Bonus Post

I wanted to make a separate post for this update, aside from the one that will come on Monday. See, we put my dog down on Thursday, and I don't want to leave that be without getting some thoughts out there, but talking about death in a general update doesn't sit well with me. (That being said, this will indeed be a post about my dog's death. And, as usual, you don't have to read it if you don't want to; I'm just voicing my thoughts on what happened.)

First off, I'm fine. She had a long life, she was sick and in pain and almost completely blind. She probably would have died soon on her own, but we did her a mercy by bringing her in so that she wouldn't have to die in pain. While losing her did make me sad for a time, the experience of her death is what impacted me the most. Digging the little grave in the backyard, sitting with her and my mom as we wait for the vet, the unnatural - yet perfectly natural - stillness, shoveling dirt back into the hole, dumping out food and water... It's almost surreal.

The whole thing was very somber for me. The digging was almost entirely in silence, except to ask if it was big enough. Digging a hole, by the way, is hard work - something I appreciated as a way to focus without thinking. But I couldn't really get away from the knowledge that my dog, asleep in the garage, would be lying in the finished hole in less than an hour. Such an unusual mindset to be in. Not necessarily negative or even emotive, just unusual. It was a similar experience about an hour later when I lowered the little cardboard coffin into the earth, my mom standing with me. Hearing the dirt hitting the cardboard was a little eerie.

The mindfulness that was present in every little action and movement was only half of this entirely new experience. Dying and death was the other half.

In the weeks and months preceding my dog's death, as her health took serious turns for the worse, I would sometimes look at her and imagine what it would look like if her chest simply stopped rising - if she stopped breathing. Even now, the thought of an animal I've seen alive not breathing brings another thought: "This isn't natural." But it is natural. Circle of life and all that, right? Still, knowing the inevitable does not make the actual event any less bizarre. It feels like breathing things should continue breathing. Maybe that's the original way of things, before the curse of death.

I don't really know how to express the oddity of seeing the life leave something, and the lies eyes tell ("she's just sleeping"). I guess you have to see it. And I can't even imagine what it would be like to experience this with another human instead of a pet or an animal.

I could try to come up with some poignant statements about death and dying, but I'm pretty sure they'd end up being nonsense. So I'll just leave off with this: Death is the weirdest natural phenomenon of them all.