On May 15, 1886, Emily Dickinson died after a two-year illness probably caused by hypertension. She died in her own bed with her brother Austin sitting beside her. Emily’s last letter, written to her cousins, contained only the words “Called back,” which were later carved on her tombstone. As she had asked of Lavinia, Emily’s funeral service was small, with only the family and Thomas Higginson in attendance. He read Emily Brontë’s “No Coward Soul,” first explaining that Emily had often read it aloud to Lavinia during those last weeks:
No coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere:
I see Heaven’s glories shine,
And Faith shines equal, arming me from Fear.

Emily had always been curious about the passage between life and death. In an early poem, she had envisioned a dog as the fitting companion for that solitary journey:
This Consciousness that is aware
Of Neighbors and the Sun
Will be the one aware of Death
And that itself alone

Is traversing the interval
Experience between
And most profound experiment
Appointed unto Men -

How adequate unto itself
Its properties shall be
Itself unto itself and None
Shall make discovery.

Adventure most unto itself
The Soul condemned to be -
Attended by a single Hound
Its own identity.

If her gentle Newfoundland Carlo were not there to accompany her as she “traversed the interval,” Emily believed he would be waiting on the other side to meet her. Many years earlier, she had said to a young friend: “Gracie, do you know that I believe that the first to come and greet me when I go to heaven will be this dear, faithful, old friend Carlo?”

From Shaggy Muses, The Dogs Who Inspired Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edith Wharton and Emily Bronte (New York: Ballantine Press 2007). An earliar version was published in Anthrozoos 12 (3) 1999 pp. 132-137