Ok fine. I'll admit it right out of the gates. I am, by definition, a mama's boy, but maybe just not for the typical reasons. Four and half years of university living has created a somewhat infallible self-image; independence has become the name of my particular brand. So it's rather interesting to return home and meet the person who made you, taught you basic lessons, watched you grow up and accepted your inevitable departure. I make no denial of my selfish agenda: she holds invaluable insight on the most fascinating topic: me. It's give and take - I talk to her about my life and she happily studies me like a petri dish specimen, but in return, I learn something about myself either through a form of self-confession, or through her sagely advice; I embrace the former, I cringe at the latter.
We're discussing the oddities of our particular relationship over coffee when I said something rather bold for a mama's boy. I told her my personal goal in life was to be free from all attachment, whether they be attachments to people, objects, ideas, emotions; nothing is safe, all must go, eventually. I looked her square in the eye and said something like, "don't take this the wrong way, but I don't need you, but I appreciate the time we've had together, I respect your views and values more than most, but that if I NEVER saw you again, I would probably be just fine". In the word's of Tracy Jordan, "TWIST". That's kinda fucked up, no? I didn't say it to be mean, or even disrespectful - just a matter of fact statement I honestly believe. I love her, but I love my own happiness more.
Skip back about six years ago and I get a call from my Old Man saying that our beloved family dog, Chenobe (Shu-nob-ee) or Nob for short, had to be put down. She couldn't walk properly, she couldn't eat properly; she was suffering from a vaccination that was meant to protect her, a stipulation of the New Zealand government for any animals entering the country. My Old Man, at the time, was planning on moving there. So I hear him saying she's going to die, but that I don't have to come with him, just he thought I should know. I decide rather presumptuously that he'll need me to be there; he had developed such a close and personal bond with her over the years, he would need someone to comfort him afterwards. I was also curious like a monkey.
So I'm sitting there on the floor with Nobby, she's got a needle in her leg and within 30 seconds she's dead. Her breathing stops, eyes close and she's gone. Just a shell remains. Wam! Death. What? Seriously? Just like that? Fuck. I can't stop staring down at her furry body. The vet and my old man leave the room, I guess, but I'm still staring down at the floor, my eyes welling up with tears. A major attachment to my childhood just left the building, and I, the one who had come to console, now was the person most affected by it. To the Old Man's credit, he handled her death very well; I suppose he had learned this many years earlier and knew what to expect. We sat on the park bench afterwards, he with his arm around me, looking off into space as I felt an incredible pity for the dog I had just lost. I thought of all the times I had never paid her any attention.
The aspect which confounded me most, was that she was just a fucking dog. I improperly lead myself to believe her death would be lesser somehow, because she was not human, and so my emotional shock didn't match my expectations. The only thing worse than pitying something, is to pity something and feel anger towards yourself for feeling it; to discredit your emotions by some arbitrary value scale. That, to date, was the only experience of death I've encountered which had any profound effect on me.
As a result, I have come to realize two very important things. The first: life is life and there is no scale of value that can be assigned to it - a death is a death and if you feel it, it counts. The second, all things die and that's really not so bad, in fact, it's kinda necessary to sustain life overall. I hasten to add that my "traumatic" experience of death was mild in comparison to people affected my mass genocide and horrific slaughter, but as a white boy from the suburbs, I'll take whatever I can get. I just want to acknowledge to any would-be readers out there, the sentimental cheese factor of "boy and his dog" is not lost on me. But taking from my own lesson, she meant a lot to me, more than most people, and at the time that trauma felt very real. I should have accepted that feeling instead of denying it.
Cut back to this morning. Six some odd years later. I'm looking at my mom, telling her I don't need her. She's cool. She understands. She tells me that if I died, she would mourn, grieve, move on and endure "pockets of sadness" between longer moments of joy and contentment. That's all well and good, I say, but for me personally, that's not good enough. I realized today that a large part of my thinking and analyzing is a kind of insurance policy that I'm paying into right now, to avoid future pain from whatever comes my way. I don't see my dog's death as a loss, in fact, it was an easy lesson that just took time to learn. If my mom died today, my hope is that I would feel a human sense of loss, on reflex, but rationalize the lessons stated above, immediately thereafter. I would use my rational understanding of our universe to accept her death and see it as part of something bigger, something necessary. To attribute emotions to death is a very human thing to do, something I learned firsthand comes without invitation, fast and hard. But to rise above that primitive, emotional reflex, to see it objectively is the underlying goal of my life. I don't fear my own death, just everyone else's.
To understand this, about a person who I care for very deeply, I think, makes us closer. Two cups of coffee and a dash of open-mindedness doesn't hurt either.
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