A Little Gold Dog, A Not-So-Little Legacy
There’s a little figurine of a dog I keep on a shelf in my home.
It’s painted gold, mounted on a weighted piece of wood, and has an embedded metal hook. I assume it’s to hold a leash, since it came with one, along with a harness, grooming brush, nail clipper, two stainless steel bowls with little bones engraved on them, and an open bag of treats. Everything in the bag was top of the line –nothing cheap or low quality– and although the items were used, they were still in good condition.
All of it came to me as a gift, humbly wrapped in a plastic grocery store bag.
To this day, I don’t know who the gift is from.
The giver of the gift doesn’t know who I am, either.
I found the bag on the picnic table inside our neighborhood dog park a few years ago. Without knowing all the details, I recognized there was a sad story behind it.
Someone had to say goodbye to their dog.
I wondered if it might have been due to a breakup. Maybe a couple had parted ways; one got the dog and the other had left the items at the park for the custodial pet parent to pick up. Or maybe someone was moving to a place that didn't allow pets, and had to surrender their dog to a shelter. Maybe they’d left the bag of items at the park on the way out of town, for a friend or neighbor to pick up later. I’d seen it happen before in the college town where we live. In the square dance of young adulthood, pets are often casualties of failed relationships and leases coming to an end.
I left the bag at the park that morning, believing someone would be by to claim it.
It was still there later that day when I took my dogs back to the park again.
It was there the next morning.
And the next.
I asked one of the maintenance technicians at our apartment complex if he knew anything about it. He told me he didn’t, and said if the items were unclaimed by the end of the day, he’d throw them in the dumpster.
I walked back to the dog park and retrieved the bag.
I didn’t need the items for my dogs. At home, we already had plenty of leashes, harnesses, treats, and grooming supplies. I took them because it was clear no one else was coming to get them.
That told me there was a sadder story than the ones I’d been telling myself.
Someone’s beloved dog had died.
And rather than hold onto their late dog’s items for sentimental reasons, they had chosen to give them away. How heartwrenching it must have been for that person to pack everything in a bag and leave it in a dog park without knowing what its fate would be. All they could do was offer the gift and trust that someone would accept it.
I felt the weight of their grief as I took inventory of all the items.
The grooming tools that had kept the dog neat and clean.
The treats that had been given to reward and delight, and the bowls that had fed their pup day in and day out.
The leash that had once connected the owner to their small companion for countless daily walks and new adventures outdoors.
These material things were all that were left of a bond so precious, the owner longed for it to live on in some way. I understood the assignment.
I accepted the gift.
A few months later, I spotted a stray boxer wandering around our apartment complex. I approached him with a handful of treats and called the phone number on his tag. His owner answered from her desk at work and explained that she lived in a complex down the street from ours. She told me she’d already received a call from her leasing office, letting her know that someone from the maintenance team had entered her apartment and accidentally let the dog out. I grabbed the leash from the bag I’d found at the dog park and hooked it to the boxer’s collar. Once his owner arrived, I passed it along so she could get him back home safe and sound.
More recently, a neighbor’s cat had gone wandering in the woods, returning home with a coat full of burrs and ticks. We found the wire grooming brush from the bag left at the dog park and gifted it to her owner. And when another couple in our complex had their cat escape while moving out of their apartment to relocate across the country, we set up a trap on our patio. We used the bowls we inherited from the unknown gift giver to leave food and water out nearby. It took three weeks, and some late-night adventures that involved us shooing a family of possums out of the traps, but we finally caught their beloved kitty. Having already moved out of state, they hopped on a plane the next day to come back to get him. He flew back home with them in a carry-on pet crate the day after. His family sent us pictures and videos of his joyful homecoming. It was a beautiful thing to witness.
While many of the items from the bag have gone on to live other lives with different pets and the humans who love them, I’ve kept the little gold figurine.
It reminds me I’m part of a legacy.
For the Covid-Conscious, legacy is a bittersweet topic.
It’s hard to embrace feelings of hope and fulfillment about our legacies in the face of our current reality. We live in a society that decided years ago to ignore a global pandemic, and continues to look away as the numbers of people disabled and killed by Covid climb each day. We’re forced to continue contributing to the economy and carrying out our civic duties without a shred of protection from the institutions and people demanding our presence, time, and talent. We understand death will come for most of us sooner than we’d hoped. When each day is a fight to survive, it’s enough to fill even the most resilient among us with existential dread.
