Category: animals

Old Dogs and Dying

Old Dogs and Dying

In Spanish and other languages the parts of the body aren’t possessive. It’s la mano, la cabeza – not my hand, my head. In the meditation practices I follow, we are asked to do the same with thoughts: noting “thinking;” not “I’m thinking”. Most helpful for me: labeling sensations in a disinterested manner. Not, my foot’s numb, my knee hurts, but pain is being experienced. That’s a bit long for me, so I tend to go with pain is happening, boredom is happening or numbness exists, tension exists. It’s a deliberate method not to defer the feeling, but to universalize it. When we attach to our pain, it isolates us – whether it sets us apart as uniquely victimized or uniquely ignored, it sets us apart. When we use our pain to, if subtly, acknowledge the experience of pain everywhere, at the very moment that it’s manifesting in us, it has the opposite effect of opening us up to the world and our place in and with it, and simultaneously, if subtly, transforming our interpretation of the sensation or emotion from something negative into something that simply is.

In one of the books on dying that I’ve consumed (maybe Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal), a man who had lost his oldest son to a genetic condition in his late teens was asked how he got through that tragedy, how he could stand losing a child, he simply said, “He was a wonderful person, and it was an honor to have known him.”

This response, or my memory of it, has stuck with me for years. It comes up almost every time I think about the death of someone I care about – past or eventual. There’s so much in this simple answer. I think it struck me first because it didn’t seem like a response to the question asked. (Something I tend to notice because of my ridiculously literal approach to conversation.) No judgment! I mean, look what this guy had to suffer through. But in fact, it is an answer to the question, and there’s no suffering in it. He “gets through” it because it’s a privilege, it’s a gift. While I have no doubt that this man himself felt as much pain as any of us would in losing a child, it’s not about him. It’s about them as a mutualistic partnership, of shared love.

Our dog, Vicious, is old. Not crazy old, but she’s outlived the average lifespan of her major breeds, she’s quite deaf, and she has issues with her back legs (alleviated by some great drugs – science!) B & I both struggle with our fears of losing her. I see it in him and myself, whether we put it into words of not – the way we stare at her when she’s sleeping, the excessive concern when she simply trips or gets up a bit more slowly than usual, the occasional moment of panic after being particularly delighted with some weirdness of hers. When I joke that “it will kill us when she dies” I’m not joking. A part of us – individually and collectively – will die, and something else will likely replace it – the shared sadness, the shared loss, the shared history. I’ve had to talk myself down many times over the past year or so … finding myself obsessing about losing her, working myself up into a frenzy, and then confronting myself with the simplest, most obvious truth, one I’ve been studying for nearly two decades: be here now, bitches. And instead of lying in bed thinking about her being gone, I go downstairs and cuddle her on the couch – whether she likes it or not (she’s neutral). Sometimes it’s hard for us humans to truly understand why living in the future is such a waste of time; it’s so much a way of life that it doesn’t seem harmful at all. But when confronted with a future loss it becomes so fucking clear. I can experience the pain of losing her once she’s dead, or I can torture myself by experiencing the pain even longer! Right now, when I could be appreciating her! Awesome!

Of course we can’t stop ourselves from thinking about the death of loved ones, especially if they’re old or ill, but if we can redirect whenever we catch ourselves – just like coming back to the breath in meditation – life is so much better. We can’t prepare ourselves, emotionally, for tragedy. We can make practical plans, whether logistic, financial, what have you, but the pain you feel when they’re gone will not be lessened one iota by the anxiety you invested in the loss beforehand.

So that’s helped. But then there’s this additional element introduced by that incredibly equanimous parent. The thing that strikes me most about his response is his detachment – not from the experience, but from ownership. It wasn’t that is was his son, his loss: his son was a person in his own right – a wonderful person – who he was honored to know. As I’ve been mulling this over in relation to V, it’s amazing how much spaciousness it gives me. When I think of her as my dog, she begins and ends with me, with our introduction to her existence. But when I think of her as the highly specific, weird freak that she is – one born before I knew her and perhaps inhabiting some kind of consciousness before then; one who has moved countless people and been idolized by the occasional dog, one who will continue to live on in all of us, in our memories and the feelings and experiences she inspired – (in exactly the same way she lives on now when I’m not in her presence), one who makes choices and has preferences unrelated to me or what I want of her – then losing her is painful, devastating, but not catastrophic. She will have left us, but she hasn’t left. Everything dies, but nothing ever leaves. We are all literally made up of the same particles that existed at the beginning of matter as we know it. Vicious is just a sedate, introverted, tolerant, yardwork-loving, floppy eared version of a particular collection of elements and, if you believe as I do, a particular manifestation of consciousness. This understanding won’t make me any less sad when she dies, but when I think about her inevitable departure from that perspective, I feel less suffering, less individual attachment to her and more, like that enlightened father, a feeling of unbelievable luck. I got to care for this exceptional creature. I got to spoon her in the morning; I got to stare into her beautiful brown eyes and wonder what she thinks when she looks into mine; I got to watch her prance like a horse and chase turkeys and lie in the sun with her eyes closed and her head in the air. Particularly knowing when I took her in that she would, barring some anomaly, die before me, how can I regret her loss? If I see her as a visitor, as a gift, it’s all good. Everything is impermanent. Everyone leaves us, or we leave them. It’s all just a matter of how much presence and gratitude I can bring to her right here, right now (when she’ll let me).

