I've noticed something about a lot of the Hitchens tributes today. A great number of them contain a digression along the lines of, "I disagreed strongly with Hitchens in regards to this or that issue, but..." Indeed, it is probably safe to say that Hitchens is unusual in that even among those of us who had the deepest admiration for him and his opinions and his impossibly sharp prose, virtually all of us had more than one point on which we thought he was not just wrong, but badly wrong, shockingly wrong, dangerously wrong. The Iraq war is the obvious example, but it is only the tip of the iceberg. Scan a few of the obituaries and blog posts and you'll see what I mean. Here is a man who inspired even his dearest friends and most dedicated supporters to voice their differences in a damn eulogy!
And in a way, this is the best tribute we could pay to a man who so relished an argument, who convincingly defended (whether right or wrong) the most seemingly untenable positions, with a quickness and wit the potency of which was rivaled only by the contents of his ever-present rocks glass. For fuck's sake, by the time Hitchens unleashed his savage takedown of Mother Theresa, the woman was so venerated in our culture that she had become an idiom for unimpeachable goodness ("He's no Mother Theresa, but..."). It helps that in this case Hitchens' criticisms appear to have been largely right on the money, but my god -- who else could possibly possess both the audacity and erudition to have launched such an iconoclastic attack? One cannot separate his rightness in this case from his wrongness on so many other issues. The entire world telling him he was full of shit? A mere trifle to the Hitch.
We have lost not only one of the most astonishing orators and scintillating essayists of our time, we have also lost a man with a unique ability to be gloriously unflappably wrong in the eyes of everyone he respected (and everyone he didn't respect, too). "Conventional wisdom" will sleep easy tonight, I fear.
From my wife's blog, about wrestling with grief coming up on the first anniversary of Nicole's death:
I hung some of the stockings on the fireplace last week, but not hers. I would like to be the sort of person that hangs her stocking and puts some of her favorite things in it, enjoys her memory, then brings the stocking to her grave on Christmas and lays it there gently, says a prayer. But I am not that sort of person. I will probably throw her stocking into the fireplace. Maybe I'll fill it with coal and hang it on her gravestone. Or more likely the rage will pass and I'll do something sensible, like taking the family to her resting place on the 21st with some of her favorite ice cream (butter pecan sans pecans). And I won't really want to be there, and the visit will have nothing to do with the holidays. I will go out of a begrudging sense of duty that Nicole would have appreciated. We'll be sensibly sad and cry a little, then we'll go home and live our delightful lives. She'll be extracted from my holiday memories for several years and then one day I won't even think twice about using the roses on the tree, and her stocking will be long gone. December 21st will be a day when maybe Jay or I will say, "Hey, isn't it the anniversary of.." and whoever didn't say it first will be embarrassed, then we'll distract ourselves with something more fun to think about, and that will be that.
I don't really write poetry. My song lyrics, of course, but I struggle with those, and in any case, one might say that every song I've written is a lie: usually they are about a character, even if written in the first person, and even when I am talking about myself I will freely change facts or even themes to make a rhyme or to enable a cool line. This post is in the spirit of a poem, but my forte is prose (that is the only way I know how to tell the truth) so that is how I will deliver it.
Nicole had a scar above her right eye. Or maybe above her left; it's strange how fast these details fade from memory. I asked her about it one time. When she was very young -- maybe three? or was it older? -- she had wandered in front of a kid on a swingset, and had gotten clobbered. It was pretty deep. Nicole always wore a lot of makeup, maybe too much, but nonetheless you could always see the scar.
During her life, I thought it was sad. I thought, "What a stupid little incident, and yet this scar will be here forever." But the other week I realized that scar isn't there anymore. Nicole's been cremated. There is no trace of that scar anymore, except for echoes: in photographs, and in the reverberations of Nicole that live on in the neural pathways of her friends and loved ones.
I used to think the saddest thing was that the scar was forever. But I was wrong, the saddest thing is that the scar was never forever.
