Thank U

I haven't delivered a eulogy in 8+ years. Relative to that, my facebook profile picture is pretty fresh and recent:

"It would be nice if an emergency meeting of the UN security council declared me insufferable, but less so when I am absorbed by little dogs and granted me a stipend and visa to just hang out with dogs again." March 31st, 2024.

It's Usma, star of my post 'microcosm of helplessness' and I haven't tried it in a while, but yes, I can close my eyes and still picture the moment she looked back at me and then ran across the avenue to get hit by a car. A memory seared in by my hippocampus that fills me with cold shame and guilt, I remember the decision - the ultimate one in a series of decisions that lead to that moment and it still rattles me, shakes me up, recenters me in that microcosm of helplessness.

I'm sad to say that Usma is now deceased after recovering from that hip fractured in three places and posing for the above profile picture. She died about a fortnight ago as at writing and of course, her death has effected me. 

I've been processing, and it's probably a great opportunity to slow things down a bit by acknowledging that 'processing' is one of those psychology speak terms that have been adopted by the general public to use at their convenience. What needs process is that the death of something is a catalyst that causes a chain reaction of changes to your mental schema with which you navigate life, that we simply do not have the bandwidth to update everywhere, all at once. That schema is made up of many relational thoughts and feelings, and again, I feel lay people have heard through popular culture and social media of the 5 stages of grief or whatever - shock, anger, denial, bargaining and acceptance or whatever. 

This is not a good model of grief, it is based on terminally ill patients experience of coming to terms with their own death, they are grieving some kind of future they imagined for themselves, and its a process that doesn't ulitimately terminate in acceptance, but terminates in death. 

'Bargaining' always caught me out, I suspected it was where you begged your girlfriend to get back with you on the promise that things would be different. But certainly, shock tends to happen, and it makes sense that it does because you know all our ancestors would have seen things like their children die while trying to paddle a canoe out past the breakers, so going into shock can zombiefy you into functioning while not registering distressing events as and when you hear about them.

But a better model, at least one I am persuaded of, is the resilience model of grief which I think better explains the vast disparities in human responses to bereavement. There are people who can more-or-less function as normal, and people for whom a death can effectively disable them. I suspect the variation can in some part be explained by variations in people's ability to regulate their emotions.

So that's what I'm up to, have been doing recently, when I get the chance, and what I call 'processing' and in part this death of a beloved canine companion is cumulative, an opportunity to come to terms with mortality as a whole. 

Cumulative but also specific, I'm mourning the loss of Usma and she offers me specific mysteries that mean I can never quite be sure when the grieving process has done its thing.

James, for whom I delivered my last eulogy, humbled me in my inability to perceive how much his death fucked me up, and how unwise I remained. So I'm now cautious when it comes to Usma.

A Caution on Privacy

Usma is my dog, in the sense that we accompanied each other, as humans and dogs do. But not in the property sense. She belonged to, and the person most important in the world in her opinion was, Ale, my former partner. She was already an extention of Ale's inner world when I met her and although we bonded quickly she remained forever and always, Ale's biggest fan.

As such, you know there's reflections I have on her death that would likely be of some value for anybody to hear, whether for inspiration or validation, but I won't because it's a private matter, pertaining not just to my private life, but Ale's too. 

There's a greed too, a simple desire to keep cherished memories to myself, as, as with all grief, the pain I feel at loss is a function of wealth, the pain you don't feel at my dog's passing is a function of your relative poverty. 

The people at a funeral that care more about you than the deceased, do so because they never had what you lost in the deceased. That's the deal, and you know I don't feel particularly compelled to share memories that belong to myself alone, or more frequently between Ale and I.

And I've also been callous in the past writing about James. I've never been raked over the coals for my solipsism, more a dawning self-awareness that just because I felt alone in my prolonged grief and incompetence at coming to terms with his death, didn't mean I was alone, just more likely, I had the biggest mouth.

But I'll share as much as I feel both good about, and is useful so as not to deliberately waste your time. 

Reason as Impediment

My friend John has a construct that I believe he calls 'Rational Man' very similar to Behavioural Economics founder Richard Thaler's 'Homo Economicus' in that it describes a mass of people who likely do not exist. People who do what is reasonable and rational all the time.

Generally people who put stock in 'Rational Man' particularly in their design principles, design an engine of their own frustration with the world. Notionally they do this because they discount irrationality, a part of which - the relevant part to this post - is not treating emotions as data, and building them into your model.

This is my main takeaway from Alain De Botton's pop-interpretation of Stoicism in his 'Consolations of Philosophy' BBC miniseries, where he rode shotgun with a London Van driver who experienced road rage daily at London's variagated drivers. De Botton aserted, that from the perspective of Stoic philosophers, if you carried the expectation that today was the day that everyone in London (and/or the world) became proper, competent, considerate drivers in the face of all the data to the contrary, then it is you, not the shitty drivers that frustrate you when they merge without indicating or do a 3-point turn rather than detour a single block, or park outside the lines, or talk on their phones while driving, steer with their knees, check their socials at traffic lights, exceed the speed limit, fail to exceed the speed limit, drive under the speed limit, drive in a hat etc. etc. It is in fact you who are irrational, for not observing empirically what your fellow humans are.

Rational analysis can be a defense mechanism against painful emotions. Instead of simply feeling the sadness, the anger, the frustration, the despair etc. you instead try to understand it. The moment it crops up you internally say 'that's interesting, lets try and analyse where that came from and how to fix it.'

