You started your days here on earth
Saying that you were Snake.
You shed that name like a discarded skin
And in doing so claimed the namesake.
You spent the pandemic hibernating,
Quietly remaking yourself into
Someone easier to approach,
And your circle of friends has grown.
I still see you curled in a circle,
Swallowing your own tail like a riddle--
Infinity with a beginning, middle, and end
That you are still learning how to bend.
When my first child was born, I spent countless hours during her first months of life simply staring at her sleeping face, amazed at her tiny existence, and the way that every conceivable human emotion would wash over her features. Her angry scowl would split into a wide, open-mouthed grin, followed by a grim look of mystification, and on and on it would go. She felt everything all at once, even before she had experienced anything apart from being wrenched into this world and stared at. I wondered at the wordless thoughts that accompanied these expressions, if they existed at all. She seemed to have entered the world with the whole spectrum of human emotion already latent inside of her, just waiting for life’s experiences to give vent to its various expressions.
Later, in my 30s when I became serious about running, I similarly marveled at the way that my own emotions would vacillate dramatically during every run, from the depths of despair at ever finishing my goal distance, to utter elation that I was doing something difficult but beautiful and my body was equal to the challenge. Those emotions would surface inside of every run, but I started to prefer running up and down giant hills because then, there was an external explanation for the arc of those feelings— running downhill or on flat surfaces was joyous and running uphill was dreadful. I would have had those same emotions without the obvious challenge of the hills, but when I run on flat surfaces, there is no hook to hang my feelings on, and they run amok.
I wonder how much of our modern miseries have to do with narrowing our lives in such a way that we lack external stimuli on which to hang our feelings. We narrow our lives with electronic devices, with overwork, and most recently, with the horrifying isolation that accompanied the pandemic. How much of our mental health is wrapped up in simply finding an experience that will give vent to the feelings that we all must express over the course of our lives? The sorrows, the joys, the trepidation, the mystery— all of these things we need to feel in turns. When our lived experience becomes too limited, nothing is there to elicit our inner dramas and call them out onto the stage of the world.
Ted Koppel's book, Lights Out, discusses at length the vulnerability of the U.S. power grid to a cyber attack. He walks through a hypothetical situation where such an attack has occurred, and traces out how it will impact people in the days and months that follow. In exploring the type of doomsday preparation that would be necessary to survive the aftermath, Koppel explores the Mormon church's teachings on preparing for disasters in such a way as to maintain self-reliance during an emergency.
In the course of describing how impressively Mormons have made doomsday preparations, he indulges in some speculation about the moral crisis he believes that faithful Mormons will face when doomsday finally comes, because there is an inherent conflict between the Mormon belief in loving your neighbor as you love yourself, and the Mormon belief in self-reliance and preparedness. Because when you find yourself in the position of guarding a bunker full of the only available sustenance for miles around and the earth has become blighted and food scarce, how do you treat the people outside of your bunker? Do you give them food, or do you lock your door?
Koppel raises this ethical dilemma with real earnestness, because he believes it is one that we all will face in our lifetimes if we are lucky enough to survive a doomsday scenario. But I think we are already living through the early days of such a scenario, and that we all refuse collectively to see it, because the scope of it is so horrific. There is currently a vast migration of suffering humans across vast distances on the planet. They are leaving their homes because of gang violence which is escalating due to food shortages. And it is all happening because of climate change. Portions of the planet are becoming slowly uninhabitable for humans, and a large portion of our fellow human beings are fleeing to cooler climates as a result. Right now, they are heading north to places like the United States, and they are seeking a refuge from a warming planet that will no longer sustain them where they came from.
We are living the doomsday scenario already, and thus far, the United States' official answer to these suffering throngs of humanity who are falling down at our door, is, "Go away." We are locking the door of our bunker, because we have never imagined this situation and have no governmental apparatus for dealing with it. No vision for what is to come or how we can intelligently and thoughtfully address it. It is just too big for us to see, so we fall back on false narratives about who these people are and why they continue to journey to our borders at great peril even though they know that if they survive, they also face unimaginable horrors at the hands of our current system. It remains the only alternative to certain death.
I don't hear any kind of public dialogue about whether locking the bunker door is really the best strategy for humanity as a whole to figure out some kind of plan to save ourselves. My hunch is that an honest and open discussion would lead to the conclusion that it's really probably not the best plan we can come up with.
When I was 22 years old, I lived in an apartment in the City of Buffalo. One night while I was taking out the trash, a tuxedo cat who was visibly blind in one eye came up to me and asked if I would take him in. I picked him up and said, "Hi Hawkeye!" like we were old friends and he purred and rubbed his head against mine. He was very thin and flea bitten. There were chunks missing. So I carried him up the four flights of stairs to my apartment and fed him a can of tuna fish, and then went out to buy a litter box and cat dish. I had always had a cat growing up. I don't know how normal people get cats. Mine have always found me.
At the vet a few days later, they said he had worms; had been hit by a car (hence the bum eye) and that he'd been neutered on the street (hence the cut ear, as a marking). And he needed a home (hence the human paying the bill).
The first night he slept with me in my bed, I hardly slept at all. He couldn't stop telling me how happy he was. My vague impression is of a lion puffing out his chest on top of the covers to stake his claim. Still purring. And when I would come home from work every day, he RAN to me to pick him up and I would hold him in my arms and we would rub foreheads VIGOROUSLY for AWHILE. He missed me.
After awhile, he settled into a better way of sleeping with me. I would hold up the covers after I got in bed. He would walk under head-first, make a U-turn, and lay on my outstretched left arm. I would wake up with him still lying next to me, head on the pillow, like a human.
When I started law school I put two chairs in my home office, one for me and one for Hawkeye. I would work my fulltime job, go to school fulltime, come home at 6:30, sit with him and read until midnight, and then go to sleep for 5 1/2 hours (also with him) and start it all over again. The only thing I allowed myself to take breaks for was to pet him and watch him for awhile as he laid next to me in his own chair.
Later, I got married and we moved to West Seneca where he howled at the walls for being in the wrong places for the first few days. Then when I got pregnant and gave birth, I labored mostly at home. He came and laid in the crook of my arm just as he did when I would sleep. He stayed with me for hours and hours like that, purring and letting me pet him, helping me to stay relaxed. He put me into a kind of almost-sleep until it was time to go to the hospital where the baby would come within an hour.
Sometime in those early years, I took him to a feline ophthalmologist who said he would inevitably develop an eye tumor in his damaged eye which would take his life unless we paid to have the eye removed. I was still in law school at the time, and had no money, and couldn't afford it. The doctor said if I couldn't pay the bill, she would do the surgery and keep my cat as her own. I couldn't imagine. So he didn't have the surgery.
A couple of years later he did develop precisely the cancer that she had predicted would kill him, and I watched him slowly waste away. We eventually put him down. I still remember him on my lap on the way to his last vet visit, looking out the window, curious at his surroundings. He had been so lethargic for so many weeks that it was shocking to see him interested in anything again. It made it harder to let him go.
I have learned from the cats I've had over the years that most of companionship consists of shared routines. Looking at each other. Doing little things that relax each other. To have a life so intertwined with your own that is devoid of what we call language is a unique and powerful thing. His life story is a part of mine. It seems a shame not to tell it.