In the comments to an earlier post, somebody pointed me to an exciting Facebook group called "Grief Beyond Belief". The purpose of the group should be obvious from the name.
Here's a couple posts from a thread there today, with some emphasis of my own added:
Little offensive calling them delusions, don't you think? I too am an Atheist, however....I do believe that we have souls. I don't believe in god, heaven, hell, or anything pertaining to religion. As I believe religion was nothing more but created by man to control people. But It has been proven that spirits do exist. I'm all about if it's been proven or not. It's well documented and caught on camera and such that spirits do exist. People have seen them, heard them, ect.. It's not religous nuts either, because they are usually against that kind of thinking. As they think the soul goes up to heaven and their loved ones are with "god". I very much believe that the spirits/souls of our loved ones are around us and can/do make contact or let their presence be known sometimes. Some aren't so lucky to experience it, or maybe we've over looked it? I don't know really. But I do believe it happens and don't discredit someone if they had a legit experience with it.
NO ONE has a clue about what happens after death, atheist or holier-than-thou. we can all have an opinion, but no one has the right to call another delusional. and jeff, unless you've been dead and brought back in the ambulance (like i was in '89), i'm guessing you have even less of a clue. i have no freakin idea what happens and no idea if there's any 'being' out there. i've had unexplainable occurrences after my husband's death of cancer just 10 wks after diagnosis in 2007. as recently as the eve of the 4th of july when i was sitting on my porch. i wasn't even thinking about him and yet when i looked at the other rocker, there was an outline of him in his jeans and boots. and frankly, i don't care if anyone believes it or not.
God fucking dammit.
I'm not comfortable criticizing someone while they are grieving, but the whole fucking point of this Facebook group is that I don't have to listen to people talking about, "Oh, mwah, nobody can KNOW what happens after death!" and "There's spirits all around us talking to us!" What the fuck. Fuck you.
I wrote a very nice guarded comment on the thread explaining why these statements made me very uncomfortable. Now on my blog I am venting. This is fucking bullshit. If you fucking believe in spirits all around us, you AREN'T a non-believer, you are a New Ager. And THIS GROUP IS NOT FOR YOU. If you are having trouble finding a group for you, let me help you with that. Goddamit...
Mortality's been on my mind more lately, for really obvious reasons: A very close family friend died suddenly in December, a former girlfriend of mine died suddenly a few weeks ago, and there has been a spate of two-degrees-of-separation deaths as well, i.e. not people we knew, but people we knew knew. That'll sure make you think about death a lot!
It still doesn't hugely bother me, and I mostly stand by what I wrote about the topic back in January 2010. The thought of oblivion is a little bit more unnerving now that it's more viscerally "real" to me, but not that much more unnerving. What's actually been troubling me more than the idea of my own eventual annihilation has been proton decay and its implications about the fate of the universe. I'm finding the idea that someday every particle in the universe will have disintegrated, even if it's an absolutely inconceivable 1090-odd years in the future, to be really troubling and bleak.
So then this morning on the drive to work I was thinking about cosmic voids (yes, really) and for a moment I had that same feeling of an incomprehensible magnitude of bleak nothingness -- though not quite as powerfully as when contemplating the eventual breakdown of all the protons in the universe. It hit me that, depending upon how we view the relationship between space and time, as well as how much stock we put in the concept of the present, they could be no different!
Nobody really quite knows what to make of time. I tried reading The End of Time by Julian Barbour, which proposes a radical reimagining of how we perceive time in relation to physical reality, but I only made it about 2/3 of the way through before the heady math and geometry was just too much for me. In any case, where I'm leading is that one way of viewing the universe is as a static 4- (or more-) dimensional object. There's no particular present, just points in spacetime. Of course there are many different ideas on how we ought to interpret time in relation to physical reality, but this is one of them, and based on our limited knowledge at this point in history, it could be valid.