Given who I am, I'm almost certainly prone to this, and mindfulness techniques are a boon to put me in touch with my emotions, experiencing them in the body, observing them as I feel them rather than understanding them. Otherwise, I'm not a huge fan of mindfulness.

But to a degree, I am helpless in the face of analytics, I try to adopt a policy of 'feelings have to be felt' and I have a luxury of minimal contact hours where I might have to function in a manner that doesn't center my emotions such that I hijack the social program. I can grieve largely and sufficiently in private.

So I want to assure you that's what I've been doing, even prior to Usma's death. A general approach, and since Usma's death this manifests in listening to the songs that come into my head motivated by the emotions I feel. I do not look away, and I don't try to shove those feelings down. I try to get the fuck out of their way so they can come out.

There's still a bunch of wishing though, feeling and expressing emotion I have found means that they don't repeat on me. I have done much grieving for Usma, but no ruminating. What I do wish for however, is that I could just get them all out, like if one feeling just cascaded into the next, instead I just have episodes here and there, they come up and kind of break off and I know a part remains that will have to be felt later.

In that breaking moment, that's where analysis tends to begin on my part, as I contemplate what the feelings mean, how I am changed having felt them. Again, this can leave me wishing for more, like that I could just complete the grief metamorphosis.

Where I think I feel I'm at

Today it occurred to me, that the nature of my grief in this case feels something like this:

All there is to say is "thankyou" but the thankee is gone now, so I can't.

What I need to feel, is her absence and come to terms with it, complicated by being separated by half a planet for 3 years.

I also know what Usma represented to me symbolically, well it's multiple things, but the one I miss that is particularly resonant with her death, was coming back to life, as in liveliness, vivacity. I met Usma while grieving, a big cumulative ball of grief that included the loss of two of my dearest friends under very different circumstances (suicide and ostracism) and the death of the family dog of 15 years, the last 6 or so of which I was her main companion. 

I just hadn't bridged that experience I was conscious of, which was getting attached to another dog. I'd been through it before, but in my head was the fact that dog's only live so long, and I'd had Bess for almost half my life by the time she died. I'd let maths get into my head, realising that every dog onward would be in my life for smaller and smaller fractions.

I needed a girl to shove me across that stalling though, and Ale brought with her Usma and we quickly fell in love. Much quicker than Ale who took like a half dozen walks compared to Usma's two.

It was all very delightful very quickly. 

For the moment though, appreciation comes with pain.

A Vision of Running

So today I was walking past the vet clinic where Bess my longest serving companion, spent most of her last week of life. Her kidneys suddenly and catastrophically failed, but in a manner somewhat ideal she was able to be kept alive on IV until the whole family could assemble, bring her home and we could all be there to euthanise the beloved family dog.

Such a walk I would have done over a hundred times since Bess died, but it resonates once again as a bitter-sweet memory because of Usma's recent death. I looked at the curve where the heel of my hand meets the wrist and where I have a particularly pronounced scar from where Usma buried her tooth in my flesh when I picked her up after she was hit by a car.

I would already have recounted in that microcosm of helplessness post, that when she bit me all I thought at the time was 'good' because it meant she was most certainly alive. Because Mexico has a rabies protocol that bite turned out to be super debilitating in the form of applying yellow goop to it every day for a fortnight while it healed up without any bandages or anything.

Anyway, I'd never made the connection before, but...look to this day I remain somewhat of a fantasist. I have a strong visual sketchpad, music often evokes powerful imagery in my minds eye and from time immemorial I have always found it easy to superimpose what I see in my minds eye over my actual vision.  

In my teens and early twenties though, I was often daydreaming fantasies of a megalomaniacal nature no doubt a response to coming of age during the War On Terror and instead of the fantasist response of assuming comforting conspiracy theories to explain away the confronting incompetence of world leaders and subsequent all-of-society, I used to imagine just basically being powerful and in charge.

I was also almost certainly, heavily effected by Frank Herbert's Dune series. All nerdy stuff, and nothing that came close to preventing me from inhabiting a mundane existence. But as say, a rooftop amateur sniper doesn't appreciate, you can't just exercise power and not think all of societies institutions won't come crashing down on you. 

This is why people can't easily stand up to say, organised crime, even if you aren't afraid they go after your family. 

Without contextualising the whole post-hoc rationale of the vision, running around as a youth (training for cross country) I had recurring visions of running through streets carrying a severely injured lover. Alternately, and even more fantastic and self-aggrandizing visions of carrying a lover in my arms after I had been shot or otherwise injured. 

And today I was just remembering running with Usma in my arms, freaked out, Usma in shock, arm bleeding, Ale talking to me but not registering what she was saying, the driver stopping to ask if the dog was okay and trying to reassure them without wasting any time on them, and just making our way half a block to the vets.

I don't believe in 'manifesting' I think in most cases that's more a case of confirmation bias and predicting the obvious, like if you are an attractive young woman people will give you free shit because they either want to have sex with you, or because they are hoping you will tell them a way to have people give them free shit because they want to have sex with you.

This was more, exactly what processing grief means in terms of updating your schema. I didn't recognise that I was living a recurring fantasy because a) Usma was a cute little dog and not a woman like Ale and b) it wasn't a fantasy it was a nightmare (particularly given that Usma's injury was my fault), and c) Usma being dead likely relieved my anxieties that she will die enough to look at that moment of personal history where I was extremely worried that she was going to die.

