Interlude: old dog, ice cream

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Last night, a night deep in July, my dog got lost facing the corner, trying to leave a room that in fact he knew by heart. It was as though the room had turned. Since he was a dachshund and therefore unable by definition to back up and start again, he just faced the cul de sac and shivered. He had somehow wandered and gotten lost. When he saw me he sadly wagged his tail. I picked him up and pointed him the right way but it still didn't feel right, in fact still doesn't. Once you're in one of those turned around

places you can never really back out. This is death. We all know what death looks like when it approaches. This thing is never just approaching someone else. The approach approaches everyone. So much scary solidarity is too much to feel. And yet earlier I'd been so mad at him for wandering when there was clearly noplace to go. Wandering compulsively -- but I too am that. Compulsive. And getting mad at the old is about the ugliest and most futile of errors. Then it made me shudder to

think how mad I'd been at my mother (July 4th 2005) for refusing the chocolate ice cream she loved, when as one now sees, she knew that she was dying and I of course didn't or by nature of my role,

simply couldn't. Proving that I wasn't really mad but deeply scared. I mean, I was in a corner too, sharing the feeling that I was required to deny. And really only fools can imagine that sharing emotions like this one can have any connection with assuagement. These are not better for being shared. I swear, there he was, shivering in the corner. No emotional response to this would be

of any help. Something else would be needed. Not "I know how you feel." Please not that.

I'd say I can't evade the horrible grip that that corner had. or has and had and has. The sense it gave that death had a beauty and a meaning from which the living were not only excluded but had chosen to be excluded. But so rule-bound is the fact of living that in fact when we the living "choose" to see death as a great evil it is not a choice we have made but the role we are absolutely ethically obligated to play and so this fear involves no choice at all. Neither we nor the dead have really chosen.

And so I was ethically obligated to insist that my mother eat, while she was bound (from a much deeper and, I will insist, a truer place) to resist and say no.

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