If we look at it that way, then there is little practical difference between the incomprehensible emptiness of cosmic voids in the spatial domain vs. the incomprehensible emptiness of a dead universe in the temporal domain. (Depending on the spatial geometry of the universe, there could be one important difference, in that if the universe is finite but unbounded for example, there's no spatial direction you could go in where you would encounter unending emptiness, but there is a temporal direction where you can... but I'm not sure how important this is to my point here.) So when we stare into the temporal abyss, when we contemplate the eternal death of the universe, it ought to be no more existentially disturbing than when we contemplate the spatial abyss of these incomprehensibly large voids.
Which is to say, it's still pretty freakin' disturbing, but perhaps more manageable. Voids are still one of the bleakest things I've ever heard of.
Apologies in advance for the even-more-rambly-than-usual nature of this post. I am fighting off a bit of a cold -- which you'd think would advise against attempting to tackle existential questions of consciousness, wouldn't you? Ah well. I'm sure I'll catch some of it in proofreading, but it may be a little, eh, disorganized from time to time.
I mentioned I've been experiencing a bit of existential angst recently, mostly surrounding the nature of subjective consciousness. For one thing, I have recently come to view the following quote, commonly attributed to Mark Twain, in a different light: "I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it." True, my non-existence will surely bother me as much after I am dead as it did before I was born (i.e. not at all). But when one really contemplates the fact that one's consciousness did not exist in the past, it seems to me to be just as terrifying an existential abyss as contemplating one's future annihilation! Now not only do I have to look death straight in the face and come to terms with it, but I have to have a staring contest with the birth of consciousness as well. Oy...
But the fact that I know I won't "suffer the slightest inconvenience from it" is indeed a comfort. I guess the bigger question that has really been troubling me can be expressed most succinctly as, "Why aren't we p-zombies?"
Now, before going any further, I need to be clear that I think p-zombies, in the strongest sense (and in the sense that is troubling me), are a silly idea. Perhaps it is my philosophical naturalism talking, but it seems plainly obvious to me that an identical physical replica to ourselves would experience consciousness in any possible universe. To borrow from Douglas Hostadter, that would be like trying to imagine an identical copy of an internal combustion engine, except this copy doesn't actually burn gasoline to create energy, it just simulates doing so. Yeah, that's silly.
But of course the allure of Chalmers's concept is that it sure seems like a sensible question even if it's not. Indeed, compared to the real universe, it is comparatively easy for me to imagine a universe populated by p-zombies, in that they really do think, and they sure do appear to experience subjective feelings, but there's nobody actually really experiencing it, at least not the way I subjectively experience it. To reference Hofstadter again, he referred to consciousness as "a hallucination hallucinating itself," a phrase which I found somewhat obtuse at the time I read it (though I knew what he meant and basically agreed), but now that same phrase has real resonance, and is terrifying at the same time.
This has been bothering me enough that for a moment I was like, "Man, I almost wish I believed in a soul and the afterlife and all that..." But then I realized that doesn't even answer the question. The question of why some living things are sentient and some are clearly not, and the blurriness of that line... that is all left completely unexplained. Unless, I guess, you believe that no animal except us ensouled humans feels a damn thing (which I realize was the predominant Christian worldview until fairly recently), but that just seems so clearly implausible on its face. And that only resolves the blurriness of the line, it still leaves all of the "whys" untouched.
There is a similar infinite regress as one encounters when trying to give a theistic answer the big "Why is there something rather than nothing?" To that question, for any answer, you can always say, "Okay, so why that?" (e.g. why god?) Similarly, "Why do we have a subjective experience of anything?" has a similar infinite regress. Sure, I can describe how human neurology seems to be quite an adequate machine for simulating subjective experience -- but from an intuitive standpoint, that seems as existentially unsatisfying as Lawrence Krauss' answer to the "something rather than nothing" question: "Nothing is unstable." Krauss' answer is pithy and compelling, but it is no less vulnerable to the reply of, "Okay, why that?"