I started to cry, mourning finally the lost sense of clarity and purpose that I had in that desperate moment, that was chronologically buried by the immediate guilt and self-loathing I felt once Usma was in the vets hands, but that partitioning the sequence of events, from the moment I scooped up our squealing piglet from the road, supporting her neck and spine and getting bitten almost to the bone for it and that desperate rush to the vets to get painkillers into her, I'd passed a test I'd long been desperate to pass, and didn't even notice it happening.

Don't Mistake the Banal for the Profound

In the last eulogy I delivered, going by memory, though I have roughly what I said written down somewhere, it wasn't a jazz-eulogy; I'm pretty sure I said something like 'just as a part of me has died with James, a part of James lives with me' which I feel is in danger of being construed as profound, whereas if you reflect on it as much as I have, it's simply acknowledging something quite banal.

This is how relationships work, they are built on resonance, commonalities resonate more so in the presence of one another. When someone dies, the resonance stops, but what resonated for you, still exists. This is as mystical as the cables on a suspension bridge, or if you will, a guitar string. They can resonate by having a wind blow, or being left on top of a speaker. If some external force doesn't act upon them, then if you want to make the noise you have to exert the energy yourself.

Smash the body of a guitar or snap a suspension bridge cable, it won't resonate at all, which is death in this metaphor. Specifically the brain death, hence you can lose your resonance with living loved ones due to conditions like dementia, while still feeling great sentimental attachment to their living remains.

So, it's banally true also of Usma, that a piece of me died with her, and a piece of her lives with me.

It becomes more true in this case, because of an inside joke between Ale and I, that was our characterisation of Usma. Near as I can recollect, it began with Usma following Ale's lunch to her work desk. Ale told Usma "It's not for puppies/peritas" and I, as would come to be the notation of Usma's voice remarked "sOy gEntE" ["I'm people"] which became the beginning of Usma's long running scams to get fed people food, most typically involving variations of "[Insert fOOd] InspEctOr..." but also got laughs when the illusion was broken by having Usma ask Ale "cOmO sE dIcE..." ["hOw dO yOU sAy..."] which would prompt Ale to scold Usma "Usma you speak Spanish you don't ask how to say things in Spanish!"

Anyway, I'll spare you more elaboration, because, well, greed, but also an appreciation that without loving attachment to this particular dog, I'm sure the gag gets tedious quickly.

But Ale paid me the huge compliment of, upon returning from a day trip to the nearby lake-side resort town that she went on with Usma while I stayed home, that she had thought 'Usma is really quiet today' and not referring to her penchant for barking at dog-drama bullshit, but the conspicuous absence of the illusion of Usma's personality, before remembering that it's an illusion.

And that persona, was me, and Ale very quickly (instantly) learned the persona herself, the only difference being the differences between Ale's voice and mine. But it's not like you can project any personality onto any dog and effect the same willing suspension of disbelief. It needs to comply with our sense of animism, it needs to be congruent with the dog's stable personality traits, her behaviour, it requires a cognitive empathy with that particular dog's-eye-view of the world. It's not arbitrary.

Just so, Ale created Doki's voice on a whim, but not arbitrarily. It was my birthday, and at that point Doki wasn't allowed on the bed, he came in in the mornings after our housemate left for work and typically napped on either my backback, any dirty laundry I'd left on the floor, or the couch until I got up. Ale picked up Doki and said 'happybirthdaytohm' (as the nomenclature for Doki's written voice became) and it was perfect straight up.

If you could hear, and can't synesthetically imagine from the nomenclature what the dog voices sound like, you wouldn't find them particularly original. They no doubt share a pedigree with all cartoon dog voices ever, but they were distinct enough to describe the distinct personalities of the dogs.

Now, with Usma dead, she can talk from beyond the grave so long as I am alive. Just in my voice for Usma, not her own, which was a dog's voice, expressed as barks, growls, whines, shrieks and whimpers. 

Just days before learning of her death, I'd been feeling sadness and longing, reflecting on the dramatic reactions Usma produced when either of her people returned home after she'd been left there. There are few people whose day I earnestly want to hear about. This is largely based on the modal ability at storytelling. Let me take it further, there are few people whose wedding or trip of a lifetime I want to hear about, generally because most people in my experience, assume something rare to be intrinsically interesting, and don't realise that it is possible to make describing a cabbage as interesting as coming under mortar fire, and coming under mortar fire as interesting as describing a cabbage.

Part of my motivation to partner up with Ale and make a go of it, was because Ale is interesting to me even when she talks about something I profoundly disagree with. 

Ale aside though, I was recently reflecting that Usma was someone, that earnestly I always wanted to hear all about her day, even though what she was saying, not in our persona's voice for her, but her own voice "you were gone and now you're back and I didn't know if you would be back but you're back but you were gone."

Of course, there's a general conversational principle of "avoid the middle" that Nassim Nicholas Taleb puts as, for example, that if you are on a University Campus and you can't talk to the world's leading expert in a field, the next person you want to talk to is the janitor, not an undergrad.

Dog's of pretty much any stripe, are always for me, going to trump any human who lacks conversational skill. 