How are we supposed to care about what we’ll leave behind to a world that no longer seems to care about us?
This question has been rolling around in my head for a while. Just yesterday, I read an article about a study that gave me pause.
It made me realize our legacies matter more than you might think.
A recently published linguistic analysis of over 38 million obituaries from across the United States sought to examine how Americans define a meaningful life. It found that tradition and caring for others were values most emphasized in the life stories of those memorialized, but also found that societal values changed during times of crisis. The economic recession of 2008, the September 11 attacks, and the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic were selected as data points for studying such changes.
The researchers made some interesting observations.
Following the recession of 2008, there was a decline in the mention of achievements in obituaries. People wrote less about the careers, property, and finances of others during a time when the economy was fragile, suggesting a societal reevaluation of what it means to live a successful life.
Then after 9/11, mentions of benevolence increased in obituaries over the following year. A crisis that devastated the entire nation reshaped our view of others yet again. We chose to anchor our memories of the loved ones we'd lost to the goodwill and altruism we saw in our communities during that time.
And in what the authors of the study erroneously refer to as the ‘aftermath of Covid-19,’ the most pronounced change was noted.
There was a lasting drop in language related to benevolence.
It has never recovered to ‘pre-pandemic’ levels.
The authors come up with a handjob of an explanation for this. I find it downright insulting.
“During a time when communities were making extraordinary sacrifices –wearing masks, social distancing, staying home– obituaries became less likely to emphasize caring for others, which felt like a paradox. However, we think this reflects how in times of crisis and personal distress, prosocial behavior becomes harder to publicly recognize, even when it is widespread.”
I disagree with the authors’ assessment of pandemic mitigations as ‘extraordinary sacrifices.’ They seem to overestimate how long people had to forego comforts like indoor dining, travel, and social gatherings, all of which resumed in some capacity just months after the pandemic declaration in the spring of 2020. They likewise overestimate how long people were willing to mask and take other precautions, all of which largely ended when mandates did in early 2021. It's clear the vast majority of people were only willing to mask while it was required.
So pardon me for waving the bullshit flag, but I have a hard time believing people lost sight of benevolence due to a perceived overexposure to it. If people truly had seen masking and other mitigations –not as mandates or intrusions on their personal freedoms– but as prosocial behaviors with valuable impacts to greater society, they would not have abandoned them with such haste.
It also doesn’t make sense that the language used in obituaries didn’t normalize back to baseline following the alleged ‘end of the pandemic,' as it did in the aftermath of the other crises studied. As stated in the article about the study, “in the aftermath of COVID-19, the most pronounced change was a sharp and lasting drop in benevolence-related language.” It almost sounds like we’re suffering from a societal benevolence debt and lockdowns are to blame.
While there is much their explanation doesn’t take into account, the most glaring omission is the widespread frontotemporal brain damage people have suffered from repeat infections with a neuroinvasive virus. It's well documented how such damage manifests as emotional instability, memory problems, decreased reasoning abilities, and a lesser capacity for empathy.
“Accepting that Covid-19 commonly causes damage to our brains, often the frontal lobes, but not accepting that it can cause personality changes would almost be an indication that some of us have already lost the ability to think critically,” writes Kevin Kavanaugh, M.D., in Infection Control today (April 2024). “Since the pandemic began, our world has become more dangerous. Brutal wars are breaking out, people are becoming less compromising, and our government has become paralyzed by a lack of consensus. All could be partially explained by a change in behavior caused by SARS-CoV-2 infections.”
We could very well be witnessing the death of benevolence. It’s a harbinger of bigger troubles to come.
As noted in the editorial The Decline of Human Benevolence, “according to evolutionary theory, humans are psychologically programmed to feel compassion towards other humans due to frequently collaborating with one another,” states author Ray Rivera. Benevolence is essential to our survival as a species, yet increasingly, “people find unsettling ways to justify their unkind actions towards others.”
U.K. Consultant Neuropathologist @JamesThrot ties it all together in a recent post on X, stating “the virus isn’t just a pathogen. It’s an architect of cognitive collapse. Its target: empathy, conscience, foresight.” In simpler terms, he explains in another post that “billions are silently losing the part of their brain that makes them human.”
If that isn’t pants-shitting terrifying, I don’t know what is.
