Please welcome today’s guest writer, Josiah Kinney. Josiah studied letters at Calvin and graduated in 2016. He is currently an architect working in Virginia.
Pets, despite their small size, carry you: through breakups, ugly jobs, and hopeless days lost on your couch. But also through the good moments: hiding under the table at dinner parties to sneak off with cupcakes or crashing the moment when romance is in the air. Pets are there for us, to make us more human and lovable and fun. Eventually though, there comes a day when you need to carry them—one more time through the door. And it’s heartbreaking, the whole damn deal of it.
A week ago my sister’s dog passed away, Buddy. He was euthanized and fell asleep in the loving hands of his lifelong owner.
Buddy was mellow and quiet, showing his canine strength not in his bark, but his walk. Specifically, his walk away that ended with a happy thud as he plopped down on the floor. Apathy doesn’t capture it, indifference does. Why do I care about your chubby child or yippy half-sized dog? Why bother with raised voices or pandering for pats? Naps, food, naps, walks, eating bugs and grass—that’s the game we play for.
Humans are emotional animals. It’s theorized that emotions gave us an evolutionary edge in the darwinian game of survival. Mammals could form packs and sense each other’s anger, happiness, sadness, fear without ever speaking a word. This type of emotional telepathy could communicate danger or bounty or safety.
I am not a scientist and more of an occasional dog pat-er, but I don’t think it’s that far of a stretch to believe that we share this survival connection with our pets. We are bound together by emotions and perhaps mammalian instincts that create a sense of reciprocal nurturing and support. It’s a pack’s pact.
And yet eons of years later, in modern suburban life we still try to control our pets. Sit here, eat this, don’t play with that, walk now, go away. They don’t quite fit in. But I think that’s also why we love them so much—despite the collars and leashes, fences and kennels, there’s still a bit of wildness in them that we can never control. They break out and suddenly surprise us. Licking when we aren’t looking, begging when we’re too busy to notice our own food, kicking us when sleep is too good. Our companions are unpredictable and fill our well-controlled and scheduled days with surprises and interest.
Maybe death is just one other thing that we try to control. It’s part of what we do—try to keep things at a fixed state, keeping things ordered and how we like them without the hurt, or inconvenience, or any other annoyance involved. Nature is quite the opposite—constantly changing, growing and decaying, nothing ever stays the same.
Death is a change that is terrifying, a hill we can’t see over. But I can’t help but think about what Buddy would do. He would be indifferent to it. Indifferent and thereby accept it. Once you yawn at the fear, what is left to do? Take a nap, eat some food, grow tired and sleep, wake up and walk around, find a bug or two to eat with some fresh greens—then repeat until you can’t.
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