The above is a photo I took of Bess, and a friend, and I took it at the time because it was salient that my two favourite conversation partners were together and perfectly illustrated this principle. Within six months of taking this photo I lost both, so I'm really glad I have it, and though Ale and I still communicate, and obviously have been communicating with the death of Usma, we don't really converse and furthermore, Usma was a point of connection between us that is now gone, which is why grief isn't really discreet.

Again, the loss of beloved interlocutors echoes, rhymes in this present moment. Usma is the first dog I loved after Bess. I mean I loved Millie, my brother's dog whom I'd regularly dogsit, but she was alive before Bess died, and also it's one of those rare instances where English lacks sufficient vocabulary, with Millie it was Storge, familial love, Bess and Usma was Ludus, playful-joyous love.

But I owe a debt of appreciation to Millie as well right now, a kind of reverse-bringing-other-shit-up that any particular bereavement could do. When I left last time to go to Mexico, I had no idea I was saying goodbye to Millie forever. She got sick and died, not knowing what had happened to me, a member of her extended family and caregiver.

That was a new and unpleasant experience for me, an experience that beds-shit-down in the emotional wake of Usma's demise. 

"But you know I don't care. What I care about is to see you again. And to dance that song

From the record that we love so much, so much, so much..." ~ Tijuana Makes Me Happy, Nortec Collective.

A motivation in life was to somehow make my way back to Usma again, to validate her faith in humanity. But upon my departure from Mexico, I knew it was a distinct appreciable possibility, that I wouldn't get that chance. There was a world of possibilities, estrangement from Ale, dog attack, car accident, dognapping, all the myriad health issues that shorten dog's lifespans, getting deported and banned from re-entry, my own death.

I know in part my muted response, the resilience of my composure, to news of Usma's death and confirmation of this undesired reality, is in part because I had to grieve Usma several times. Ale knows and she's the only one who really gets to know. From my first return to Australia, to our first relationship crisis, to our separation, to the uncertainty of my departure date, to my departure, to our estrangement. 

Every time was heartbreaking, and every time I got to see her again was appreciated wholeheartedly.

Devastation

'If I die while I have a pet, let my animal see my dead body, please. They understand death and seeing me dead will allow them to mourn, but if I just never show up one day they’ll think I abandoned them. I know what it feels like to be abandoned and I never want anyone to feel that way, especially my dog.' ~ attributed to Sir David Attenborough, I can't source it.

It was upsetting to read this, but no-less true. What a privilege it is to be present when your dog dies, so they die with your living scent on their brain. Though sick dogs having no real stance or appreciation for euthanasia do seem to seek out some dog-privacy, liking their own death like they like their bones, solo. 

I feel crushing guilt that I abandoned Usma. Those friends I have that I was able to talk to, in the messy mucassy hours of fresh grief console me that my guilt isn't warranted, sharing my understanding that I didn't deliberately or maliciously abandon Usma (and Doki, and Millie) it was the collateral cost of a failed relationship, compounded by immigration status.

I just don't view "Abandonment" as a legal term like like Murder, distinct from Manslaughter by having the qualities of mens rea and malice aforethought and whatever else. It certainly makes no difference to a dog.

There psychology is evolved to excel at being a pack animal from the plains, with a unique interspecies capacity among mammals to induce oxytocin based bonding through eye-gazing with a human. We are their pack, and I know Usma, she never understood why we would ever split up the pack.

There is a greater meditation there about responsibility that I simply haven't done yet. I take responsibility, given the facts, there was nothing else I could do, certainly was willing to do, to exchange for staying in her life. Equally, Usma was not taking any bargain where she kept me and was abandoned by Ale. 

That was the breakup, that none of our pack got what we wanted and hoped for, was both the cause and the outcome.

Usma would have got new adventures, new joys, new people, new pack members as well. I'm sure also, there is a confused, uninformed form of mourning an abandoned dog goes through too. 

When I started living seperately, and just visited Usma, dogsat her, it wasn't the same as when I went to the shops without her or the gym, even when she came to visit me. She started greeting me like Ale. An experience I both loved and hated. 

The qualitative difference, indicated that Usma felt my absences, and felt them more when they grew longer. It was plain to the naked eye, that my moving out distressed her, that she didn't understand. 

After I last saw her, staring through a doorway as my Uber pulled away, she went through something. 

Whatever that something was for her, it is its own particular experience of devestation for me.

But I would not wish it away at the cost of not ever being her beloved person. 

I think it's under circumstances like this, which is to say, unideal deaths which everyone who gets a sufficient shot at life, is going to experience be it first-hand, second-hand or third hand; that the resilience model of grief truly shines, and the 'stages of grief' model fails. 

It happens that people die alone and terrified, deprived of a chance to say the things and hear the things that really matter to them. What those who survive are left with, is just a fact they can contemplate, and yeah accept rather than deny. 

But accepting need not translate into any kind of peace, I feel you simply have to function in light of that accepted fact.

Though I have no children of my own, and I'll acknowledge that tedium to a greater extent later, I am convinced by Dr. Gordon Livingston, that the primary responsibility of a parent to a child, is to model for them that it is possible to be happy in an imperfect world. And I am anxious to clarify, even if Dr Livingston doesn't, that to demonstrate the possibility of happiness does not mean it's necessary to achieve a state of static happiness, but to be happy when one can, with the knowledge that we do not live in the best of all conceivable worlds. 

“I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times*, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities, for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one’s very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?”

