Without being the slightest bit suicidal or even morbid, I spend odd moments thinking about my death. The line in The Who’s “My Generation” “hope I die before I get old” led me to hope that I would die before I turned 70. Damn: I am 82, in excellent health, with no prescriptions or props. So far, so good, most people would say. My doctors’ predictions that I have another decade or so to go makes their life sentence seem like a death sentence. I do not want being old to spoil my love of life, for, to my way of thinking, being old means being no longer able to love life while living it. My rule for my pets—their last day should not be a bad one—I hope will apply to me.
I am a Jew who is agnostic about the existence of God but certain that life is not a dress rehearsal. Thinking about death is an inverse way of thinking about life. What I cannot value dead is what I value living: family and friends; good books, music, and movies; scholarship and teaching; birdwatching, hiking, camping, racquetball, and kayaking; and crossword puzzles. For me, death means that, for the eternity after my death, there will be no me to value any of these things, and it will not matter to the “no-me” if any of them value me.
The one exception is something which I allow myself: a very limited faith that I can value my dogs and cats here and can continue to do so there. In the short pre-death period remaining to me, I reflect on the message printed on a piece of wood sold at a tacky roadside market: “If There Are No Dogs in Heaven, then, when I Die, I Want to Go where They Go.” My faith goes farther. I believe that only those who love dogs and cats go to heaven; everyone else goes nowhere. I believe that I shall join my many dogs and cats who have pre-deceased me and who assemble in a larger pack to welcome each new arrival when the time comes. So whenever I have to put one of my family down, my last words are advice to seek one well-suited to them of those who have gone before. At my age, I wish myself long life only out of a desire to outlive all the cats and dogs of my last pack so that none feels left behind. That will be the time for me to join them all.
But I must admit that my faith has the necessary element of doubt which makes faith necessary. It resembles the doubt at the end of the story of Greyfriars Bobby, a Skye Terrier, who spends every night for 14 years on his master John Grey’s grave. Shortly before his death, he looks up to an overcast evening sky and thinks, “I have abided long and lonely. How long have I still to abide? And, then, will I be going to Old Jock?”
I trust that Elizabeth has joined her corgis. The Queen is dead; long live the King!
My book On the Same Team: Dog Owners Coaching Their Best Friends is available on Kindle.
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