On Monday, my parents told me that our dog was sick, that it had in fact been weeks of going back and forth to the vet, to the oncologist, to the surgeon, that she had had her spleen removed and a tumor as well but it had already spread, that they were giving her a medley of pills each day, but at most, we had a couple of months, and then the next day they called and said this was it, she’d stopped eating and her blood count made it clear she was bleeding internally, and that night a vet came and put her down.
It wouldn’t surprise you to learn that we loved her in that pure, unwavering way that’s really only possible between people and their pets. Cherished her from the moment my sister picked her out until the very minute her heart went cold. Nine, almost ten years — something cruel about the fact she didn’t make it a decade.
The things I’ll miss: everything, but the small, strange things most of all: the way she’d sneeze after getting out of the car, the way she’d rub against the couch after a shower, the way she’d stretch with her shoulder tucked onto the floor and her butt up high in the air, the way she whined in her sleep, the way she hated the rain.
And the things that have made me cry: hearing that she barked without getting off the couch when the vet came in the front door. Her last harmless yap. Knowing I’ll never get to feel her ear again. Listening to my parents each say they are broken. Hearing them say, it’s hard being home.
At this point, the shock has passed. The speed and surprise of it all (it was a fast, aggressive cancer quite rare on its own and even rarer in labradors), while dreadful, almost shielded us from the greater pain of having to accept our new reality, but by Thursday, it had firmly set in. Now it’s not the shock, but the finality of the passing. Knowing I’ll never see her again.
Loss is the essence of life; there is nothing this world has ever brought into being that it has not eventually taken back into the dark.
We look at old photos. We find warmth in old memories. But whatever consolation they provide is tinged with grief, is shadowed by the knowledge that what is left is ephemera, artifacts that are testament to what was and is not.
Proust was right: The past, the present and the future are all present in the people — and the pets, and the places — that we love. We lose more than mere companionship. We lose the hope we’d invested in future moments and plans, and the past unto which they were a door to, a past that gets harder and harder to feel.
There was a time when I thought that Nietzsche was right, that what mattered was action and strength, the conversion of pain into character and conviction. I can remember his confidence seemed to bleed from the page. There was something fundamentally charismatic about his energy, his thrust. His continual suggestion that we, if we’re brave, can seize meaning and beauty from the furnace of the world, without needing the redemption of some final system or truth.
I was a grad student, reading the majority of his corpus, finding, as one does, no good reason to doubt what he said. (When you’re in the throes of a new intellectual obsession, it’s almost impossible to see what eventually come to be its obvious, embarassing flaws.) The short of it is that I’d read articles debating different ideas within Nietzsche but none that had dismissed his entire corpus outright. Until I found one, written by a basically-unknown Catholic priest who’d spent a chunk of his life abroad but then became an academic. Not someone who’d have a Wikipedia page, and I doubt I could find him again if I tried.
I don’t remember the details, but only his chief idea: that where Nietzsche had failed was in miscalculating — literally, underweighing — the suffering of the world. The sheer amount, and the type.
For Nietzsche, it was easy to fetishize hardship as a means toward greater strength. But in this priest’s mind, the greatest (and most universal) pains were those which were compounded by the fact that they taught nothing, that they provided no opportunity for growth or reflection. That they were pure, uninspired and uninspiring suffering.
In this priest’s view, Nietzsche had focused on pains which could prompt action in this life, while this priest had spent his life helping those whose traumas had no functional outlet. Whose pain could only be redeemed by faith in another world.
This seems to me the great metaphysical question undergirding the experience of losing a pet, though it really could be anything you lose which you know is irreplaceable. For its these losses which remind us that loss is fundamental. That loss is the engine and essence of life.
And the question is always what to do about that.
