I think I’ve got a very distinct form of millenial brain rot that the thing that made me most fantasise about the reality of the supernatural was not wishing to see a dead relative or loved one again but restoring a pet to life.
Content Warning: Death!
The first time I remember going to the funeral of a human being I knew I was I think, seven. She died of breast cancer. It was a big deal, it interrupted a school day, and I remember getting ‘out of school’ for it – by that I mean the entire school stopped class, we all got in various cars and got trips to the graveyard as a church-school unit, and then we attended the funeral. It’s one of the byproducts of having your church and school and entire social circle all interlinked.
It was a weird thing, too, because while the woman in question was in my memory undeniably lovely, I don’t remember much about her. Silvery hair, up in a heap, glasses, three kids who were by all the metrics I understood, pretty great, I remember visiting her house and helping to feed her goats.
And when she died, when we lowered the casket into the ground, with the message that this was it, this was the end and now she was gone and we would see her in heaven and if you weren’t saved you not only wouldn’t see her in heaven, you were going to be tortured forever, well, that’s how funerals went for me. My dad had the mantra that you never wasted a funeral – I’ve strong memories of him turning every funeral he spoke at into an opportunity to evangelise, but so did all the other people I know.
I’ve lost four grandparent figures in my life. One funeral I had to miss, but the others I went to. I loved dearly most of them, and I remember the strange hanging feeling of grief, when as an adult I had to hold onto the right way to cope with the departure of people who were themselves, very old, and who had lived long lives, which were not necessarily happy. Overwhelmed with feelings of sadness and anger at some things, like the way a decaying memory destroyed a brilliant man, and feeling I never did enough to be his friend when he was alive. He was just the person I heard stories about and from and who… maybe? Thought well of me? Well enough?
I never felt the need to call to God in those experiences.
I get that there’s always some kind of … vibe to it. Like, I get the impulse to call to God is a thing that a lot of us do when we’re at our most helpless. If someone, anyone hears this, if there’s anything that could be done, to make this permanent change unpermanent, if there is a deal to be made, if there is anyone I can negotiate with about this, to just make them alright, it’s never been a person.
Part of me is I think just scabbed over.
Things end.
People suffer.
I don’t want it to happen but I don’t find it like, something that would make me reach out in the hope of the supernatural. What did make me do that is the moment of holding a dying pet in my arms. Sometimes when I think about it, I wonder why, and the more I do, the more I think that … like… animals don’t know what’s going on. They don’t know that a valve in their heart is doing this, or a tissue in their brain is doing it. If they had lived in the outdoors, if they hadn’t ever been domesticated, if their lives had not been deformed around humans like me, they would not be like this, they would not know that they were going to go to sleep for the last time and it would, perhaps, be because of me because the alternative was even worse.
I get why people turn to God. I really do, I have my whole life. There was a period where I may have phrased it as ‘weakness’ or ‘mental illness.’ That’s because I was an arsehole, but the motivation, I get it. It was always part of the hope that someone, something, could hear if you reached out and said please, just make this okay. I don’t know anyone who prays to God to make them a billionaire, I know people who pray to get their way out of student debt.
It’s a cry for help. It’s a cry for mercy. And we live in a merciless world and I am somehow, in my mind, okay with that when it’s people we talk about. When it’s a pet, when it’s something that has that enmeshment with my life and with humanity as a whole. It’s… it’s so unfair and this little critter that I can’t even get to understand, in the simplest of ways, that I love it so much and I would make deals with devils or gods to make this not happen to them…
Anyway.
Dog’s fine, just been thinking about this for a few months since multiple friends have lost pets this year.