― Voltaire, Candide 

*My ability to discuss suicide candidly myself, including suicidal ideation, has inspired some to express their concerns for me, and attempt a kind of intervention. As such, I am in turn anxious to convey to people that I have never seriously contemplated suicide, much as while I have speculated on whether I would suck a man's dick sooner than fight him in prison, I have never seriously considered blowing a guy.  

Stuck in the Middle With You

With some bitter irony, I became closest to Usma during her recovery from the broken hip. We didn't like leaving her alone, and I having less friends, less clubs, less commitments was the natural choice as dog sitter.

I don't think dog bones heal any faster than human bones, around 6 weeks or something, but unlike a human with a broken hip, dogs figure out ways to compensate and walk around with broken hips sometimes immediately after a car hits them. 

Our landlord and neighbour Gina gave us some spare pet blankets, and by around the 3 week mark, Usma could be experienced walking hurriedly from one dog bed setup to the next dog bed setup around our apartment so she could keep an eye on whoever was there. It was cute, endearing and ridiculous.

We grew close then and never really separated emotionally. 

When I got Covid in Mexico, I had only one day of feeling under the weather, after that, the only symptom I ever experienced was not respiratory but the loss of smell which lasted 12 days. I have a spreadsheet somewhere where I tracked it. Each morning I would test for the return of my smell by picking up Usma and sniffing her.

The foolish thing I did at that time was never get a test for Covid, which later as Mexico changed its Covid mandates and opened night spots up to people who could either prove they'd gotten a vaccine or had Covid, Ale and I were paperless.

Similarly, in the years I was in Mexico, in hindsight I suspect I had symptoms of depression. Likely sub-clinical depression, but definitely something that impeded me from functioning and that was very likely environmental as upon returning to Australia I very quickly got back into the workforce, finding motivation easily to get shit done.

I feel I am too far removed from the experience I was having, to pursue a legitimate post-hoc diagnosis. I missed my opportunity to obtain an opinion I could have any confidence in.

In Mexico I was overwhelmed, and what eventually happened by the end of Ale and my relationship and cohabitation, was that my self-soothing routines that staved off these undiagnosed and hence speculative symptoms, expanded to take up my whole day. 

Again, occasionally I'd get work, commissions and contracts here and there, but very minimal and I'd function fine doing good work.

And here's what is difficult to describe. It was a really difficult time, stagnating like that while my relationship slowly suffocated. It was also, the best time of my life on a consistent basis. The two were occurring simultaneously, coincident, and Usma was there for it all.

I ruminated on the perplexing way that from my mid-20s to my mid-30s I suddenly found it impossible to get a relationship going, but my work (as opposed to wealth strategy) was ideal, doing my art and financing it with a call centre job, while my parents heavily subsidized this lifestyle by letting me live in their house while they were off overseas.

Then I found the relationship at long last, and between a global pandemic and a lack of citizenship, now I didn't have the income by which to plan out a future, though I had substantial savings, when you live off them you have to keep saving them.

I also ruminated on the potentially debilitating effect appreciation was having on my life. I have the language now, but even the stuff I could articulate, I struggled to talk to Ale about. 

The world we live in is driven by anxiety, the average person functions through a lack of perspective in order to motivate participation in the economy. Most people feel a sense of urgency, a sense of deprivation etc. via this anxiety near as I can guess.

I was trying to describe to a friend, the general nature of the "real talk" parents give their children to initiate them into adulthood. For example, recently watching a review by Mark Kermode of the screen adaptation of Camus' "The Outsider" Kermode characterised existentialism as adolescent, books like "The Outsider" something teens get into, but you have to grow up some time.

The Onion has an article baring the headling "Free-Spirited Man told to grow up and stop being happy."

I was describing it to my friend, as being a talk that takes the archetypal form of "look son/cupcake, we know for all your life we've been showing you stories and teaching you the importance of standing up to bullies, but the truth is, we don't. Life is all about appeasing bullies in order to survive, they are much much stronger and much much more important than we'd have children believe."

But, while you may disagree with my characterisation of the diversion referred to in lay terminology as "life in the real world" and more technically/specifically the modern economic project, it's not very controversial to point out that what the vast majority of people do with the vast majority of their lives, is not sustainable. Most of what we produce is waste, waste that will be recycled by ecology in a time frame that doesn't sync with the continuation of human society. 

The "real talk" that basically consists of telling people to get in the habit of doing what everyone else is doing, is fake, the real real talk is that we can't keep doing what most people have been doing for very recent history, and actually, most everybody will have to make quite drastic changes, the longer we drag our feet in changing.

But on the microscale, having the perspective of the real-real talk is debilitating. People who produce less waste, are given less food clothing and shelter, less resources, less opportunities.

Most people only snap out of the sensitivity (doing what everyone else is doing) driven habits (doing what you've always done) when berieved. Distant relatives, functional strangers, articulate inanely that death "really puts things in perspective" but in my experience, for most people this perspective is fleeting, they experience life as a series of discreet incidents not incidents that form a greater context.

The silt settles for a while and the waters become clear when the shock of a death disrupts them, but in two to six weeks they can get back to spiking their own cortisol over shit that literally doesn't matter, like traffic congestion.

I've observed that, but it is not my own experience. The cortisol never came back, particularly after James' death, to behave in a way that didn't get me called on in class when I hadn't done my homework. In the bigger picture, it is an adherence to the principle that "things not worth doing are not worth doing well." An antithetical notion to cultures like Japan and maybe South Korea, cultures that are slowly going extinct while simultaneously being fetishized by outsiders.