If we can do this with our loved ones, it may be a better way of honoring their existence, their journey on this planet, and help us let go a little more easily when they leave.

(I write this now, of course, because I won’t be able to write it when she’s actually gone, but I may be able to read it).

Life Lessons From a Mouse

Life Lessons From a Mouse

Mice, really.

It’s been a good year for mice in the Twin Cities. Are the raptors in bad shape? Are mice fucking more than usual? It hasn’t been a particularly frigid winter (79th most cold, which hardly seems worth mentioning), so it doesn’t seem like their survival is under unusual threat, but many people we know in the area have had exceptional mouse problems this winter.

Ours has been a blessing.

You’d think we’d be a rodent nirvana, here. We are both messy and Buddhish. We are a philosophically and temperamentally no-kill family. Yes, we still eat fish (for the time being) and I honestly have no problem killing mosquitoes, or the wasps that have come after me that last 3 summers (because wasps are all-around fuckers and mosquitoes are humans’ most powerful enemy) but other than that, we remove insects from the home rather than kill them and try to protect the baby bunnies that their shitty mothers dump in our dog’s yard. Even the dog is exceptionally gentle. She observes and lightly bats at beetles, and tries not to drool when the bunnitos emerge. Mostly she squishes them. I think she likes the sound. 😦

We have occasionally had A mouse over the last decade. They say you never have A mouse, but since we never saw more than one at a time, we could convince ourselves otherwise. But this year, we had to face up to it. Unless they were teleporting, we had mice. The good thing about being messy is that it was easy to know where to first address the issue: we cleaned. That is, we started cleaning. We (my partner mostly, far messier than I and afflicted with ADD) are still cleaning. Because of some dabbling with diffusers and lotion-making years ago, I already had plenty of clove & peppermint oil, which I scattered all over the house (peppermint in the living areas; clove in the sleeping areas). We cleaned areas we’d never cleaned before, we shoved steel wool in anything that looked like a hole, we started picking up the dog bowl when she wasn’t eating, sealing her food in a plastic bin, not leaving plates on the floor for her to lick for longer than a few minutes, sweeping regularly.

I knew this wouldn’t fix it – most of our friends with mouse problems were clean people – but it was a start, and it was a life improvement, regardless. We were also very lucky. The mice never got on a counter, never got to even the second from the bottom shelf of the pantry, never got into the dog food or any food container. (I started keeping all my bottom-shelf food in glass or ceramic jars ever since the first mouse appearance way back when.) so when people laughed at us when we said we weren’t going to put down poison (Big No) or even traps (death isn’t the worst, but having your face or leg scraped off is), we would explain that they weren’t more than an inconvenience. Then came the emailed articles on hantavirus and other hazards. We kept cleaning and hoped the critters would find the living situation unpleasant and leave … from wherever they came … which we still haven’t figured out.

They had made it upstairs (shiver) to the bedrooms (shiver), so I thoroughly cleaned out my tiny shoe closet for the first time since we moved in, jettisoning some heels I will never again wear in the process. For a month, I refreshed the water and dropped clove oil into my diffuser every night; folded my clothes and put them on a shelf, tossed them in the laundry, or draped them over the hamper for reuse. I did not leave an AlterEco truffle or peanut-butter filled pretzel on my bedside table in case I woke up in the middle of the night and needed a snack. I (sloppily) folded up my meditation cape and blanket after I sat every morning and placed them on the designated ottoman instead of leaving them on the rug.

The mouse has done wonders for us, honestly. It told us to get our shit together and we’ve done our best to comply. We are still not clean by many standards, and we will probably never be neat, but we are so much cleaner. I have been disciplined about my bedtime habits for the longest stretch of time ever. That’s right, I have never consistently put my clothing, etc. away in my life. Better still (and YES, I AM AFRAID TO SAY THIS BECAUSE DESPITE EVERYTHING I AM STILL STUPIDHUMAN SUPERSTITIOUS), with all of these changes, and perhaps with the help of the meditations I have devoted to asking them to leave, there have been only two mouse appearances in the past month, and none upstairs, even though we’ve had some very cold days. It seems almost unbelievable. I find it hard not to believe it is a combination of right effort and right thought and right intention and … I know it sounds ridiculous, y’all, but I have learned over the past few years that there are more things in heaven and earth […] than are dreamt of in your philosophy and that it is possible that the winning combo of changing our habits and asking the mice to leave so that we didn’t have to kill them to protect the health of our dog & ourselves may have sent something out into the universe that encouraged them to find another home. The mice told us to get our shit together and we’ve done our best to comply.

Whatever it is, I hope it all continues. Not only the absence of the little guys, but my discipline, our increased cleanliness, the commitment to close up potential house holes in the spring, our squishy no-kill policy, and my spiritual concern and attention to the little guys. All of that is good, and more than that I am so happy that the path of compassion appears to have won out over the path of fear or aggression or convenience. I don’t begrudge those folks the killing of their invaders – we all have our stuff, and mice can be scary – but for us, it looks like it’s working. And I’m honestly a little astounded that I have kept up the new habits for so long. Really, I’m pleasantly surprised that I have adopted any new habit, at my age. Folks used to think that the we were far less flexible as we age, but studies of meditators, in particular, have shown remarkable plasticity. I’m not an example of a great meditator and this isn’t an example of an exceptional change, but I have to say I’m really enjoying it.