MUSINGS ON THE DEATH OF A DOG

There are moments in my life when I wonder if what I am experiencing is not solely in my imagination. I wonder if what I see, hear, and feel are events that others also see, hear, and feel. Am I only in my mind? Somehow, reading a number of books assures me that there are really things out there and not merely inside my brain. That there are other people, living or dead, that have ideas that are similar to mine. Or if not similar, their ideas raise issues and give me points to think about and ponder. I am particularly conscious about Kierkegaard’s Concept of Dread, giving me the feeling of angst about my human condition.

I had been through the deaths of my father, mother and two sisters. However, it was only when our dog Conan, a half Japanese Spitz half poodle, died when I seriously wondered about the existence of souls. What are the stuff of souls made of -- energy? When Conan the dog died it struck me that while the physical body becomes lifeless, his life force must have gone somewhere. If life is made of the same stuff, whether human, animal or plant, we must be immersed, not in discrete clumps of energy, but something else in an energy field. God? However, we have such phenomena as ghostings, where the likeness of the persons are seen and recognized as distinctly as someone known to have existed before. These are not perceptions unique to an individual but are shared with others.

I’ve always wondered how it is to die. Perhaps there is truth to the pain of being punished for sins committed in life. Somehow, I also think there is oblivion and forgetting. Shakespeare was very candid about the question, especially in his famous soliloquy of Hamlet. Life is the interlude of remembrances of things experienced in our present existence but begin and end in eternal forgetting. And yet, while I walked the streets and see the flowering bushes and the luxuriant green of the trees lining the streets of Marcelo Green Village, I could not help imagine the nostalgia of being beyond living. After death, can we really remember our lives spent on earth? Still, I could not put so much belief in reincarnation and the claim that we can remember past previous lives. Most of the regressions, the process of being hypnotized to raise past memories, always result in persons being pharaohs, or queens, or Roman warriors (like Patton) that could have been influenced by readings on history.

On the other hand, why not wonder what life is? We think about death and dissolution. We think and hope for immortality and endlessness. But about life, what is it? It takes nine months of gestation for a human being—shorter time spans for some species, longer for others—but the process is the same: fertilization, gestation, birth. However, even the beginning or even before fertilization there must have existed something that has to unite with something to “become.” At the more physical level, we have come to know charged particles that combine to produce more complicated organizations that could even become pulsating entities that have life. Plants, animals, men.

What is life really? Coupled with consciousness, awareness, intelligence. To know, has it really many levels? Conan, my dead dog, surely had consciousness, awareness. He even manifested having a conscience and a seemingly deep sense of guilt. He used to slink away with a guilty look if he somehow accidentally hurt someone among our family. Or he knew with whom he could feint ferocity and play being aggressive. He knew enough to understand my signal “Green Cross” (the rubbing alcohol) for him to leave the room or else get a spray of the liquid, which he detested. But even when he obeyed me, he would turn around at the doorway, face me and growl his objections. Why was he the gentle, harmless dog that he was? His life, what was it?

What is our life? An awakening from nothing? And to die, to sleep once more into nothing. Life is not merely the accumulation of atoms in different combinations to last for a particular duration depending on the binding force of the constituent building blocks of a living entity. What is the purpose of all the studies and the accumulation of knowledge turned over to us by those who lived before us? Do we really need them in the state of our nothingness? In the prospect of eternity, does it matter for man to acquire knowledge? And for what? How could his knowledge of Earth matter in the enormous expanse of the universe?

Awaiting the end of life, nothing seems to be important anymore. I wonder why we ever trouble ourselves accumulating honor, knowledge and wealth. What are the important things really? Jesus truly said not to place priority on things of this world.