But if a perfectly good mechanistic reason seems existentially unsatisfying, why should a magic reason be any different?
I can ask, "Why do we feel?" and you can point to all of the neurological mechanisms that allow us to feel, and I can always retort, "Okay, sure, that all makes sense, but why do I actually feel it?" (Which I believe to be a nonsensical question, but it doesn't always feel nonsensical on a sleepless night) If to the first question you instead pointed to the soul, I can ask the same damn question! Well, except for the "making sense" part. But still... again, maybe it's my philosophical naturalism talking, but it seems to me that saying that the soul is the substrate of subjective experience is just as existentially dissatisfying (actually, more so) as saying that the brain is the substrate of subject experience. What is there about the substrate that allows it to experience stuff? Does my soul have a soul? Does my soul's soul have a soul? Where does the regress end?
Answer: It ends with our biology, clearly. There's something rather charming and beautiful and amazing about that, but also rather dizzying. I've been angst-y about it lately, but I still feel like the materialistic explanation is ultimately the most satisfying -- and not only from an expository perspective, but from an existential perspective as well. Magical explanations like the soul don't resolve anything; they just dazzle us enough to make us forget the original question.
This is the first time I've used our coffee maker at home in quite some time -- it got moved into the basement when we were renovating our kitchen, and we didn't move it right back up when we were done because my wife couldn't drink much coffee when she was pregnant. I'm working from home today, so I fired it up.
I remember, when Nicole (my friend who died in December) would come to visit us, she would use way too many coffee beans and grind them way too fine, which would cause the water to back up in the filter and spill all over the counter, making a huge mess. It drove my wife absolutely bonkers, but Nicole didn't want to do it any differently because "I do this with my coffee maker and there is no problem!"
Seems petty in retrospect, but of course that's in retrospect. It would be nice if we could interact with our loved ones every day as if it might be the last time we would see them, but in practice it just doesn't work like that. I think we could all use a little more perspective, but too much perspective is crippling.
Just some random thoughts. I've been experiencing a lot of existential angst lately (nothing like the sudden passing of a close friend and the birth of your second child coming within six weeks of each other to make you think about life and death, eh?!) and I've been thinking of doing a post about it, but haven't quite collected my thoughts.
So I'm not even going to touch Palin's invocation of "blood libel" in her anything-but-an-apology video she released today. It may be some kind of fundamentalist codeword that the likes of us don't understand. In any case, it's deeply, shockingly offensive, and I'm not even going to comment on it beyond this paragraph.
What I want to talk about are the people who don't get why Palin should apologize for the "crosshairs" thing. I take this comment from MarkCC's blog as an example:
You’re touchy about the phrase “blood libel”, but you have no problem falsely blaming someone for a mass shooting.
Okay, look, I'm not blaming her for it. In fact, I think the shooter probably couldn't have cared less about Palin. He may not have even seen the crosshair graphic, and it's a near certainty that he wasn't inspired by it.
Many commentators have focused on the political climate inspired by the militaristic and sometimes even explicitly violent rhetoric coming from the Right. While I agree whole-heartedly -- and in fact, I remember so many people making predictions that an assassination attempt of a national US politician could very well take place sometime in the near future due to the overheated and divisive speech coming from that side -- I think that in terms of why Palin should personally apologize, even that's not the most relevant issue.
The reason why Palin should apologize is because if you implicitly wish death on someone, even in jest or in metaphor, and then that person dies or someone tries to kill them -- well, if you have an ounce of humanity in your entire body, then you feel really horribly guilty about that!
Say you were at a party and you got in an argument with one of your friends. A really nasty argument, let's say, that ended in shouting, and as he was storming out, in your rage you shout something vulgar like, "Eat shit and die!" And then let's say he was in a horrible car accident on the way home that left him in critical condition. How would that make you feel? How would you react?
If you were a human being, you would feel awful. You would apologize to everyone at the party. Your soul would be wracked with guilt.
