Postcard #8
Dog days, 2019: taking leave, greeting, and lives that deem themselves eternal
"I love this tiny life which deems itself eternal," wrote Marie Bonaparte of Topsy, her beloved chow.
Some things go unnoticed. The motivations behind our small acts and choices. Often, they slip by us, no matter how glaring to others. Little unexplained tendencies. We all have them. How, for example, did I fail to notice the phonetic resemblance between the two old-fashioned names, Agnes and Gladys, plainly symptomatic of something? Minimally, this may cause confusion to the reader. Bear with me. It will pass as Agnes passes from the story, fading from dog to ghost.
Agnes died on December 12, 2019. For almost a year, I was without a dog. It was hard to let go of the old Labrador girl, our habits and affections so ingrained. Gladys, a Spaniel, was born on September 19, 2020. She left her litter and came to me in November.
The arrival of a puppy was detrimental to writing. With Agnes, I could be at my desk all morning, break for a leisurely stroll, then back to my desk. With Gladys? Nary a line for weeks after her arrival.
I didn’t mind the loss of writing time or the changes to my hours and daily routine. In truth, I sought such a break. I longed for her soft brown coat and oversized paws promising growth. Her general physicality. The interruption of Agnes thoughts. The care of another life entrusted to me. To be forced to rise early, spend more time outdoors, and feel tired at the end of each day. These are a gift to a person in lockdown.
In time, I sensed my rusted brain creaking. It’s a door ajar, catching the wind and its messages from an open window, idling back and forth, tapping the doorframe. I noticed leaves scuttling along the pavement. Gladys chased them, darting in all directions. I was ready for precious minutes to chase my own leaves, those old habits of study.
I missed the burly Labrador whose thick coat seemed to absorb the clamour of ideas in my head and the tapping of my keyboard. Now the reverse happened. The puppy was fine-coated, rather clamouring in herself, and constantly on the move. My ideas bounced off her. I struggled to organize them, fitting paragraphs into puppy naps. My living space altered too. There remained a faint memory of the large-boned calm of my old girl as this fresh thing called a spaniel chewed my trouser legs, chair legs, then raced past in a blur to the next chewable location. Let’s just say the room was no longer conducive to study.
I could not immediately love her as I had loved Agnes. This is not to say there was no love. But it was rattled. Unfamiliar. Here was this puppy – a teething, manic, pre-hormonal, pooping little mass, as yet unsettled in herself. At times, surprised and confused by her own body. I was unsure who she would be, who we might be together. All that took time to reconcile with Agnes. As it would with Gladys.
Yet already, new love brought fierce protectiveness. The few times I thought she was unwell, my stomach knotted with fear and a sense of obligation. Donna Haraway has said, “I have a dog. A dog has me.” (“Making Kin: An Interview with Donna Haraway” Los Angeles Review of Books [LARB] 2019).
Gladys had me, but I could only be inadequate. We must learn a dog, and ourselves with a dog, as we do for another human. We accept that there will be error, misunderstanding, power imbalances, and most of all, mystery, the enchanting unknowability of another:
“If you take anybody seriously, one of the things you learn is not knowing. That’s one thing I learned from Cayenne and my other dogs… And the appreciation of not knowing and letting that be is something you learn in a serious relationship. It’s a kind of letting go. Not knowing and being with each other not knowing… It’s very hard. But that kind of relationship is also deeply joyful. It takes a lot of restraint, and it takes forgiving each other. It takes forgiving yourself for imposing yourself on the other, for thinking you knew when you didn’t, for not paying enough attention to know when you could have.” (Haraway, LARB, 2019.)
With Gladys, all this was compounded by the relative fragility of a puppy. I was anxious for her tender bones, her reckless acrobatics. Her untried organs. Everything still developing. I was her keeper, but a woefully inept one. Words, so useful to me normally, would fail as they often did with Agnes. Outside the prison house of language, dogs do not speak to us in words.
