Love, loss and the biology of endings.
BY DAVID WHITEHURST
“IT IS SUCH A STRANGE FATE that we should suffer so much fear and doubt over so small a thing.” This truly understated lament about the ring in Tolkien’s Fellowship has always struck me as perfectly representative of what makes Boromir, the proud but hopeless one who utters this line, the most relatable yet most contemptible character in the story. As the reader, we find ourselves loathing him for his lack of faith but any honest reflection leaves one resonating with him far more than the other noble optimists in the story; it is a strange fate to suffer so much over so small a thing. Boromir’s lament echoed in my head as I stared hollowly at the x-ray, which revealed a small, malignant mass growing just near the heart of my most treasured companion; a 12-year-old hound mutt named Scout. At some point earlier that year, I’d gone on my last jog with him, I just didn’t know it then.
It’s been said that dogs must necessarily not live as long as we do, as they show us both how to live and how to die. It has also been said that grief is the price we pay for love. Many things have been said by well-meaning friends in the last few months. I find that “I’m sorry” is what felt the best to me, because there’s really not much else to say. No words of condolences can diminish the reconciling that we all must do when confronted with our fate or the fate of those we love. But it is a strange fate that we should suffer so much fear and doubt over so small a thing. That thing is the unimaginably small mechanism of the DNA replication process called telomeres. The fear and doubt brought on by this little device was brought to the forefront of my attention even before the sickness that took my canine from me, when a human loved one shared the news of their own cancer diagnosis with the matter-of-fact statement that “my telomeres are getting short.”
Probably the most unsettling thing I know about the body is that we all get cancer every day, but almost always our body’s defense mechanisms will stop it. Telomeres are one such mechanism that are basically some material scrap that we can afford to lose a little of each time a cell replicates. If a cell turns cancerous, usually running out of telomeres will arrest its growth. However with age, it’s more likely that a cancerous cell will be able to override this defense. We face these odds every day, but they get less favourable over time. This is the built-in ‘flaw’ in our design that no repairman can yet fix. Without telomeres our cells couldn’t properly replicate and yet their finite nature means that cancer is not merely a possibility, but an inevitability. Indeed, cancer is not a flaw in our design, but something chosen by the same selection pressures that made the rest of us.
Spinoza’s unique solution to the mind-body problem is that there isn’t one; that the experience of pain and the actual pain are the same thing. This I believe is the ultimate expression of romanticism. It is the realization that you are not a mind in possession of a body, but a body in possession of a mind. Your life is material, relying on material phenomena, and your thoughts, however ephemeral, are dependent on the material and not the other way around. This means you are intrinsically linked to the natural world and therefore to view an eventual cancer diagnosis as an aberration of nature, instead of the result of our intrinsic connection to it, is folly.
Perhaps it’s not simply a superficial condolence to say that dogs show us both how to live and how to die. Knowing that my companion, the one who’d slept next to me for 12 years, was in the process of dying was deeply saddening, of course I knew it would be. But what I did not expect was the deep sense of purpose that would come with caring for him. During his healthy life, I’d only ever cleaned up a handful of accidents. But as his cancer had metastasized to his intestines, I had to clean up hundreds of accidents in those months. Several times I woke up covered in his fecal matter, because his desire to be close to me only increased as he grew more sickly, and his bowel continence only decreased. This somehow didn’t bother me however, as if tapping into a deep well of patient caregiving ability I never thought myself to have. I realized soon after these events that this was the most ‘human’ I had ever felt. And so my companion had shown me that the truest meaning and fulfillment in life is primarily to be found in caring and living for others. Through his illness, he had shown me how to live.
The hardest part was saying goodbye. His health was failing rapidly and the Veterinarian oncologist pragmatically pointed out that soon it’s going to get a lot worse. I packed my things and headed for my family farm, my dying companion’s favorite place in the world. His usual excited whine coming up the driveway was replaced with a weak whimper, but he was still happy to be in the mountains of his upbringing. Despite many years as a city dog, he never felt at home there. His last night alive, he sniffed around the yard outside of my family home while I dug a grave as deep as I am tall, feeling totally hollowed out by this morose activity. Yet continuing to dig, immune to fatigue and unbothered by mosquitos, as if driven by an invisible compassionate force that could never visit the dishonor of a shallow grave on my companion. In a final favor to him, I was able to get a vet to make a house call for his euthanasia. He seemed to have spent the last of his life energy on his last full day alive and when the vet arrived, he perked up a little, but only long enough to make it to the yard where he flopped over, heavily panting, and refusing to get back up. I really must resist the urge to implant anthropoid self-awareness that wasn’t there, but he did seem to say he was ready. I laid in my family’s yard and held him in my arms as the lethal dose of pentobarbital was injected and felt his heavy panting slow to a few final heaves. Within a few seconds, his eyes had glassed over and his body was totally limp. This was a moment I had dreaded since the first of his soft, short hairs under his eyes had turned white many years ago.
Several minutes went by before I felt the strength to stand up with him. He was not a light dog, but I had always easily carried him when he was alive. Now totally limp, his new weight surprised me. His hind legs hung from my left arm and his head swung from my right, with his tongue fully out of his mouth and his once iconically curled tail hanging straight down and swinging like a dead snake. The short walk to the grave felt like a mile, as I confronted the fact that my companion was no longer a body in possession of a mind, but just a body. As I attempted to put him into the grave, his limbs and head folded under himself. So I climbed down into the grave in front of him to gracefully lower him down to avoid the horror of dropping him, but I lacked any ceremonious way to remove my feet from under his corpse such that I had to horridly yank my legs back up to the surface out from underneath him. So… I learned some things about the logistics of burial that day. After replacing all of the dirt, I gathered rocks from around the property until I’d covered the grave with a modest cairn of stones. At that moment, I decided I’d bring a rock home from every future trip to slowly add to the cairn, which seemed a decent way to honor his memory and continue to take him with me in some minor way.
Life had gotten busy enough for me in the years before his illness that I had rarely made time to go on runs with him like we had before, I guess imagining that at some undetermined point in the future, I’d have more time for more runs with him. But our last journey down the trail where we used to run was more of a somber trot. Losing him has had a profound effect on me in many ways, but more than anything it has made me realize emotionally that which I previously only understood intellectually; the impermanent nature of life and the futility of imagining that there’s some eventual tomorrow such that indefinite procrastination is permissible. Despite all of my reading of the great stoic and romantic thinkers, I learned more about life and death that day than a thousand hours of reading. My friend had completed his life’s work, and finally showed me both how to live and how to die.
My last visit home to the farm, I removed a piece of dark brown basalt rock out of my bag. It had marched with me for the last 30 miles out of the desert valley in Oregon where I’d found it and flown all of the way back to the east coast with me. I kneeled next to my companion’s cairn of stone and placed the small rock next to the previous addition. What had happened the day I built that cairn was replicated in my mind once more, with a little less fidelity than before. And the memory of my lost companion replicated too, with a little less pain and a little more fondness, like the telomeres of my memories, folding back over themselves one more time to make a more-enriched life possible.
David Whitehurst is the owner of a small business that manufactures apparel and consumer goods in a factory in Philadelphia. He grew up in the Appalachian mountains of Southwestern Virginia and loves nature. He is an avid reader of classics and philosophy and writes in his spare time, producing primarily nonfiction essays but hopes to one day write a book. David enjoys training Jiu Jitsu, scuba diving, horseback riding, backpacking, fly fishing, and discussing ideas for the sake of ideas. If you’d like to contact him, please email him at davidwhst@gmail.com
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