When my mother called to check in on me, during those years of stagnation, she would ask me a question repeatedly from a place of worry, that I found hard to comprehend "are you getting your needs met?" I think in the manner intended, there was much to my mum's question, in the manner unintended though, a large part of the paradox of having the best years of my life in a bad situation, was because the answer was 'yes' and a big part of that, was the heroic companionship of Usma (and Doki).

I would consciously marvel, and still do, that to some degree, a dog is just a bag of organs on legs, and yet they can evoke such meaning, love and happiness. The perspective made salient by James' death, and exemplified by dogs, is seeing intrinsic worth. I suspect in part James' struggle, though complex and not understood by me, had a contribution of unjust expectations. When he died it hit home hard, my own luxurious position of not needing James to be anything or do anything, just to be. 

As Gabor Mate pointed out, before he became known to US markets and the podcast circuit, human value is not discovered or created but intrinsic. Dogs' achievements are hard to quantify or weigh, those that are not strays or wild, are overwhelmingly employed as companions, the health benefits can be measured, their union is relatively week. Dogs I suspect, routinely extend the lifespan and expand the quality of life for their people, at the cost of their own, particularly in a 21st century, largely post-growth economy, where people are routinely both asset poor, cash poor and time poor and members of the precariat.

As such, for everything that was bad about the situation, I woke up to a beautiful woman, in Mexico, with pups and cats and it was all quite wonderful. The major stress, was not knowing how to keep it going, but I had it and perhaps nobody else appreciated it as much as I, bar Usma. Usma had it too.

She was fully attuned to Ale, but she was also apart from Ale. Usma and me, we were in sync. what I went through in those years, we went through together. I lost my fellow traveller.

Ring Theory, A Response

"Ring theory" regards manners, it is a heuristic. When I first came across it, it appealed to an intuitive sense, I have even shared it or explained it to others, and almost certainly written about it on this blog. 

I no longer agree with it, I think it a flawed model though it could still be a nice idea. For example, from the linked article:

"Susan Silk gives the perfect example in the article:" ~ anonymous author of content on speakinggrief.org

This may be one of the more bizarre things I've ever quoted, being the framing sentence that leads in to a quoted example. The flaw is that ring theory's creators do give a perfect example:

When Susan had breast cancer, we heard a lot of lame remarks, but our favorite came from one of Susan’s colleagues. She wanted, she needed, to visit Susan after the surgery, but Susan didn’t feel like having visitors, and she said so. Her colleague’s response? “This isn’t just about you.” “It’s not?” Susan wondered. “My breast cancer is not about me? It’s about you?”

Now, the original article is behind a pay wall, even though it is not news anymore. I recall it, but can't rely upon, having another perfect example where the concentric circles of ring theory were drawn up such that there was terminally ill patient, patient's husband and work colleague, where the work colleague had an emotional breakdown over the impending death of the patient in front of the husband who supported and comforted her.

This is a perfect contravension of the "support in, dump out" heuristic that makes up ring theory, based on the heirarchical value of closeness.

When James died, it was only about a fortnight prior to the murder of Melbourne comedian Eurydice Dixon. I first heard the news, from one of Eurydice's friends and fellow comedians. Somebody who had actually seen her act, knew her personally, knew her boyfriend (whom I'd met at my friend's gigs, but never since). As such, I had both direct experience of a very private constellation of grief, and indirect experience of a massive, public collective meltdown sparked by a high profile death with a tangential single point of contact that amounted to DM thread where my friend and I compared some notes, once.

That note was the spanner in Ring Theory for me at least. It was an observation that people's reactions, particularly devastation in the face of grief was not a function of emotional closeness and investment in the person at the centre, but a function of how much it resonates with their own unresolved shit.

Again, the resilience model of grief, a mere observation that grief impacts people's ability to function differently, proves itself to me, as superior to both the 5 stages of grief model, and ring theory.

Consider these imperfect examples where ring theory falls apart:

A military veteran's son dies in a drink driving accident the son was responsible for. For the veteran this personal tragedy is but the latest brush with death he must process, for his son's school peers, it is their first real confrontation with their own mortality, at the public memorial several of the son's peers are frankly, losing their minds and badly in need of support due to their inexperience with grief. The bereft father is actually perfectly positioned to offer such support, the egocentrism of youth is by no means going to be the worst thing that happens to him, given the tragic loss of his son itself. His grief cannot be made worse by the incompetence and inexperience and myopia of youth. It can be made better, by his doing something incredibly valuable for his son's friends, even though he will think of his son every day for the rest of his life, and these young people won't until their next brush with mortality, where remembering the loss of their friend they haven't thought about in years might help them, and help them help others. 

Or:

A divorced dad's new partner dies of a sudden brain aneurism. His children had only met her a handful of times as she generally mostly stayed over when the kids were with his mother. The dad's support network rallies, as the person they know closest to the assumed "center" of the ring in ring theory. The thing is he is aware that he can luxuriously indulge his grief by offloading his parental responsibilities for a couple of months, but the benefit to him is outweighed by the cost to his own children.

Or:

Larry and Susie are both close friends of Marty, whose mother has recently died. They see each other for the first time since hearing the news about Mrs Funkhouser. Susie waits for Larry to offer her his condolences while Larry waits for Susie to offer him her condolences. A petty argument ensues.

