin Life, 272 pages)

When Kari Leibowitz was looking for a research opportunity that would help get her into a top-notch doctoral program, she reached out to Joar Vitterso, a psychology professor at the University of Tromsø in northern Norway. He agreed to become her research partner in studying why Norwegians, despite long periods of darkness and cold, seem relatively immune to the winter blues that so many Americans report.

So despite being something of a winter-phobe herself, having grown up at the Jersey shore, Leibowitz signed up to experience Tromsø’s “Polar Night” —the two months in which the region doesn’t get direct sunlight — and other things she thought would bring her misery. Instead she wound up studying, and ultimately adopting, a winter-loving mindset, which she says is the key to thriving in winter.

In How to Winter, Leibowitz expands on the article she wrote that appeared in The Atlantic in 2015 (“The Norwegian Town Where the Sun Doesn’t Rise”). Although she soon departed Norway for Stanford University — where winter lows are in the 40s and it hasn’t snowed since 1976 — that article established her as an expert source on coping with winter, and she’s made it a focus of her work since. How to Winter combines her experiences in northern climes with research from Stanford’s Mind and Body Lab on what amounts to positive thinking — reframing how we perceive experiences. Not surprisingly, it’s Leibowitz’s on-the-ground experiences that are the most interesting part of this book.

In Tromsø, which is in full darkness for most of the day between late November and late January (save for a bluish twilight that lasts a couple of hours), Leibowitz found that residents report relatively low rates of seasonal depression. Part of this is because the region is well-equipped for winter. “The city has infrastructure to keep the roads clear of snow and restaurants warm even when it’s blustery outside. Every restaurant and coffee shop has soft lighting and open-flame candles … and cafes often have heat lamps and blankets at outdoor tables so that people can enjoy coffee outside year-round.” At the city’s international film festival, held in January, people watch films outside, and it’s not uncommon for parents to let their appropriately dressed babies nap outside. The first principle of a winter mindset, it seems, is not to be afraid of the dark and cold.

Compare that mindset to the collective moaning and gnashing of teeth that occurs when it gets dark an hour earlier in New England. It’s not that the time change doesn’t have a real effect on our life, Leibowitz writes, but that Americans tend to follow a script about winter misery that begins about that time, rather than actively planning ways to enjoy the season. With regard to the November time change, for example, Leibowitz recommends reducing meetings and commitments the week of the change — seeing it as a time to catch up on rest, make our homes more inviting and cozy and begin pleasurable winter rituals, such as fires or saunas, or what she calls “slow hobbies” like baking, knitting or woodworking.

Animals, she writes, are more in tune with the changing of the seasons that humans are, and this is one reason many of us resist the advent of winter; we haven’t been having to prepare for it, and we expect our well-lit, furnace-warmed lives to go on as usual, rather than make changes. “We pretend we are not animals like any other, as if aligning with nature is a personal or moral failure. But this is a fallacy, and when we look at it plainly, we can see how nonsensical this view is.”

Then we’re told by the media that we’re suffering Seasonal Affective Disorder even though we probably aren’t — true diagnoses range from 0.5 to 3% of the population, and you only have SAD if you first meet the criteria for clinical depression — SAD is a subset of that. So you probably don’t have SAD — you just need a mindset that sees winter as wonderful, Leibowitz writes.

Leibowitz argues that a positive winter mindset is not the same thing as positive thinking, which too often tries to get us to deny the negative. We can’t think our way into its being 80 degrees and sunny when it’s snowing in January, but we can employ “selective attention” to overcome misery. Much of what bothers us about winter is anticipatory — we expect to be cold and miserable if we go outside, when actually when we force ourselves to get outside, it’s often pleasurable and at minimum makes our enjoyment of the indoors even greater when we return. “When we stop pushing against it and observe what it really feels like, asking ourselves, ‘How intolerable is this, really? Am I in danger or am I just a bit uncomfortable?’ the quality of the cold shifts and we find that maybe it’s not as bad as we thought.”

That’s one reason part of her advice to adopting a winter mindset is get outside (“You’re not made of sugar” is the title of one chapter), and she offers research that shows, counterintuitively, that when people do things like cold plunges and winter swimming, they wind up feeling warmer and happier after the shock of the experience.

Leibowitz acknowledges that it’s easier for some people to love winter than others. In Oulu, Finland, for example, known as “the winter biking capital of the world,” bike paths are cleared of snow before roads are. A number of Scandinavian cities have heated sidewalks so people don’t have to worry about falling on snow or ice. Leibowitz travels to places where it’s the norm to have heated floors in bathrooms, individual coat racks next to booths at restaurants and there are even heated toilet seats in public restrooms.

Moreover, she acknowledges, it might be difficult to adopt a “winter is wonderful” mindset if you don’t know how you’re going to pay your heating bill. Not many of us have access to the saunas of which she sings praises. And some of her advice at the end of each chapter is a bit cringy (“Take an awe walk” and “take a family nap”). The book could have been made tighter, and more effective, by icing out its Oprah magazine vibe.

Still, there’s value in much of Leibowitz’s advice, and her travels are interesting. I like many of her suggestions, such as to change the “holiday spirit” into the “winter spirit,” put as much thought into planning January and February as we do December, and instead of trying to force bright light into our winters in defiance of nature, embrace softer lighting and candles (a practice Leibowitz calls “Big Light Off.”) In fact she’s such an effective persuader that even a winter visit to Tromsø is sounding good right now. B