If you were Sarah Palin, you'd make a video painting yourself as a martyr.
This is particularly resonant for me right now, because my wife's and my relationship with our deceased friend had been very rocky towards the end. The reasons make sense now, but that doesn't make it feel any better. The second-to-last e-mail I sent to her before she died was giving her flak about cleaning up her dog's poop when she visits us. That hurts, you know? I mean, I wasn't doing anything wrong, and these things happen... but you always wish the last thing you could say would be something meaningful and heartfelt. I know the world doesn't work that way, and I know -- I think I know better than most -- that in the end it doesn't really matter, that death is death, and that it would sting pretty much just as bad no matter what our final words had been. But I'm human, so I still think about these things.
Now, this situation is pretty different, I guess. Palin was never a friend of Giffords, of course. But then again, I didn't publish a website with a picture of crosshairs over a map of my deceased friend's apartment.
So no, Palin didn't have anything directly to do with this. And as for the extent to which violent political rhetoric created an atmosphere that was encouraging to the Loughners of the world, Palin is hardly the only one who shares blame for that.
None of that matters. Any halfway decent normal human being would feel absolutely awful about the horrible coincidence between the crosshairs incident and the assassination attempt on Giffords. And the fact that Palin apparently doesn't feel bad about it at all -- or at least won't say so in public -- is just fucking sickening.
I've been going through all of the remaining online photo albums that belonged to my deceased friend, as we're putting together a memorial slideshow for this Sunday. Of course, since she took the pictures, she's hardly in any of them!
So the lesson is: If you think you might die a tragic untimely death, make sure to take lots of pictures of yourself. heh...
The weekend before Christmas, a very close friend passed away suddenly under relatively shocking circumstances. She lived out of town, but had been supposed to drive up and stay with us starting last Thursday, as she does for most holidays. She apparently kept a very detailed diary, which continues to provide her family and us with more and more stunning revelations to heap upon the already tragic story.
Sometimes people succumb to the temptation to refer to "the real Nicole," i.e. the side that she showed us, as if the heretofore-unseen facets of her personality were somehow not a part of reality. With the caveat that it might have been better -- given that she was already dead -- if we had never found out about the other facets, now that we know about them, I think this is the wrong approach. It is simply the other side of the coin that labels everything we knew about Nicole as a "mask", some kind of illusion to hide a dark reality. Neither is correct. We all have many facets, and they are all equally real, all an inescapable part of what composes the whole.
I'm not really a condolences kind of person, so I'm turning off comments for this post. Instead, you can keep our family in your thoughts. And maybe sacrifice a goat or two.
On Friday, I post this, and then on Monday, XKCD posts this. Freaky.
Most likely, it's just that we both read Snopes. Still, it's funny that I had a particular reaction to the Snopes article and then XKCD sees fit to rebut that reaction days later.
Snopes covers the myth that it is the rubber tires that makes cars safer in a lightning storm (turns out it's because the metal frame acts as an ad hoc Faraday cage -- who knew!).
They conclude with a list of tips to protect yourself from lightning strikes, which includes such gems as avoiding doorways (yes, doorways) whenever you hear thunder.
The article also mentions that 58 people per year are killed by lightning. I'm pretty sure at least 58 people per year are killed in auto accidents while they are on the way to the pet store to buy dog food, so therefore nobody should own a dog.
Seriously, for causes of death which are that rare, it does not make sense to change your behavior one iota to avoid them.
Very quick post here on the fear of death and the lack of an afterlife, etcetera, inspired by my watching the train wreck of a conversation between Thunderf00t and Ray Comfort, where the bananaman asks Thunderf00t the titular question of this post. Thunderf00t answered with a quick "no". If I had to answer yes or no, my answer would be the same, but I don't feel quite right with a solid "no". Not anymore at least.
I definitely think about what would happen to my family after my death, and that could be said to be a fear of sorts. Of course, I take some small comfort in the fact that it would most certainly not be my problem any more, but it is my problem now and it is something I am concerned about.