 Ring Theory I suspect, is precisely wrong moreso than it is approximately right. The fact is that many funerals are attended by dozens, up to hundreds of people. Eurydice's example is one where the media might put a photo of candles and flowers left in the park where she was violently murdered by a man, and splash a headline like "Nation grieves/mourns" and there may be an argument to say the generalisation is fair and that the resemblance to grief or mourning or bereavement is near enough, but I would specifically describe what most people were processing was a story they heard.

What happened to so many people, was that they heard something and had an emotional response. They didn't 'lose' Eurydice because far more people were effected by the story than had ever known she existed. Who they imagined Eurydice to be, reminded them of either themselves or someone they cared about. It reminded them of personal experiences they had banked that were on some level unresolved. It may have even been a story, that brought up other stories that had effected them.

An obvious example being women, just women in general were massively effected by the story of Eurydice's death and I personally witnessed a variety of responses from women in my life that ranged from a mix of stoic realism coupled with frustration and alienation from fellow women, to very public meltdowns that played directly into the negative stereotype of hysteria, behaviour that amounted to women taking to social media and attacking every man they knew.

And so, even if, as a public event surrounding a private grief, we can apply ring theory by saying in terms of identification and relatability, women are closer to the centre of the circle than men, you are then going to get the clunkiness of group identities that not only belie the heterogeneity of women, but are not easily comparible - like older vs younger women, who is on a closer ring? Younger women that suffer from the fear of male violence as they enter sexual maturity, or older women who have suffered and survived male violence reexperiencing it psychology in the wake of this event?

Then the collision of public and private - who is on the more inner ring? The boyfriend of Eurydice or a young woman who is hesitant to pursue their passion for stand up comedy because they feel unsafe?

I would not throw out the ring theory of grief, but I would give it a postmodern treatment, deconstructing the assumptions by examining what power structures they preserve. 

As conceptualised in the original article and repeated by the various websites and blogs that distributed the meme - the structure of the concentric rings is predicated on familial values, privileging direct family members over extended family members, friends over colleagues, colleagues over strangers.

Charitably noticing that no version of the ring theory I've seen, explicitly maps out such a heirarchy, rather implying it should be intuitive, unfortunately I don't think intuitions are up to the task. It is all too often taboo and impolite to mention that someone is actually estranged from their partner or spouse, and it is all too easy to overlook that the partner of a friend attending a funeral, based on their personal history and not the closeness of their relationship to the deceased, may need far more support than the person who knew the deceased.

I would propose that the rings should be arranged fragile in, resilient out. An elderly woman may be the most impacted by the death of her husband, but in many cases it is plausible that the couples children will need more support from their mother, than the mother will need from her children. (Especially with the recent transfers of wealth from young to old, meaning a widower who vacates the master bedroom for her precariate children to stay there while she moves to the guest room may be providing both emotional and practical support to adult children who badly need it).

What does all this have to do with Usma? It's almost certainly the case that Ale is more adversely affected by Usma's death than I am. They were much closer to the point of sharing one heart. But it's also the recognition that I am largely resilient, and while there is much to process, the support I have needed and need going forward in order to feel the feels and function, is not in proportion to how much I love Usma and how much I regret her loss. 

I can lean on the benefits, the luxuries I've had to grieve heavily the loss of grandparents, friends, prior dogs, relationships etc. such that there were many feelings familiar to me, that didn't require processing or understanding, that I saw coming and as such have not been thrown into disarray by. 

I have been able, for example to attend my classes and support my student peers through their anxieties and stresses of having to deliver a training session, when they unlike me, have not lost a precious little dog. I am not doing a disservice to myself, by not disclosing my private grief and (as I feel would be the case) hijacking the emotional resources of our student community. Rather enjoying the dividends of being able to function in such circumstances and feeling I have done no injustice to myself or to Usma.

Focus

When everything I'm feeling makes it hard to understand

That what, what I need to miss

It's what I need to miss... is you ~ The Eels, Going to Your Funeral Part 1.

I've recently become aware that not everyone experiences life as a continuum. They appear to consciously experience life as a series of discrete events, apparently disconnected. These people likely get tremendous value out of sitting down with a therapist and being coached to connect the dots and see patterns.

People tell me, and I experience, a struggle with abandoning context, to just "get to the point" instead of providing the context, contextualising the context and contextualing my contextualising of the context and then giving a few dozen examples to assure you and myself that the point is robust, founded, coherent.

Usma's death is part of a continuum of mortality, it's something else I loved and lost. Her death brings up not just the loss of Usma, but the loss of Doki who is still alive, but in a different town, with a different family and no clear path back to reunion and only at most one or two years younger than Usma. The loss of what was my home, much autonomy, dignity, a relationship...

This cascades in turn, into bringing up other dogs lost, friends lost, family lost. Life lost, time lost.

These I think are the breakdowns we can see. The real breakdowns in ability to function, the people who lose themselves to grief. When it cascades. A reliable predictor, is when what people lose in death, is not just the person of the deceased, but the opportunity to resolve some tension, the opportunity to hear sorry or say sorry.

I have been told by someone, that the death of their elderly, very sickly mother, was the greatest tragedy of their lives. The very antithesis of the Zen story, where a family asks a monk to write them a scroll to hang in their shrine, and the monk writes "The Father dies, the son dies, the grandson dies" and the family are all like "what the fuck is this?" and the monk reassures them "this is a very auspicious wish, for it is the right order of things, any family that faces death in this order is very blessed." or something.

