W o r d J u n k

A Meditation on Death (and my Dog I guess

I’m following some post-chart for the month of February so if my posts this month seem oddly pointed or specific that is why. Also if I suddenly stop posting it’s because I was lazy and decided not to do it.

Anyways I’m talking about death. Which is a really morbid subject to start out with - but February is an appropriately morbid month because the Earth is at the height of death and depressingness. I guess my earliest experience with death I can remember is the death of our family dog. We had had him for a long time before I was born so he was already quite old. That being said he lived up until I made it into the 4th or 5th grade.

Strangely enough I knew he was being put down yet wasn’t so concerned about it. I had other pets die before and wasn’t bothered too much by the it because these pets only lasted less than a year anyways and were either fish or lizards.

So one morning as I left for school with my father he says to me somewhat hurriedly as we’re going out the door “You wanna say goodbye to Toby?”  Which I thought was odd because I was only going to school, I had no idea that TODAY was the day they were putting him down. So somewhat confused I say “…uh…no? Uhm, bye?” And then we leave.

When I got home I didn’t even notice Toby was gone until my Mom came to me before dinner and told me that we actually had put him down that afternoon. I guess they finally noticed I didn’t seem to be all that effected by Toby’s absence. I was surprised and my mom was ready to console me but I didn’t feel the need to cry that moment or go ballistic at my parents for not letting me give a proper goodbye to a dog that was more or less a childhood friend to me.

It wasn’t until a couple days later that it finally hit me. He wasn’t coming back. It wasn’t the same. All the stuff of my childhood I remembered doing with him, none of that would happen ever again, because he was gone. Then I became angry. Then I became sad. I remember specifically it was the middle of the night lying in bed when I began thinking about this and I just started crying. I know I sound like a dweeb, but you must realize not even a person in my family has died before this and I used to watch Old Yeller religiously on VHS.

That being said, after all these events, I realized just how much I took Toby for granted. He was old and didn’t play much anymore anyways, but just the idea really struck a chord with me. The surprise and suddenness of it illuminated this fact that even the little constants of our lives that we may not notice, yet make us feel secure, because they’ve always been there and are apart of us can disappear before we even realize. With the death of that dog, came the death of my childhood and soon enough I started worrying about girls (even more than I did in Elementary school) and anxiously awaiting  facial hair growth (I still am a little actually).

So how do I cope with death? From that experience I think I can say that feeling obligated to mourn the passing of a loved one right away isn’t necessary — it isn’t even natural. It needs time to sink in first - and then you will know to mourn. Moving on can be hard (especially if you’ve lost an actual loved one and not just a dog), but eventually you just do. You just live.

So that’s my rather elongated experience. I feel kind of cruddy because I’ve never even lost a relative that’s been very close to me and here I am writing about some dog. But my grandparents are getting much older and I wonder how I will deal with their deaths over time. Maybe I’ll have a different answer then.