Historically, we humans have held this against animals. We measure their ‘powers’ against our own, thereby diminishing animals and our relations with them: “Lacking speech, the faculty of reason, and what recent ethicists term ‘the capacity’ to suffer, the animal has also been said to be incapable of death – in the ‘proper’ sense of that word.” (See Dawne McCance, “Death” in The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies [ECAS] Lynn Turner, Undine Sellbach and Ron Broglio, eds. 2017)
Engaging this western philosophical view of animals in The Beast and the Sovereign, Jacques Derrida notes that:
“in the dominant tradition of how the animal is treated by philosophy and culture in general, the difference between animal and human has always been defined according to the criterion of ‘power’ or ‘faculty’, i.e. the ‘being able to do [pouvoir faire]’ or the inability to do this or that (man can speak, he has that power, the animal does not have the power of speech, man can laugh and die, the animal can neither laugh nor die, it is not capable of its death, as Heidegger literally says; it does not have the power (können) of its death and to become mortal, etc.), and, as I said here quite insistently not long ago, Bentham always seemed to me to be on the right track in saying – in opposition to this powerful tradition that restricts itself to power and non-power – that the question is not, ‘can the animal do this or that, speak, reason, die, etc.?’ but ‘can the animal suffer?’ is it vulnerable?” (Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 2)
Further to this, and drawing on Derrida’s argument, McCance notes “Derrida’s contention that vulnerability is a ‘non-power’ humans share with animals and that it is from ‘compassion in impotence’ that we might begin to rethink human-animal relations…” (McCance, ECAS.)
It is this notion of shared vulnerability which first suggested itself to me during my last years with Agnes. The two of us had experienced some difficult losses and changes together. I resisted them in ways that my dog seemed not to. And it would be Agnes, in her silent constancy, who showed me how to ‘weather’ changes without denying them.
Slowly, my daily rhythms began to meld with hers; we were like the two images in a rangefinder camera, coming into alignment. The pleasure of that alignment, the labour of it, ever at risk, always sought. Likewise, our immediate concerns grew more compatible. Were we warm? Did we have a place to be? Food? Some company? I saw the humbling significance of our having satisfied these basic needs. I worried less, grew quieter, and realized that her vulnerabilities were not so far removed from mine. At a certain moment, we seemed to ‘age’ together, in our bones and muscles. Our femaleness achieved some mutuality. In time, I was at greater peace in myself, and with Agnes.
I knew we were moving towards the end. She was old. I could imagine the possible ways she might die although ultimately, she found one I had not foreseen.
We had recently moved back to the Calder Valley of West Yorkshire. On the valley floor, there were rows of little houses once inhabited by mill workers. Further up the lanes, there were weavers’ cottages, and the moors could be seen above them. Agnes, I reasoned, had at least a year or two left in her. I could take her up to the tops where the wind might raise her thick Labrador coat and make her frisky, and we could drop down to the canal towpath when her limbs were too tired for hill walking.
The pandemic was yet unseen. We began each day in an innocence of the near future which, in retrospect, looks more like misplaced optimism. Curled at the end of my bed, Agnes always raised her head to greet me, her tail lazily tapping. She waited while I went down to make coffee with warmed milk, fetching a small dish of kibble for her to enjoy while I sipped my brew. We sat together, old friends. Those elements – coffee and kibble, Agnes, her gaze – gave us the pretense of eternity. Like all life, we were an endangered coastline, a house at risk of sliding into the waves. But we were tenacious. Still on the trail. Purposeful. We believed in the promise of each day. We were on dry land.
Then, on the morning of December 12, there was no coffee hour. Agnes didn’t raise her head or look to me. She never moved. She was already cold and stiff when I opened my eyes. She must have been dead for some hours.
She had been poorly for two days, having got hold of moldy bread thrown on the canal towpath and I believed this was the cause of her sickness. I was used to the scavenging of a Labrador. She had found rotting food before and made herself sick. Recovered in a few days. Agnes had a stomach of steel, I often said. As on other occasions, she threw up soon after ingesting the bread. I could see lumps of it in the large mass of vomit I cleared from the floor. I hoped this would be the worst of it, but she seemed so weak afterward that I took her to the vet anyway. The vet checked her over and agreed she had upset her system rather badly. She was given medicine to coat her stomach and help with nausea. We put her on a diet of boiled chicken and rice. But her appetite never returned. She stood before her bowl, stared at it like a receding pleasure, tried to eat, but couldn’t manage it. I put small amounts in my hand to tempt her. But she backed away and dropped to the floor, confusion in her eyes.
By the end of the second day, I sensed danger and made another call to the vet. We agreed that if she did not improve by morning, I should bring her in. She didn’t make it through the night.
I had always expected there to be a ‘moment of decision’ on my part, ending in a final trip to the vet. But this was not to be. In retrospect, I believe Agnes retained a degree of power over herself by dying at home without assistance from a vet. But at the time, her departure from such intervention, this final solitary agency of hers in the dark of night, while I slept, was shocking and painful.
The fact of her age, that death was coming, that life had been lived – in the end these would make mourning possible. Our long history together, not always easy, marked by loss and grief for us both, this too made mourning possible. We fear and dread death, often forgetting that death is also a setting free. I don’t think I will ever forgive myself for being asleep when Agnes died. Nor have I ceased to mourn her. But as time passes, it has become, mostly, a beneficial mourning.
(to be continued)