A MOST BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY IN RUINS
“Darkness fell, not the dark of a moonless or cloudy night, but as if the lamp had been put out in a dark room.” --Pliny the Younger, in his account of the eruption of Vesuvius (1)
February 3, 2018: Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine
My girl left today.
The fragile cage of her ribs encloses a sacred rhythm that slows, and stops. I spoon her, lay my cheek against her shoulder and tell her over and over again, You saved me. You saved me. You saved me.
I used to get all up in her sweet face and tell her, “You can never die. You can never leave me.” I mouthed the silvering fur on her muzzle, as I imagined her wolf ancestors would have, inhaled the scent of her breath. Accustomed to my insistence on such intimacies, she’d sigh and turn her snout away and prod me with a paw. You’re so embarrassing.
But she does die.
She leaves me.
I carry her empty leash back out to the van, and my husband Johan drives home, tears crusting on our faces, wordless. Snow is on the ground, the grayish, gravelly snow of midwinter. Leaden sky.
Anyone who has grieved a pet knows the terrible, disorienting aftermath, but losing a large dog is especially awful. Daisy was eighty-five pounds at her healthiest, and when we lay down together, she was longer than I am tall. Her absence is bigger than me, and I plummet in, unable –and unwilling—to claw out.
In bed that night, I huddle on my side, weeping again: mouth open, body shaking, but without noise. Johan reaches over to hold me and steady me against the sobs and I manage to choke out, “I’m all alone.” He retreats, irritated, and flops back over to his side of the bed. I know that he is frustrated at my inability to see myself as part of a team, to rely on him. But I can’t expend the energy to turn back toward him and beg to be held.
In 2013, I survived a school shooting. I came home that evening empty-handed: my school bag, phone, laptop, purse, keys were all at the crime scene. But Daisy was there. She was there that night and every day and sunset afterwards.
I listen for her breath and her sighs, the lullaby that sings me back to sleep, and there’s only silence.
There is a space in me that only she could fit and my girl is gone.
The day after my first husband Tom confessed his affair, I texted my friends Tracy and Christine, and said My life looks like the ashes of Pompeii. On bloody knees I wailed soundlessly, surveying the ruin, unable to discern anything that resembled a landmark, a way home.
Pliny the Younger left behind the only eyewitness accounts of the eruption of Vesuvius. His letters to Cornelius Tacitus are brief and lyrical, horrifying and clever, heavy with despair. Archaeologists have recently concluded that the true cause of death for most inhabitants of Pompeii and Herculaneum, destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in
A.D. 79 was not from ash asphyxiation but from the sudden blast of searing heat from the volcano. Temperatures careened to 570 degrees Fahrenheit in a split second, according to National Geographic. People were buried afterward; they incinerated first.
A deeper darkness prevailed than in the thickest night.*
February 14, 2018
I stagger through eleven days without Daisy, attempting to stabilize myself in this new, hideous world. I see other people with dogs and I want to strangle them because my baby is dead.
That afternoon, NPR reports on a shooting at a high school in Florida. Multiple casualties, they say. I am driving home and I must pull over, because I am suddenly keening, without breath—a hail of ash rains down and smothers me. I can’t turn it off, I can’t change the station, because I know, I know, I know how this is all going to unfold. I know that there will be a surge of outrage and indignance and then the rest of the country will fall back into its blessed somnolence; that there is now a queue of teachers sentenced to years of therapy, just like me; that nightmares will nest in the minds of children forever; that alcoholics will reach for the bottles after years of hard-won sobriety; that the wicked sorcery of trauma will ensnare not just individuals but this entire culture, guaranteeing a next time.
You might hear the shrieks of women, the screams of children, and the shouts of men; some calling for their children, others for their parents, others for their husbands, and seeking to recognize each other by the voices that replied; one lamenting his own fate, another that of his family; some wishing to die, from the very fear of dying; some lifting their hands to the gods; but the greater part convinced that there were now no gods at all, and that the final endless night of which we had heard had come upon the world.*
This Valentine’s Day is also Ash Wednesday: the first day of Lent, the space of penitence, reflection, and austerity before the Resurrection. The Episcopal liturgy for the day, in the Book of Common Prayer, includes Psalm 51: Cast me not away from your presence, and take not your Holy Spirit from me.
Dead children and teachers. Dead dogs. I imagine a map of my country unfurled, a wasteland of soot and singed bracken, desolate, forsaken. The Holy Spirit has fled.
I stay up late that night, bouncing back and forth between the web sites for CNN, MSNBC, NPR, the New York Times, the Miami Herald. I watch the videos posted on Twitter and listen to the gunfire and screams and muffled sobs. I remember the gunshots that stopped my class on April 12, 2013, my own students’ faces as we cowered behind parked cars after sprinting from our room. Blood on the carpet, star-shaped bullet holes, splintered wood, crime tape.
Daisy’s bed is on the floor beside me and it is empty and there are seventeen dead people in Parkland and this is the first school shooting since my own that I have to endure without her.
