(Please pardon my Spanish, I am relying on Babel-Fish) The picture above is the resting place of the ashes of our cats who died this year. Duncan passed in April and is represented by the metal Leaf. Alex passed in July, and he has got the fierce-looking lizard which we are going to call a Dragon for his sake. Today was Dia De Los Muertos, The Day of the Dead, and Nov. 2 is All Souls, a Catholic holiday with Pagan roots, but all have basically the same purpose: take time to honor and celebrate those who have died.
I visited MaryAnn Johanson's personal blog (which had been inactive for awhile), to discover that she had just lost her Sam. Sam was ~18, overweight and had been sick for awhile, but it was very sad to hear. Then I went over to Ptelea's blog to read the very sad news that Wiskerz had died. Wiskerz was an "only cat", and I think it is really hard on the surviving human to lose that "only pet". I will never really get over losing my little Jewell, a sweet tabby, who lived to be 14. That was nearly 20 years ago and it still hurts. I'm not one who believes in a "rainbow bridge" or "heaven", or an afterlife in the sense it's usually defined. I believe that what remains of you are the memories and minds of others... plus photos, stories, things that are left behind for the rest of us.
Here's an excellent essay from the NYT about the love of our animal companions, what it's like living without them, and the nature of our bonds and grief.
The Ambivalent Bond With a Ball of Fur
By NATALIE ANGIER
Published: October 2, 2007
A couple of weeks ago, while I was out of town on business, our cat, Cleo, died of liver failure. My husband and daughter buried her in the backyard, not far from the grave of our other cat, Manny, who had died just a few months earlier of mouth cancer.
Cleo was almost 16 years old, she’d been sick, and her death was no surprise. Still, when I returned to a home without cats, without pets of any sort, I was startled by my grief — not so much its intensity as its specificity.
It was very different from the catastrophic grief I’d felt when I was 19 and my father died, and all sense, color and flooring dropped from my days. This was a sorrow of details, of minor rhythms and assumptions that I hadn’t really been aware of until, suddenly, they were disrupted or unmet. Hey, I’m opening the door to the unfinished attic now. Doesn’t a cat want to try dashing inside to roll around in the loose wads of insulation while I yell at it to get out of there?
I’ve just dumped a pile of clean laundry on the bed and I’m starting to fold it. Why aren’t the cats jumping up for a quick sit? Don’t they know everything is still warm?
We expect the bonds between children and parents, or between lovers or close friends, to be fierce and complex, and that makes them easy to understand. We expect the bonds between people and their pets to be simple and innocent, an antidote to human judgment and the fog of human speech, and that can make the bond paradoxically harder to track or explain. How do we feel about the nonhuman animals whose company we crave? We think we know. Our pet is our “best friend,” a “member of the family,” a surrogate child for the adults, in loco parentis for the kids and the best possible pillow for whoever has first dibs.
Pets are growing ever more popular. In 1988, according to the American Pet Products Manufacturers Association, 56 percent of American households had a pet. By 2006, that figure had climbed to 63 percent, which works out to a national census of 88 million owned cats, 75 million dogs, 16 million birds, 14 million horses, 142 million fish, assorted small mammals and the occasional leopard or Madagascan hissing cockroach.
We love our pets and we love the idea of pets, of reaching beyond the parochial barriers of the human race to commune with other species. When Alex the African gray parrot, renowned for his ability to communicate, do simple arithmetic and describe objects by their color, size, shape and material, died last month of cardiovascular disease at the age of 31, his obituary appeared everywhere, and Irene Pepperberg, the scientist who had trained Alex since 1977, was flooded with condolences.
“Alex touched so many people,” Dr. Pepperberg, a lecturer and research associate at Harvard University, said in a telephone interview. “He broke all preconceived notions of what it means to be a bird brain.” She admitted to feeling devastated. “There’s a parrot-size hole in my life,” she said.
Yet part of the reason Alex’s death attracted so much sympathy, and why Dr. Pepperberg’s grief seems normal rather than excessive, is that Alex, in the public eye, was neither pet nor ordinary parrot. He was Pinocchio, striving to realize his full potential — his humanity. Importantly, Alex didn’t merely nuzzle his affection for Dr. Pepperberg. He had genuine dying words, the fine four-hanky phrase, “I love you.”
By contrast, when Leona Helmsley, the hotel magnate who died in August, specified in her will that she was leaving $12 million to her pet dog, Trouble, while stiffing two of her grandchildren, there was scant talk of dogs as best friends. There were hoots, clucks and growls, with one reader on The New York Times Web site advising the grandchildren to “go kill that stupid dog.”
Marc Hauser, professor of psychology at Harvard and author of “Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think,” says ambivalence and tension have long been woven into our feelings about animals. “On the one hand, we feel a connection to other animals and we can’t imagine a world where we’re the only species on the planet,” he said. “On the other hand, we’re always trying to show that we’re not animals. We’re like them, yet we don’t want to be like them.”
Dr. Hauser traces this tension to self-defense. We use animals, and we want to feel justified in using animals. We eat their muscles for meat, flay their hides for shoes and accessories, inject them with experimental vaccines, genetically engineer them into grotesque morphologies to study human diseases. This requires a certain mental distance.
So we adore our pets and lavish time and money on them. Annual pet expenditures in this country have doubled in the last decade and are now more than $40 billion a year. And then we scold ourselves for our foolish fiscal priorities.
We adore our pets and can come to identify with them so deeply that we attribute to them some truly daffy notions, like the radio listener who called in a comment to Colin Allen, a philosopher and cognitive scientist at Indiana University’s Center for the Integrative Study of Animal Behavior. “She wanted to tell me about how her cat had very gingerly brought in an injured bird to show her, as though to say, It’s hurt, please take care of it,” Dr. Allen said. “I suggested there might be other interpretations for her cat’s behavior.”
Yes, we love our pets and anthropomorphize them to the point where we think our cat might enjoy wearing the mouse hat Halloween costume now on sale at Petsmart.com. And still we abandon difficult pets, and shelters euthanize some 10 million pets a year.
I understand the ambivalence of the human-animal bond. I loved my cats, and I miss them, but I resent them, too, for showing me what a creature of small habits I am, and for reminding me that even love is not enough. Life, like the laundry, will always cool down.
Tags and links: Friday Ark - Carnival of the Cats - This week's carnival is at CatSynth on Sunday - Cats - Catblogging
4 comments:
Yes, we adore our pets and miss them when they are gone. These blogs, photos, words are comforting.
This post inspired me to write my own about our dear departed Sully and a tennis ball I found in my truck.
Our dogs are indeed family,an integral part of our daily lives and to not give them credit for that would be...just wrong.
I feel the same way about our turtles.
Animal?No.Familiar?yes.
Oops, must make apologies to Ptelea because I forgot that she has another cat named Pat. Apologies to Pat as well.
Thank you for sharing this very moving post.
Post a Comment