More than that though, I am a bit afraid of dying, i.e. the process, depending on how it happens. And in fact, this too has also intensified since starting a family. When I was single, if I found myself diagnosed with a painful terminal illness and it was more than I could psychologically bear, I figured I could just do a slow-motion suicide, e.g. substance abuse to death or whatever. Now, of course, I would feel a responsibility to do my best to survive, even if I found myself in a condition where I didn't really want to live. That's what I'm afraid of -- slowly dying, while fighting for my life to extend my time with my wife and son just a little longer.
Death itself? Like I say, once it's over, it ain't my problem anymore.
For a bonus, see below the fold for my favorite part of the Thunderf00t-Comfort debacle...
Bananaman: You can't make an absolute statement that there is no evidence. You'd have to have all knowledge to make a statement like that. You've got to say, "With the limited knowledge I have at present, I don't believe..."
Thunderf00t: Yes... Okay, but if you're going to go down this route, you've achieved nothing. You're into nihilism. You can know nothing. You don't even know that you are here having this conversation.
Bananaman: Oh, you can know the truth. It's all in scripture.
Facepalm! The whole discussion is like this. Thunderf00t patiently entertains Comfort's most inane questions, which sometimes leads to a fairly deep (if rather well-traveled) existential/epistemological discussion, and Comfort even seems to be going along for the ride in his own way... and then WHAM! Comfort trots out the shallow affirmations of a 5-year-old Sunday schooler.
I've had an interesting story to share for some time about just how easy it is to fall into the post hoc fallacy, but I haven't posted it yet because it's also very sad and it helped to have some distance.
Back in July, my favorite cat and my first real pet as an adult suddenly got sick and died under very mysterious circumstances. It seems most likely she ate some kind of poison, but we never identified what it was -- she was an indoor/outdoor cat, so who knows what she could have gotten into? That morning, she appeared totally healthy. I clearly remember refilling the food dish that morning and seeing her chowing away, i.e. completely normal appetite. And then, that evening, her kidneys completely shut down, and even before we got to the vet I knew from her symptoms she was going to die.
She was eight years old, a little past midway point for a cat. I'm mostly over it now, but the one thing that still gets me is when I think to myself, "She could have had another eight years... all those wonderful times with Stash, multiplied by two." I tend to get kind of angry when I think that, so I try not to...
Anyway! Enough with the sad part of the story. So, it turns out that shortly before that we had decided we should put our cats on flea medication. We ordered it online, and it arrived a few days before her death. But despite my wife's helpful reminders, I kept forgetting to give it to the cats. I finally treated our remaining cat a couple weeks after Stash died.
Imagine if I had remembered to apply the medication when it first arrived..! I would be 100% convinced it was the flea medication: I put a chemical on my cat that she's never been exposed to before, and then 48 hours later she drops dead from apparent poisoning. I would have been devastated. I never would have forgiven myself.
And yet, it would all have been an illusion. Pure post hoc. Stash died for some completely different reason. I shudder when I think of the kind of unnecessary guilt and anguish I would have felt, if the chips had fallen just a tiny bit differently...
Mariah and I went to a funeral this morning for one of her uncles. She has like a bazillion relatives, which has the odd result that I have been to more funerals in the year and a half that we've been married than the other 29 years of my life combined.
In any case, it was a Christian funeral, so of course lots of Bible verses and praying. (At least there was no bad music...) Some of the Bible verses, I can understand why you would quote them at a funeral. For instance, they read something from Song of Solomon about how when you die you don't actually die, but instead you are chastised for a little while and then go to some kind of paradise, mumble mumble. It's a bit infantile, but I can see how it could be comforting.
