The day my dog died

Fidelity, by Briton Riviere

My dog died in 2006, in the middle of the year, right when the World Cup was happening in Germany. I don't exactly remember everything that happened around that date, but I remember enough. He was thirteen years old, and had been stricken with cancer for a while, but honestly I didn't feel like he was doing that bad. My mother, on the other hand, saw it, and eventually there came a day when we took him to the vet and had him euthanized. I stood there with him, so did my mother. I held his paw the entire time, as he quickly got drowsy, sleepy and finally slept forever. Afterwards, I asked the vet and my mother to let me be with him in the room for a while alone, and everyone left. It was the saddest moment of my life up to that point, and it might still be. I don't know, and I don't care to make comparisons with other moments of loss and despair, as if life was a sort of pain Olympics where records are surpassed. It's been twenty years this year and it still hurts very much. Like I said, he was thirteen, but I was twenty three at the time, having just turned twenty three.

He was a beagle. My parents got him for my tenth birthday, in 1993. He was just a pup when the caretaker brought him to our home. And by the way, we were supposed to look several dogs before thinking about adopting one, but he was the first one we looked, and I knew right then and there. Just thinking about that moment is hard. It's hard typing these words. It's silly, I know, crying over a dog that died so many years ago, half a lifetime basically. But I don't care. I knew right then and there when I saw that less than a month old dog that he was my dog. And even though I was ten years old at the time, and even though we can call it "brotherly love" more than "paternal love," it was the love and instant attachment for another sentient being that becomes tied to your heart forever. When a child is born, many parents say they love them the moment they lay eyes on them. Others, not so much, but develop the bond and affection not much afterwards.

Either way, it's different than when a father is completely absent and meet their offspring later in life. Sure, an affection can develop, but it's not the same thing. Even mothers can have that happen. They carry the child in the womb for months, yes, but if they part ways for one reason or another right after birth, and only meet much later in life, it's hard to develop that exact same connection. What I mean to say in these ramblings is that there's nothing sacred that differentiates the love I had for my dog and the love a desperate father has when laying eyes on his baby right after it's born. In fact, in many cases, the latter is performative.

I know it's performative in many cases because I've met plenty of people who were like that, and right after couldn't give a shit about their own children, and still don't. In one case, this guy, who was a bona fide grifter who got arrested for using stolen credit cards once, had kids with different women and then pissed off to be an illegal immigrant in the United States, an immigrant that loves Trump by the way, which is something that happens a lot with Brazilians. They move to the US not just for economic reasons, but for ideological reasons, too, believing themselves to be above the rest of us, only to get screwed most of the time, and eventually deported.

And speaking of a father's performative love at first sight for one's own child, some even take pictures of weeks old stillbirths, literally an undefined clump of cells, and post them on social media, saying it's the most devastating thing that ever happened to them. This really happened with a very famous Brazilian "financial influencer." He apologized later. But sure, for many others, it's not performative. And it's with those that I compare my first laying eyes on my dog. If you're offended by me equating the love I had for my dog and the love a father or a mother can have for their child, then that's a good moment for you to stop reading (or listening, or watching) this essay or chronicle or whatever you want to call it, because we're never going to agree with anything else. We're never going to see eye to eye.

Now, going back to the they my dog died, and the subsequent days, I've got to tell you that the pain I felt in my heart was excruciating. I felt this same type of pain when my paternal grandmother died. Very recently, a few weeks ago actually, one of my best friends' mother died in very tragic and unexpected manner, and you could just see how his pain was like some devil took his spirit, skewered it, and started roasting it in a deep fire. He already knows how I am when it comes to thinking about misfortunes, so I told him that sometimes I imagine losing my mother, and just the thought of it is so painful, I back off.

I made the half baked comparison with the physical pain of putting your hand close to a barbecue fire pit. The heat is so intense one can't stand holding one's hand in there for long. In my friend's case, it was as if he was pushed into the fire pit against his will, all of the sudden, with no time to prepare his spirit. In the case of my grandmother, and in the case of my dog, I had time to prepare, but still didn't matter much, I think. Maybe I'm wiser now. I don't know. But my grandmother died in 2018, I was supposed to be wiser then, too. I guess I was. The recovery phase may have been faster, I don't know. Maybe I feel the way I do about my dog because I saw the innocence there, a pure innocence that I don't see in people. Or maybe it's just that I wasn't wise at all at the time, like I said.

Speaking of wisdom, on the contrary, back in the year that my dog died, I was still very much at the start of my journey of trying to be a more refined selfish and dumb asshole, a journey that ended in disaster, with a couple of years of extreme drunkenness to top it off. Still, it was a state of affairs that was overcome by my awakening to wanting to study philosophy at university in the near future, something that did happen, something that is still happening now that I'm in the middle of my doctoral studies as an older student. I had good luck, I believe, because I don't think pain and despair are educational. They can be, but not by definition. I really don't think most pain can be a gateway to the betterment of oneself, or to the betterment of many.

