Kelsy and the Telephone of the Wind

I talk to her every day.

Kelsy and the Telephone of the Wind

As mentioned in a previous newsletter article, I have a memory palace in a local park. This system of loci is designed for practical applications, to remember details relevant to missing pet cases.  It also is a way for me to revisit my animal family any time I want.  I try to go for a run through the woods two or three times a week, and run past the locations where I store data I want to memorize.  At each of these physical locations, one the members of my family waits for me.  I say hello to them each time I run through the park, or any time I visit my memory palace in my mind.  Whether I go there physically or mentally, Kelsy is usually right there beside me.

When I say that Kelsy is always with me, I don’t know exactly what I mean by that.  Or I should say, I don’t mean a specific thing.  It is like I have virtual reality without the goggles.  Any time I want, I can just turn and look, and see Kelsy right there beside me, or running along the trail ahead of me.  I talk to her all the time.  It’s a little like Dexter’s dad, the way he would just have conversations with his dad as if he was there.  It could also be viewed as a Shakespearean ghost, although Kelsy doesn’t haunt me in any sinister way.  I know she is a construct of my mind.  I’m not crazy, or at least not any crazier than the average person.

I think some people think that means I am always sad, if I’m always thinking of a dog that I lost.  Certainly, I felt more grief over Kelsy’s death than over the death or loss of anyone else in my life.  Sorry humans.  When I lost Kelsy, I thought I would just be the usual amount of sad, like I was when I lost Tess and Olive before her.  My bond with Kelsy as my working partner was something different, and I lost a part of my self.  As weeks turned into months and the grief didn’t diminish, I gradually shifted to a new way of thinking about her.  If I couldn’t stand the loss of her, then I simply wouldn’t lose her.  I kept her with me.  Since the day Kelsy died, I have thought of her every single day.  At first with sadness, but eventually she just kept me company in my thoughts.  She is my spirit animal or my secular saint.  To have her present with me is a comfort, not a burden.

Besides being a central part of my working life, and every part of my life, Kelsy also features in my fiction.  She is a character in my novel, The Retrievers of Useless Bay, which I published in 2013.  She is also a main character in my upcoming novel, Freeland, which I have been writing for 10 years now, and hope to finish soon.  Kelsy also appears in the planned novels, School of Assassins, The Emerald Blade, and Jukebox of Souls.  In my fictional universe, Kelsy lives 10,000 years as a digital replica of her original self.  She is partially an AI, and partially a digital archive of her life and thoughts and actions.  It is already possible to make a digital archive of yourself, or of any person, and I think it will become common for people to create digital avatars of themselves, in the near future.  Probably, for knowledge workers, most of their work will be done by digital avatars, and the real person will just step in at the end of the consultation to add anything that the avatar didn’t think of.  I have had Kelsy running around in my head for years as a fictional character, and also as herself, as I knew her, my search partner. I have a digital avatar of her in my brain.

Some volunteers recently installed a Telephone of the Wind in Seahurst Park.  It is located midway between Kelsy and her sister, Olive, in the system of my memory palace.  The idea behind the Telephone of the Wind comes from a park in Japan where Itaru Sasaki installed a telephone that people could use to “talk to the wind,” as a way of communicating with lost love ones.  15,000 people were suddenly lost in a tsunami in 2011, and this device was intended as a coping mechanism, a way for people to connect with loved ones that were abruptly ripped from their lives.  I think it’s fine that a Telephone of the Wind has been installed in my local park, right along my running path, right in the middle of my memory palace.  I have never seen anyone use it, so far, but I hope they will, if it might be of help to them.  I don’t think I would ever use it, mostly because I never stopped talking to my Kelsy.  She talks to me all the time.  She is my constant companion.

I seem to be unusual, among people I know, or that I know about.  I don’t hear many people say that their deceased dog is their constant companion, and they always talk to her.  Maybe a lot of people do this, and they just don’t talk about it.  I’m not sure why I tell people that I talk to Kelsy all the time.  I could just do it, and not say anything about it.  Maybe one reason I want people to know about my relationship with Kelsy is that, on a daily basis, I deal with people who have lost cats and dogs that were central members of their families.  I have had many people tell me that they don’t know how they could go on living if they don’t find their lost cat or dog.  I certainly understand how they feel, from my own experience.  My solution, which I’m not necessarily advocating to anyone, is that I won’t live without my Kelsy.  I choose to keep her with me.  Not everyone is going to be comfortable with the mental gymnastics of holding onto a lost loved one so closely.  In many cultures, it’s not that uncommon.

