It's Only A Paper Rose

In half an hour or so, the vet opens, and I'm going to call and make Dexter's last appointment.

This isn't even a sad thing, really. He's at least seventeen years old, and has had the most wonderful life—chill and relaxed, with endless snuggles and soft places to sleep. Even when his family boxed him up and carried him across the country, he settled right in to his new home with minimal complaint. He's made friends with almost every other cat we've brought home.

Growing up, I always wanted a cat, but my mother was deathly allergic. So I had stuffed cats (still do!), and would volunteer to pet-sit for friends who were going out of town. I loved all of those kitties, but of course I'd have to give them back when their family members came home.

Dexter was the first cat I didn't have to give back.

The other cats tend to prefer Brian, who's a softer touch about treats and snuggles, but Dexter decided from Day 1 that he was my cat and he wanted my snuggles. The first night we brought him home, way back when I was barely 21 and living in my first real apartment with Brian, I woke up in the small hours of the morning to find him standing there putting his paw on my face. Not in a rude way, more of a "just checking" gesture. Are you okay? Still here with me? On colder nights, he would regularly snuggle with me under the covers.

He was never rude when he wanted my attention—he wouldn't yowl, or claw at me, or whap at my hands. He'd just...keep climbing up in my lap, and I'd keep moving him, until eventually I'd relent, and let him up on my lap, and figure out some way to fit the laptop around him. I suspect it was really a game we both enjoyed.

I will make the call. His kidney issues have become quite advanced; he's lost most of his muscle tone, and is losing mobility and continence. He spends most of his time under the blankets trying to keep warm, though (gratifyingly) he snuggles up to me when I'm there with him. As of this morning, he's stopped eating more than the most cursory few bites of his food.

He's been the chillest, happiest boy, the best first cat I could ever have asked for. I'm so grateful to have had him around for half my life.



Death is before me today:
like the recovery of a sick man,
like going forth into a garden after sickness.

Death is before me today:
like the odor of myrrh,
like sitting under a sail in a good wind.

Death is before me today:
like the course of a stream;
like the return of a man from the war-galley to his house.

Death is before me today:
like the home that a man longs to see,
after years spent as a captive.

...and it's time.

Yeah, we're getting a bit serious this post. It happens. Life happens.

Sometimes, death happens.

Back in Bisbee, there was a local couple named Derrick and Amy Ross, who played music together under the name Nowhere Man and a Whiskey Girl. They'd been doing it a good long while, and were fairly well-known in the area - even someone like me, who didn't get out into the social scene much, had seen their flyers around town, and seen them play at the Farmers' Market and various local events. They were quite talented*, and obviously very close. I didn't know them personally, but several local acquaintances/friends did, and had nothing but good things to say about them.

Monday, Amy died. According to friends/news reports, she'd been diagnosed with lupus some years earlier, and had contracted a dialysis-related blood infection that reached her heart. It was a heartbreaking (pun unintentional) event, unexpected in the way all deaths are unexpected, because we don't want to think about a world without our loved ones, and we literally can't conceive of a world without us. But not shocking, as it were. My Facebook feed was full of grief, but it was mostly the sympathetic, supportive kind, with calls to pass the hat for Derrick. (For something so unavoidable, dying is remarkably expensive.)

Then Derrick bought a gun and shot himself that night.

Without question, it's a tragic and traumatic event for the community, and my heart goes out to the people who knew them. But if you'll forgive me for looking at it from a storytelling/journalistic/fairly detached standpoint, it's been fascinating to observe the difference in people's reactions. The response to this news was much more shattered - a lot of people were genuinely shocked.** The level of grief involved multiplied exponentially. Even I, who didn't know them personally and was now more than 1,700 miles away, felt the effects; it put a pretty good damper on my mood yesterday afternoon. I can only imagine how it felt to be at ground zero.

Fortunately, one of the awesome things about Bisbee as a community is how they pull together at times like this; it was neat to see ideas for informal memorial/community-support gatherings spring up and become solid events, and to see folks comforting each other and sharing their stories. In a way it's a blessing to see folks who are often fractious and squabbling given a reason to remember their shared love for their town. Even if one wishes the circumstances were different.

Not really having much in the way of people to talk to about this, and not really having much to contribute on a personal level, I've instead been doing a lot of thinking about the issues involved. For a long time I've generally thought (even if I didn't often express it) that suicide is a matter between the person involved and their conscience; in some cases, it's the last choice they feel they can make, a way to finally and dramatically exercise the sense of control they feel has been taken from them. All this isn't to say that I'm in favor of it, or anything - in the past, when I've had suicidal friends, I've taken what steps I could to help. But I didn't, and still don't, believe that suicide is absolutely wrong, or damns you eternally or anything like that (wouldn't a compassionate deity understand how our human wiring gets twisted around sometimes?). As to whether or not it's selfish (as is often accused), that largely depends on your point of view and the circumstances involved. Given the impossibility of seeing inside someone else's head, of experiencing their state of mind, I don't think any of us are in a position to judge. In fact, I've often thought it odd that people so harshly judge those who take that route - it's not like they're in a position to care, anymore.