The way an ill, elderly person dying can be a tragedy, is if there was that much opportunity while they were alive to have an honest conversation about what was done and what was said, and everyone just put it off because it was too uncomfortable to stop pretending, and then one managed to run out the clock.

In some ways, Usma's death is tragic. For one I wanted to see her again, dogs in my experience generally adhere to "what have you done for me lately" so while I think she'd remember the smell of me, she'd be less excited to see me again after these years than Ale who just went to the shops. She also feels a little young, though we can't know her exact age she was adopted off the streets.

But that cascading effect her death brings, of bringing up all the other deaths, the losses, the self-reflection. Even though it doesn't result in breakdown, I've simply had too many breakdowns over James and B. and I mourned Bess when Bess died, and Lil when Lil died and Millie when Millie died. 

I still relate to the Eels' lyric above. My emotional regulation and tendencies to intellectualise, despite all the progress in emotional competence I've made, mean that I can forget that what I miss, what I need to miss, is Usma.

That there's an acceptable, but fundamental injustice to the nature of this world, that I could never express what I feel for Usma, because you know, she's a little dog. There are many like her, but she was mine.  

Acknowledging Tedious People

If I had to guesstimate, I'd say maybe as much as half the population are just not dog people. Those people are to be readily expected to exist and aren't going to get someone being upset by the death of a dog like people who don't get sports don't understand that people can feel emotions over the outcome of a game.

I feel a dog person is far more likely to be anti-cat than the reverse, and frankly I haven't come across any chauvinistic cat owners that might say 'good, that's one less of them' whereas the reverse phenomena of chauvinistic dog preferers have oft stated an abject hatred of cats to the point of dancing on their graves.

The truly tedious people are the ones who do not understand the algebra and subsequently will remark, almost with a sense of pride or superiority 'it's just a dog...' making a comparison to typically, some person they lost, some person your grief inconveniences or the anxieties they feel about their own children.

In many ways they have answered their own puzzlement astutely. People grieve dogs hard because they are 'just a dog' which is to say remarkably uncomplicated compared to the people in our lives and it is rare, if not pathological to feel ambivalent about a dog.

Let me say for the benefit of the anxieties of these tedious people who help none in these situations with their skewed perspectives: yes, your kids are objectively more important than my dog. They are your kids though, and I don't like them as much as my dog. In the rock-paper-scissors of it, as a believer in the basic decency of humanity, I would sacrifice my own life to save your children. What I wouldn't sacrifice however, is my dog for your children. Frankly if you can't control your children in the presence of dogs, or keep them on a leash and they get bit, I think it is your kids who should be put down, I don't know what the answer is to 21st century parenting's shortfalls, but it feels like a good place to start.

A Thought Experiment

You've struggled with God all your life, or maybe you've looked up at the stars and wondered if we are truly alone in this universe, maybe you just seek answers to deep existential questions like 'if life is absurd why do I persist in living?' or 'what does the end of Inception mean?' 

Remember the Simpsons episode where Homer and Apu go to the first Kwik-E-Mart and it is at the end of a long journey on top of a mountain presumably somewhere in the Himilayas?

Well picture yourself as Moses climbing mount Sinai, or Musashi fighting his way through Japanese swordmasters, or a Space explorer flying to a habitable exoplanet in a distant solar system in search of Alien intelligence, or Misty Copeland having a transcendent moment dancing solo and interfacing with reality itself, or just on your deathbed having visions of a tunnel of light as all your neurons fire off before going dark and...

Tell me if you can think of something better to meet at the end of these journeys than this:

sourced here.

I don't know if you'll agree with me, like you'd be slapping your own head thinking 'duh!' right now, but I do think you'll struggle to imagine a better outcome. I also think (unless you are one of those, not so much cat-person as carpet-person or couch-person, in which case you might think it obvious that who someone would want to meet is Martha Stewart for whom I'd hope you find it super easy to imagine how increadibly disappointing and disheartening that would be for a plurality of your fellow humans) you'll find it easy to make your own sense of discovering that Yoda is a warm dog.

I'm not anti-SETI and I appreciate those who need a more intelligible wisdom tradition to get through the long dark night of the soul, but I'd emphasize that our best friend has a pretty special and unique place in human history for a reason. 

Now, I probably need to specify, this dog you meet, isn't a talking dog, nor a magic dog. It's just a friendly dog that likes pats and play. It's vocation is the same as the majority of working dogs - companionship. It is there to adopt you and be adopted by you. It's survival is dependent on clicking, on meshing, on 'getting' you and its pretty damn good at it. 

It has no wisdom to confer beyond its lived example, its intelligence caps out at somewhere near a human 5 year old, it has to win you over despite its breath, its somewhat vapid interests, its taste in food, its penchant for rolling in stinky shit, the craps it lays and its habit of licking its own genitals and your face.

Yet the covenant that homo sapiens has with canis familiaris is I think one of the most wonderful things about the universe, and we have it, what better thing could we hope to find - plausibly some kind of interlocuter, some perspective other than the human condition. But I think it will be a struggle for life to ever experience itself in a better way than that of man and domesticated dog.

And it's so much better if, while you have it, you do not take it for granted:

from the wikipedia page "human-canine bond" Basile Morin, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Conclusion

Gracias Usma. Descansar mi amor.