Societies around the world maintain daily practices, rituals, or traditions that help them remember and honor their deceased loved ones. Ancestor worship is deeply embedded in Chinese traditions. Many Chinese families have altars or shrines in their homes where they offer daily prayers, incense, and occasionally food to their ancestors. While the Day of the Dead (Día de los Muertos) is a well-known Mexican holiday, many families maintain altars year-round and incorporate daily rituals to remember and honor their deceased loved ones. The Japanese observe Obon, a Buddhist custom to honor the spirits of one's ancestors. Though it's an annual festival, many households maintain a butsudan (Buddhist altar) at home where daily offerings and prayers are made.  Many African societies have traditions that center on ancestor reverence. These might be daily practices or periodic ceremonies, but the idea is to maintain a connection with the ancestral spirits. Various indigenous groups around the world have daily practices and rituals that honor ancestors and maintain a connection between the living and the spirit world.  Atheists and agnostics may also have a practice or a tradition of talking to the dead, perhaps writing them letters or keeping journals of thoughts about people who have passed.  Some people get tattoos of their dogs, as a reminder and a connection. I don’t know how common these practices are, but they aren’t uncommon.  I think it might be less common for people to have such daily rituals about deceased pets as compared to actual ancestors or blood relatives.

Kelsy was not a pet, of course.  She is family.  She was my working partner.  She was my friend.  She was and is a part of me.  I think Kelsy impacted me more than Porter did, for several reasons.  Porter was my first dog that I got for myself as an adult.  It was a disaster for the first few weeks, but eventually we came to an understanding, and Porter was an excellent dog for 15 years.  Kelsy was different in that we trained together to work as a unit.  It was my job, as her handler to read her body language and her expressions, to know what she was thinking.  We were connected by a leash, but also by a bond of understanding.  Kelsy was not better that Porter, and Porter was not less than Kelsy.  It’s just that I deeply incorporated Kelsy into my awareness.  I had to in order to do our work.

Besides our deep bond, Kelsy gave me so much of my current life. Literally every single thing I do stems from my relationship with Kelsy.  When I first got her as a puppy, I wanted to do some sort of work with her where she used her nose and I was her handler.  When she was three years old, I saw a flier on the kiosk at her favorite off-leash park.  The flier advertised training to teach you and your dog how to track down lost cats and dogs.  I knew right away that I wanted to train with Kelsy to find lost pets.  I just instantly felt like, Of course there should be search and rescue teams for lost pets.  Why didn’t someone do this sooner?

Kelsy and I joined the nonprofit Missing Pet Partnership in 2008, and within a couple of years, Kelsy was the main search dog handling most of the lost pet cases, and I was the president of the board of directors.  After four years volunteering for MPP, I decided to create a company to find lost pets so that I could do it full time, so I wouldn’t have to be working another job that would take up my time.  My job would be to find lost pets.  Because of Kelsy, I created Three Retrievers Lost Pet Rescue.  Because of Kelsy, because she got me into Lost Pet Rescue, I ended up getting Mu and Sky and Fozzie and Tino, my current dogs.  All four of them ended up in my life because of the work I started doing with Kelsy.  After I adopted as many dogs as I could reasonably try to manage, I founded a new nonprofit dedicated to helping stray dogs, Useless Bay Sanctuary.  Since 2013, UBS has helped about 100 stray dogs per year.  In 2014, I started the Facebook group, Lost Dogs of King County.  Today, LDKC helps 10,000 lost dogs every year, getting most of them back to their families.  I am helping lost dogs and cats every single day, often for 80 hours a week.  When I’m not working lost pet cases or helping strays, I write fiction and nonfiction about dogs and cats.  I enjoy photography, and most of my subject matter is my dogs.  Literally every single aspect of my current life was directly influenced by Kelsy, and my relationship with her.  Even if I didn’t consciously think of her on a daily basis, her influence is so woven into my life that I would be thinking of her even if I wasn’t thinking of her.

What else Kelsy gave me is an appreciation or an understanding that my current dogs are the most important things in my life.  I have many great pictures of Kelsy, but not nearly as many as I would like.  Because I wish I had more and better pictures of Kelsy, I have made a concerted effort to have a lot of pictures of my dogs.  I try to capture them in different settings.  Some pictures are quick snaps of spontaneous behavior and play.  Other pictures are designed with backgrounds and lighting to make them look their best.  I write about my dogs, although Kelsy is the one I write about most in my fiction.  In a typical day, I am with my dogs constantly.  It is rare that I am not with my dogs.  Sometimes I have appointments or tasks where a dog couldn’t come along.

I am trying to get in better shape, and improve my running.  Although I love my dogs, they are not great running companions.  Sky would freak out if I tried to take her running.  Fozzie and Mu would have to stop and sniff something every few feet.  Tino would pull hard and throw me off balance, ruining my stride.  I have a six-mile route through the woods that I like to run.  Kelsy is the perfect running companion.  She doesn’t slow me down or trip me up.  As I run with Kelsy, I get ideas for how the novel should go.  I talk into my watch to record voice memos, to capture my writing ideas.  I get more good writing done while I am running through the woods than when I am sitting in front of a keyboard.  Today, I went for a run through the woods with Kelsy.  We ran through the memory palace and visited all of the animal members of my family, past and present.  Because of Kelsy, when my current dogs have passed away, I will keep them with me and talk to them all every day.  I will always run through my memory palace, I hope, and visit my family in the forest, each one at his or her own shrine.  Kelsy rebuilt my entire life, and I am so grateful for everything she gave me.

Although I haven’t yet witnessed anyone using the Telephone of the Wind in our local park, I hope they will use it if they think it will help.  My Telephone of the Wind is in my mind, and I talk to Kelsy every single day.