All that said...I think I understand a bit better, now, why it's so strongly socially condemned. The way the effects ripple through a community - humans just aren't equipped to deal well with death, and even the death of someone we don't know well can have a strong effect on us. And when you pile this kind of shock and trauma on top of that, well, it's a pretty heavy cloud of negativity to disperse. You can start to see how chains of suicides could get started; if you have a bunch of people who're unstable to begin with, and then one person kills themselves and creates this kind of grief and despair, and then another...that would magnify pretty quickly. Looking at it from that perspective, it starts to look far less like an individual decision and far more as a threat to group survival - which, if you're a pragmatist like me, is the only real objective "right" and "wrong" that there is.

I still think it's a personal choice, and I'm still in favor of death-with-dignity laws and such (even if I think the name a misnomer - there's no dignity in dying, be it by your own hand or the world's. It's merely unavoidable, not dignified). But more than anything, I hope that we as a culture are moving toward a lessening of the taboo in discussing issues like death and loneliness and despair. It saddens me to think how Nowhere Man might have chosen differently, had he felt he had someone to talk to, and how the world is the poorer for the loss of someone who brought such happiness to others. But it also motivates me to do what I can to fill that void.

And on that note, I'll head out - I have a song to write.



*Side note re: "skilled" vs. "talented" - I try to use the former term more often than the latter as regards to performing, because there's a school of thought that treats "talent" as something you either have or you don't, whereas "skill" is something you acquire with practice and experience, and both of those are frankly undervalued in the art world. However, "skilled", used in the context of a performance, also carries a certain implication of lifelessness, where you're good at what you do but don't manage to quite connect with the audience. And since one of the things NMWG was best at was that connection, I'm using the word "talented" to describe them, though their talent had been well-honed.

**A few people claimed not to be surprised, as "they were true soulmates" and "she was everything to him", or went on about how "what a beautiful love they must have had that they weren't willing to live without each other". Needless to say, I find that attitude problematic at best, but I also don't want to wade into people's grief with a blowtorch going "That's an unhealthy and codependent and frankly awful dynamic" - the events are what they are, and if it comforts some folk to think of it as romantic rather than tragic, do I have the right to try and take that from them? Still, it did produce an unintentionally hilarious quote: "What an incredible loving and strong bong these two people must have had." This being Bisbee, that's...not necessarily an inappropriate typo.

It's been kind of an odd week. Mood-wise, I've been swinging fairly dramatically from "I feel happy!" to "Meh, things're okay". (This might have something to do with the weather - the sun's been playing hide-and-seek most of the week.) Tuesday morning I woke up with a mild hangover, despite having drunk almost nothing the day before. And Tuesday was also the day I found out that an acquaintance of mine had died of a heart attack, at 31.

I wouldn't say that I'm incredibly upset about it - we weren't particularly close, and in fact had barely talked over the last couple years. Mostly we knew each other from classes we'd taken together back in college and mutual acquaintances; however, none of said mutual acquaintances are what I'd call members of my inner social circle (and I'm not trying to be elitist here; I just don't have many close friends, and I'm not a big one for going out to parties and the like, so the only folk I see regularly are the ones I'm particularly close to). So I guess I'm insulated from the general group grieving and such, which contributes to the not-particularly-upsetness. Most of my feelings on the subject have been something along the lines of puzzlement; while his death was perhaps not as surprising as some other friends' of mine might have been (he was a smoker, overweight, and had various health issues), 31 is still a pretty darn young age to die. And it doubly sucks because he and his fianceé (another acquaintance of mine) were planning to marry soon. If it were me that happened to, I'd probably be pretty annoyed - maybe not because I was missing my wedding (I'd like to think I wouldn't care about that so much once I'm, y'know, dead), but because Brian would be left behind. And I'm pretty sure he'd still care quite a bit.

So I dunno. I'm very sorry to hear he's dead, even if we weren't close. But I think most of my real feelings on the subject are more self-centered - something along the lines of "I'm too young to have people I used to hang out with dying!" (I guess that kind of says something about me.) It's also been a bit of a paradigm shift, really - I'm 24, and supposedly in that stage where I'm young and free and completely in denial about the fact that I or anyone I know will ever grow old and die. So I have faith in the human ability to stave off death through medicine and healthy eating and whatnot, and completely forget about that last stage of life - which, in the immortal words of Dr. House, "In case any of you missed that class in med school, that one's untreatable."

I guess maybe I should make a bit more of an effort to remember that, in order to better value the time I have. Unfortunately, denial seems to be the natural state of the human animal...

And just for the heck of it, I'm participating in a pay-it-forward thingy. It works as follows: You offer to send a handmade gift (note that "handmade" in this context simply means something you make yourself - a CD, an icon, a piece of writing, etc. - it doesn't have to be particularly craft-y, although crafts are fine too) to the first three people who respond to this post in the affirmative. If you like you can also leave a hint (favorite animal, type of music, something to base the work on). You will receive your gift within 365 days (hopefully a bit sooner). The only obligation is to pay it forward by posting a similar agreement on your journal.