During all this scene of horror, not a sigh, or expression of fear, escaped me, had not my support been grounded in that miserable, though mighty, consolation, that all mankind were involved in the same calamity, and that I was perishing with the world itself.*
After I left Tom, I moved with Daisy and my long-haired tortoiseshell cat, Olivia, into a tiny green house at the deep bend of a leafy county road, with a culvert in the front yard that rushed with water after a spring rain. Four rooms and a bath: a dollhouse, a temple. I did not realize how fiercely I had been clenching my breath until I exhaled in that house. I intuited quickly that there was no going back to him. Once I knew I was safe, there was no incitement to return to peril. In the days after the shooting, too, I sat with Daisy in the front yard and listened to the water, the wind in the leaves, breathed in the smell of the air before rain. Her ruby coat glowed in the sunshine. Her fur was warm beneath my cheek, her frame sturdy and reassuring.
“You can never leave me,” I told her. “You can never die.” She tethered me to the world. With her and the cat, I believed that there might be peace again. The three of us were perfectly safe in that house, as safe as houses.
A few weeks after her death, a package arrives from an unfamiliar address. I hold the heavy box for a moment, trying to remember whether I have ordered something. I squint closer at the return address. It is from a veterinary cremation service.
On my knees again, weeping. The center will not hold.
Her ashes are sealed in a gleaming wooden box with a brass nameplate on the front: Daisy. The box is swathed in a night-blue velvet drawstring bag. I had imagined that I would bury her remains somewhere in the back yard, planting a tree or flowering bush in her memory, but the box is too pretty, too carefully done, to bury. Cheryl Strayed swallowed a mouthful of her mother’s ashes before burying them. I would have consumed Daisy’s. I would have done anything to keep her with me.
I am not sure I can live.
Poet and funeral director Thomas Lynch writes, “The corpse, the grave, the tomb and fire became fixtures in the life of faith’s most teachable moment. We learned to deal with death by dealing with our dead. It is by bearing our dead from one station to the other…that we learn to bear death itself.”2
Daisy’s was not the first euthanasia I had witnessed. Seven years earlier, Tom and I had borne our Saint Bernard, Sam, out of this life. The veterinarian came to our house for the procedure, and when he was dead we lay his body on a blanket and carried him up to a corner of the property just before the treeline, on a hill where we could look toward the ridge and valleys beyond. We had known his death was coming, knew the precise date and time (and what a terrible burden it was, to watch the hours count down, knowing, knowing that he did not know).
Tom had dug Sam’s grave the day before. Even now I can recall him shirtless and sweating in the August heat as he swung the pickaxe at the rocky soil to hollow out a space deep enough for our boy. I watched him from the kitchen window, choking back howls of premature anguish, knowing that he too was weeping up there on the hill. We ordered a river stone engraved with Sam’s name and the years of his life, 2002-2011, and planted a silver maple at his grave.
Daisy’s death struck me like a viper. I did not get up that winter morning thinking that I would lose her. The ground was frozen. I had not prepared a resting place for her. (How strong was her dark body! How beautiful is her unshakeable sleep.) (3)
In Zimbabwean writer Peter Godwin’s memoir When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, his father has to be declared Hindu at the eleventh hour in order to be cremated; the mortuary in Harare is running out of diesel, and if the bodies begin to decompose, Godwin’s father will have to be buried in a mass grave on the edge of the city. Having promised his father a cremation, Godwin is forced to turn to the Hindu community. The shroud slips from his father’s face as they are placing him on the pyre. And Godwin, as the eldest son, lights the flame himself. “She is a good fire,” the attendant tells him. “She burns well.”
Bearing our dead from one station to another. It is one thing to bury an elderly dog, or a father whose long life comes to its natural end, but I will never accustom myself to the stories of burying children murdered at school. They should not be carried from their classrooms to the morgue to the cemetery. That is a twisted Passion play. What is a thought or a prayer worth amid the carnage of children’s bodies?
“In cultures where cremation is practiced in public,” writes Lynch, “among Hindus and Buddhists in India and Japan, its powerful metaphoric values—purification, release, elemental beauty and unity—add to the religious narratives that the bereaved embrace…. The fireside, like the graveside, is made holy by the death of saints.” (4)
At Yogaville, the ashram I visit a few times a year, the swamis press holy ash on our foreheads after satsang, the evening celebration of music and chanting that brings us closer to the spirit of Satchidananda, the ashram’s founding guru. I love the incense-scented ash, accompanied by prasad, a tiny paper cup of almonds and candied ginger, blessed by one of the monks. David Morris, in The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, writes that trauma survivors often feel incandescent with suffering, as though they’ve been irradiated, while others seem oblivious to the glow of that pain. I’m always reminded of that on Ash Wednesday: how the print of ash makes the invisible, visible: the penitence, the willingness to collapse and yield up our frailty to a blind, grasping hope that one day strength will flood our limbs and we’ll walk upright again.
“Has God a hand in this?” asks Annie Dillard, after a child’s face is burned in a plane crash. “Then it is a good hand. But has he a hand at all? Or is he a holy fire burning self-contained for power’s sake alone?” (5)
For all who have died in the hope of the Resurrection, reads the Episcopal liturgy.
For all who have died in hope.
For all who have died.
Italicized text with * are all from the letters of Pliny the Younger to Cornelius Tacitus.
“The holy fire,” The Christian Century, 6 April 2010.
Mary Oliver, “Her Grave.”
Lynch, “The holy fire.”
“God’s Tooth” in Holy The Firm, 48.