Covid has changed humanity on a global scale. It has fundamentally altered how people see each other, and how we remember one another.
Millions of obituaries suggest we have devalued benevolence as a society.
Thousands of studies show we are losing our cognitive capacity for it.
Science tells us this is an existential threat.
We don’t have to blindly succumb to it. We can adapt.
We can resist.
Chances are, if you're reading this essay, you’re already part of the resistance.
And if you’re not, you can join at any time.
Wearing an N95 or better respirator in every place where you share the air with people who might have Covid is the single most important thing you can do. More than 400 studies show masking is highly effective at protecting you, the wearer, from infection. The less infections you sustain, the more your brain is shielded from the kind of damage that dampens your capacity for empathy.
The benefits of masking don’t just end with you. They have a far-reaching impact.
Just like the kind stranger may never know the fate of the items they left behind in the dog park, the full impact of your masking and other mitigations will remain a mystery.
You’ll never know how many chains of transmission were broken by your choice to mask. You’ll never know how many people you spared from illness and disability.
You’ll never recognize how many people were motivated to mask up again after seeing you wearing an N95 in a public place. You’ll never understand how your boldness and willingness to stand out from the crowd created the social safety someone else needed to put on a respirator.
You’ll never fully grasp how your advocacy helped stop mask ban legislation.
And you’ll never know how many lives you’ve saved.
You gave all these gifts without bearing witness to their impacts, without expectation of anything in return, but with all faith they would make a difference. One might call that benevolence.
One might call that a legacy.
We’re all benefactors of the legacies of others who came before us.
Like Ignaz Semmelweis.
Louis Pasteur.
Joseph Lister.
All came to understand that pathogens were a threat to human life. All demonstrated it was possible to adapt for the sake of protecting people from harm. All encountered resistance from their peers and were persecuted for speaking the truth.
They persisted anyway. They triumphed in the end. We’re alive today because of them. Call it a legacy debt, if you will. We owe it to them to pay it forward. We owe it to them to be the keepers of benevolence, to preserve it for future generations long after our bodies fail and fade away.
It’s the thought that passes through my mind each time I look at the little gold figurine in my living room.
It reminds me that once upon a time, a human loved a dog.
I was lucky enough to become part of their story. As were a stray boxer, two wayward kitties, and all the people who love them. And while that stranger who lost their dog will never know the impacts their gifts have made, I believe they passed along those precious items with the faith that they would make a difference for others in some way.
Small acts of benevolence add up to a big legacy.
The late Jane Goodall explains it best in her final message to the world below:
In the place where I am now, I look back over my life. I look back at the world I’ve left behind. What message do I want to leave? I want to make sure that you all understand that each and every one of you has a role to play. You may not know it, you may not find it, but your life matters, and you are here for a reason.
And I just hope that reason will become apparent as you live through your life. I want you to know that, whether or not you find that role that you’re supposed to play, your life does matter, and that every single day you live, you make a difference in the world. And you get to choose the difference that you make.
I want you to understand that we are part of the natural world. And even today, when the planet is dark, there still is hope. Don’t lose hope. If you lose hope, you become apathetic and do nothing. And if you want to save what is still beautiful in this world – if you want to save the planet for the future generations, your grandchildren, their grandchildren – then think about the actions you take each day.
Because, multiplied a million, a billion times, even small actions will make for great change. I want to – I just hope that you understand that this life on Planet Earth isn’t the end. I believe, and now I know, that there is life beyond death. That consciousness survives.
I can’t tell you, from where I am, secrets that are not mine to share. I can’t tell you what you will find when you leave Planet Earth. But I want you to know that your life on Planet Earth will make some difference in the kind of life you find after you die.
Above all, I want you to think about the fact that we are part – when we’re on Planet Earth – we are part of Mother Nature. We depend on Mother Nature for clean air, for water, for food, for clothing, for everything. And as we destroy one ecosystem after another, as we create worse climate change, worse loss of diversity, we have to do everything in our power to make the world a better place for the children alive today, and for those that will follow.
You have it in your power to make a difference. Don’t give up. There is a future for you. Do your best while you’re still on this beautiful Planet Earth that I look down upon from where I am now.
God bless you all.
Keep building your legacy.
Keep benevolence alive.
Keep going.
In good humor and solidarity,
Guiness Pig
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