Yesterday “Tater”, our beloved rat of more than three years, passed away. I was very fond of him; he had a sweet disposition that never faltered, not even in the last two days of his life when he appeared to be suffering immensely.
This has been a difficult Autumn. In September our budgerigar “Aldo” contracted diabetes and passed away at the age of three and a half, quite young for a budgie. We took him to a small animal veterinarian who did everything he could for him including medicine and a special diet. We watched Aldo struggle and then, while I was in Maryland for my mother’s birthday, he died.
I loved and cared deeply for both Aldo and Tater and they always were a joyful presence in our home. I feel the loss of their company acutely; there are two large holes in our home now.
I have not written about Aldo until now because I was not sure what it was I wanted to say about him. And with Tater’s passing I also feel a similar uncertainty about what to say. To some, it probably would seem absurd to eulogize a budgerigar or a rat because eulogies seem a little odd when talking about animals; I think this is because the eulogy as a form requires us to impute human motives and attributes to animals, something I think really is not appropriate. It isn’t appropriate because I have too much respect for animals to believe that I need to dignify them by making them seem more human. Animals have dignity no matter what we may think or say.
What I want to talk about instead is something that Aldo and Tater showed me through their deaths. I watched them suffer and, as is customary, the subject of euthanasia came up. Should I put Aldo down because his diabetes can’t be cured or easily treated? Should Tater be put down because he is ill and old for a rat? My answer in both cases was “No.”
As I watched Tater die yesterday I was moved by his struggle to stay alive. It seemed to me that what was happening to him was that his life was being wrenched away and he was not voluntarily surrendering. I did not want to interfere with that struggle; I did not feel it was my place to decide that his life should be cut short because he appears to me to be suffering. I also don’t believe that suffering must be ended by death; that deprives an animal of the individual struggle to retain their life and hold off death even for just a little longer.
I recognize that what I am talking about is an idea that is common not only in religious thought but also liberal political theory. It is the idea that a person is a total being and has a personal, individual relationship with God. Also, it is the idea that a person has liberty over their own body and, as such, cannot cede that authority to another except voluntarily. Animals would appear to stand outside of this contractual, political approach to rights. After all, the right to life is a political right that has been established in no small part from a long, rich and diverse religious tradition that holds that the individual has no final authority except God and that dying is a deeply personal and individual matter when it comes to the struggle of both flesh and spirit.
Now death is also a social matter and the lives of those around a dying person (or animal) are deeply affected by it. Because of this we have a role in our society for wills (notably living wills) that can provide instruction to our loved ones about what we want when we are ill and no longer in a position to clearly articulate our wishes. This is a complicated issue that often divides people on the basis of faith, culture and politics. I find my views on the subject complex, as I think the views of most people are on what is probably the most personal matter we face as living beings.
When you apply these matters to animals the question becomes more complicated because animals cannot offer legal consent. In other words, while there is a push to extend rights to animals under the law (a push I support in principle) it is not a simple matter of recognizing rights because, in the event of an animal’s illness, we face the matter of who should make the choice as to whether the animal is to suffer longer and eventually die or whether out of mercy their “owner” (a term I dislike) chooses to end their life.
I do not propose to offer any simple answers or “manifesto” on the matter. What concerns me is the question of suffering. Watching Tater die, I was frustrated by what I could not do to help him become more comfortable or what I could not do to heal him. Perhaps it simply was not my place either to save him or prolong his life. I opted for being with him, hoping that I would be beside him when he died (and I was). These choices were my own, they were about me. And while I wanted to come to his aid, I recognized that he was encased in his illness and that any assumptions I might make about what he was experiencing were necessarily separated not only by the lack of a common language between us, but also by the apparent distance between what you could call his conscious self, personality or “soul” and his dying body. I wonder if what he and I held in common was that we were separated from one another by that body.
What I was left with was a sense that the struggle in Tater’s body was not my own; I was bearing witness to it. It would be presumptuous of me to make a decision on his behalf because I did not want to see him endure further pain.
Suffering is a deeply complex and mysterious experience to me. As I have grown older I have become less comfortable with “solutions” to end suffering because I have a sense, ephemeral as it often is, of the limits of my own mind, awareness and rationality. I don’t mean to suggest that my limitations should lead me to be suspicious of the efforts of those smarter, better educated and more generous than myself, I mean only that I recognize the limits of perspective, empathy and selfhood. This is in part why I am not fully comfortable with empirical answers to complex problems designed to make the world progressively better and more just even though that it is the world I want to work for.
I am the child of healers; my mother is a nurse and my father is a doctor. I hold a deep respect for their work and their service to those in need, in pain and requiring healing. I also have many years of study and teaching behind me now and have grown to value the hard and often thankless work of those who strive to find answers to the most inflexible problems. I cast no aspersions on those who believe in “progress.”
But what is perhaps the most profound question I face is how to respect life and the deeply personal, direct and embodied relationship all beings have with life itself. When I hear about projects to make our world richer, safer and more efficient I think of the lives it will save and the lives it will cost and I come back, again and again, to the problem of authority: who has the power to decide these matters?
The animals in my life have shown me what life is. Their dependence upon me for love, shelter and nourishment has humbled me to a degree I never thought possible. I can offer them no greater tribute, no higher praise and no more heartfelt “thank you” than to acknowledge this.
This was originally written 4 November 2011.
Jeremy Nathan Marks
