"At boarding school, he sang Episcopal hymns and recited prayers, closing his eyes and doing his utmost to feel some divine presence. Nope. Nothing. By the time I met him, when he was in his fifties, he couldn't have cared less. He was utterly non-spiritual, the most completely secular person I've known, so even to me it seems vaguely suspect that it's because of him that I now believe there may be an afterlife, a place I guess I would call Heaven."
"Roger Angell had loved smooth fox terriers since the afternoon, five or six decades ago, when he and his second wife Carol, on vacation in France, saw one prancing along a gleaming Mediterranean beach behind a strikingly beautiful woman wearing nothing but a bikini bottom. The image stuck in his mind, but Roger insisted he had eyes only for the dog."
The narrator's husband was utterly secular and unable to feel divine presence despite sincere efforts in youth. He loved smooth fox terriers after seeing one decades earlier on a Mediterranean beach and subsequently acquired several through the years. In 2012 the couple's terrier Andy was lively and affectionate while the husband, aged ninety-two, faced grief after his wife's death and struggled with domestic chores. The narrator notes his practical skills alongside his vulnerabilities and suggests that the dogs contributed to a new sense of belief in an afterlife.
Read at The New Yorker
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