That's why I say I was lucky that after years of affirming my will in the dumbest ways possible, and suffering for it, I was able to get out of that hole motivated to do something, and able to. But it's something that had to be, otherwise I'd taken myself out of the equation of life. I started to want to understand why in the hell we're here, why we suffer. I wanted to see if there was a purpose for all of this that wasn't magical or mythological. That's why I decided to give philosophy a chance, even though I despised it before. It was only after my thirties that that happen. Before, I was lost, I didn't know where I really stood, the ground didn't seem to be solid, and there was a pervading fog hanging over everything. Now I know that the world is indeed a vale of tears, and however much we might improve our material conditions, the friction of mere existing causes pain, it chips away at everything, until we stop existing, and whatever made us is recycled, until the whole universe dies or is recycled, perhaps.

This can be a horrific thought for some, and a liberating thought for others. I think it's horrific. But even though I think it's horrific, it's something that has helped me. Let me explain. I didn't feel joy knowing that the world is a vale of tears that hurts us and kills us, forcing us to create fleeting positive values, values that are also destroyed by the friction inherent to the world of becoming. That's not joyful, it's not liberating, at least not in the common sense of the word, to me. But knowing this did help me in the sense that I finally understood. It brought some level of peace.

And it also brought some level of camaraderie with thinkers who thought that before, and who put those philosophies on paper. Another thing: understanding helped me become less of a selfish person who wanted to affirm my will regardless of the cost, because it made me abandon the thinking that everyone benefits if we are all selfish assholes. It stopped that cycle of complete idiocy, because I started to realize we're not separate, that the pain of the other is also my pain, that however much some have privileges, the minute we're created and start to feel pain and are conscious, we become brothers and sisters of suffering, and that not recognizing this is horrible. Not caring about this at all, hurting each other, means abiding by the rules of an uncaring nature and universe. Affirming one's will is just going on with the program, a cruel program. It's our default setting, being selfish assholes, one that we keep reverting to, unless we reflect on it, and work on it. There's nothing amazing or great about it, I think.

What is great and amazing are those moments we step outside of the program, those moments when we're able to feel compassion, and even love, not just for those creatures that are attached to our hearts, our mothers and our dogs, but those who are outside. It's hard. To be able to do it constantly makes one a saint. All of us don't have to became saints, though. But if we stepped outside of the program more often, maybe this experience of living wouldn't be as bad as it is. It would still be bad overall, because of the inherent structure of becoming, because of the epherality, friction, and pain that permeates everything, but at least we wouldn't add more distress to it — except, maybe, the distress brought about to some by the mere knowledge of the pain and ephemerality of existence.

It still hurts that my dog died. It will always hurt. At the time, I still viewed myself as a Christian, so when I was alone with him in the procedure room after he died, I made a sign of the cross on his head, while I cried over his dead body. A dog. A beagle. A poor creature that was born as the result of artificial human selection done hundreds of years ago, created to help people in the northern parts of Europe in their hunts. However, because of the way I led my life, and eventually found philosophy, I now see he was a close manifestation of whatever blind and irrational forces that underlie everything, the same forces that make me and everything else. It's not much of a consolation, I know, but it does help me understand, even if it doesn't make me approve of it, even if it makes me look at the whole grand mechanism with even more contempt, instead of awe.

His floppy, long ears that moved from side to side erratically when he ran, that's something I won't ever forget as long as I'm alive. Some beagles do look like him, but he had a distinct look, at least to me. There's so many regrets too, that I will always have, because I know I could have spent more time with him, I could have been a better friend, a better person. It was unfortunate that I was growing up. Honestly, I still had not grown up when he died, far from it. I can't say really I grew up before I reached thirty, which is ridiculous to contemplate, but it's the reality. Overall lack of maturity is what I'm trying to describe. Even so, no one can say I didn't have a deep love for that creature, even if I could have been a better brother to him. He was always just there for most of my life up until that point. Losing him was soul crushing. And just thinking about the regrets of not doing more stuff with him now is like my heart is being squeezed inside my chest by an unknown malignant force.

Talking to another friend not long after, when he lost his pet and was himself facing deep sadness, I remember saying that even though the pain was horrible, I'd still do it all over again because I got to know my dog. Now, many years later, as someone who agrees that it would have been better not to have been born in the first place, I think a little different. I do know it would have been better not to have been born, since no one would be here to feel this pain in the first place, but having been born already, I guess that yes, having had my dog was something that did shine a light of love and friendship that made going through life much better. So, how does a pessimist who is sure that it's better not to be think of this whole thing? By saying it's not he who hates life, it is not he who hates existence. He loves it. It is becoming that doesn't love him back, that doesn't love anyone, and puts everyone through the meat shredder in order to feed itself with the tears of it's victims. However, we, the victims, are ourselves part of becoming, we are the end point of this thirst for manifestation that underlies everything existence: we are the subjects for whom the world manifests itself as object.

by Fernando Olszewski