But when we were coming in, the minister/pastor/whatever was reading this passage:
If we live, we live to the Lord; and if we die, we die to the Lord. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord. --Romans 14:8
Uh, dude... Okay, so yeah, I know that many theists find the idea of "belonging to God" to be comforting, but I don't, and I don't really understand why they do. The way I parse it is, "Doesn't matter whether you live or die, either way you are Jesus' bitch." I just don't get it...
From the only atheist who is almost as sexy as my wife comes a heartfelt and heartbreaking rant about the Argument from Personal Experience. I thought it was worth posting because of it's relevance to a heavily-commented recent post of mine.
I've had a ridiculously easy, tragedy-free life, all things considered. Believe it or not, I have made it to thirty without having to really deal with death at all. My paternal grandparents were dead before I was born. My maternal grandmother passed away when I was just a bit too young for it to have the full effect -- I was old enough to know what death meant, but not old enough that I can now recall much about how it felt... I remember a few snapshots, particularly my mother coming in the door having return from the hospital and croaking out, "She died," and that as soon as she said it I felt my ears burning.. but very little else is concrete. And my maternal grandfather faded so slowly, the grief of his actual death was mild.
I've had a handful of acquaintances who I later found out had died, but nobody I knew really at the time of their death. The exception is Mariah's aunt Vicki, who died last year of terminal cancer... but the first time I met her was the day she was diagnosed, so in a way I was prepared for her death from the start.
So I guess that's why I'm being such a big baby about Stash dying. She's just a cat, sure, but it is the first time I have had to fully deal with the unexpected death of someone/something I loved.
There is also another component, though, that makes this difficult, and that is what I referred to in the title to this post. I am someone who prides myself on "knowing a little bit about a whole lot of stuff." Heh, I guess that's why I was big into working on Wikipedia for a while... and I still just randomly surf around, absorbing a breadth of information.
Moreover, I have a few morbid fascinations with things like air disasters, engineering disasters in general, the mechanisms of disease, etc. To generalize, it's an interest in science-meets-death I guess. I don't know exactly why... maybe I'll explore that in another post.
In any case, the point I am making is that I have all this abstract knowledge of horror, but no concrete knowledge of horror, having had as I mentioned previously a remarkably tragedy-free life so far.
Holding Stash as she died... feeling for the first time what it felt like to hold a warm and still barely living body that nonetheless was like dead weight, like a warm furry sack of organs more than a being... experiencing directly for the first time the slowed pulse rate and cold body temperature of a mammal in shock... seeing her lose control of her bowels and of her swallow reflex, shitting and drooling, suddenly focusing my abstract knowledge of the indignities of death into something real and concrete...
Well, it was just a cat, but I feel as though every terrible thing that I understood in the abstract is now firmly in the realm of the possible. No, strike that, I think even before I was able to perceive the terrible as a possibility, but now, irrationally, all the abstract horror seems not just possible but inevitable -- which, in a sense, it surely is.
To put this another way... what is so jolting about the suddenness of Stash's death is not that it seemed surreal. On the contrary, it felt at the time to be almost hyper-real. It was life in high-def. It was everything you knew was there all along, but now you could actually see it.
I think I am quickly coming to terms with the particular emotions of the loss of Stash. But even as the pain of losing a pet fades, I'm experiencing a profound lack of hope for the future. In any given proposition, the worst possible outcome now seems all too real, almost likely.
I'm sure I'll get over that soon too, but right now it's a little fucked up.
One of the hardest things about Stash dying was how sudden and mysterious it was. I think about that she was eight years old, not that old for a cat, she could have easily lived twice that long. It's hard to keep it in perspective and remember to appreciate the years she had, when I can quite reasonably say that she could have had just as many all over again, if "whatever" poisoned her hadn't come along.
But yes, let's have some perspective. Eight years or sixteen years, it's not even a blink in the history of life on Earth. Uncountable trillions of possible cats were never even born, and yet I was astronomically lucky to be able to spend just a little time with this one astronomically lucky cat. One blink of an eye or two, the important thing is that she lived at all, and that she was with a family who loved her, and that I got to know her.
