Accepting the Permanence of Loss

My dog died. He's gone. I wish I could say he's gone on somewhere. Maybe into a childishly wishful doggie heaven, where he will be forever happy, forever chewing on a treat at the foot of his protective master, my grandfather, who also breathed his last lungful of nitrogen and oxygen molecules a few years ago. I wish I could take comfort in that ideal but mythological land where the dead live blissfully on. There are many people who actually believe that such a place exists and that some invisible, intangible aspect of themselves that still has the ability to experience will go there when their neurons stop firing. I am not one of those people.

Perhaps I could still find comfort in another popular belief that some essence of old Blue, again ethereal and imperceptible, has floated off and slipped into a freshly fertilized canid zygote, or into a collection of cells that recently replicated and thus fits into the human-defined category of: an organism. I must admit, the weight of loss would not feel so heavy with a conviction that Blue-Mo has been reincarnated as a new puppy somewhere, with so many socks yet to chew on, so many dinners yet to enthusiastically wolf down. But where is this essence that latches itself into new flesh at some magic moment? There isn't even a hint that such a thing exists. If it did, then how much of it could really even be Blue? His memories of his experiences, his capacity to sense and to make decisions based on what he sensed, his capacity to react to stimuli... his canine emotions, his houndish thoughts, all arise from the complexity of his biology, the mechanisms, structures, and processes that require no supernatural spark, no transcendental essence to function. Not only is there no reason to believe in that spark, there is good reason not to think that any defining but undefined part of Blue has found a new "host" to reside in, as the idea of reincarnation demands. If I believe that, I may as well believe my stub-tailed companion is in doggie heaven.

No, Blue is gone. Every mole chase he ever experienced has slipped away, unrecorded and irretrievable. In a way, many good times he had still remain, but only as they were recorded from the perspective that my family's and my faulty and biased memories still hold. What was the view like from Blue's end of the frayed article of my sister's clothing during a friendly-snarl-filled game of tug-of-war? Blue's memories, which for a time were recorded by the flashing of electrical impulses in his canine brain can never be played back in our hominid brains. So I'd like to say he "lives on" in my memory. But that's really just a euphemism for the fact that all that's left of his presence is what is recorded, (sometimes in error) in the gray matter of those who had experiences involving him. Still, that euphemism is so much more accurate than the trite and ridiculous phrase suggesting he has "gone to a better place." (Accurate only if said by a true pessimist who considers oblivion better than the alternative experienced by the living.)

It is undeniably true that the effects of Blue's existence and his actions will still ripple outward in time (like that proverbial roughly-spheroid of silicate matter being gravitationally pulled in the direction of and finally into a small inland containment of dihydrogen monoxide between 0 and 100 degrees Celsius). Blues existence, an effect of a long line of other causes itself, will definitely continue to create more effects in the world, mostly in unforeseeable, unknowable ways. Many of the effects of these ripples we may consider "good," others, we would likely consider "bad." But "what Blue is" does not exist at this point in time, or at any point in the future. A dog who once ate a whole thanksgiving turkey and threw it up, only to dine on it once more, does not exist past this point in the dimension defined by it's increase in entropy. That dog I loved, he only exists in the past now, along with my childhood. Along with my Grandparents. Along with another loss that is even now still too overwhelming for me say. Still too difficult to fully accept. I know that everything I've said of Blue applies to far deeper losses as well. But that's reality, and to deny it will only detract from the importance and the meaning of what has been lost.

In some ways, this is bleak. In this light, we see that not just our personal losses, but the losses of history are all the more tragic. We must not forget, though, that the universe could have followed an infinite number of other paths, but instead it took a path where you existed, where I existed... where Blue existed. It took a path that had us on it, travelers ourselves. And as existence rolled along this path that included us, we experienced. And we loved. I loved Blue. I loved my other non-human companions, too. And I loved my Grandparents. I loved my Mother. Even if love (like everything) at the smallest scale is described only by the interactions of particles, like the complexity of organic life or the simplicity of a spiral shape of a galaxy, but unlike the promises of mythology, Love is real.

Goodbye Blue. I'm glad our paths crossed.