Two days after Amethyst’s death, I got a card in the mail
from the vet. A purple pastel heart enclosed the image of a cat’s paw, itself
in turn enclosing a small red heart. Opening the card, the sentiment read,
“always in your heart…a devoted friend and companion who will never be
forgotten. Thinking of you,” Below the sentiment was the signature of the vet
and his technician. Until I opened this card, it hadn’t occurred to me that I
had never experienced grief. I had lost a dog as a kid, and that was bad
enough. I was a kid, and the dog was being relinquished to animal control for
having bitten another kid. Though I was upset enough to have learned that pet
ownership was fraught with consequences and emotional pain, I did not, by
virtue of immaturity, experience grief in full at that point. Who has died in
my life? My parents, even as of this writing, are still living. I am sanguine
about their survival, as is my wife about her parents. We were, as I have said,
sanguine about the prospects of Amethyst’s survival. With respect to our
parents, “we are dreading that call.” As a teen, I knew a woman, a classmate,
who died in an automobile accident. We went to the funeral as a class. But I
didn’t know her well enough to grieve. Not too long before Amethyst’s death,
Del’s sister died. She died much too young of liver failure and the resultant
organ breakdown, similar in nature to the catastrophic systemic breakdown that
killed “the cat.” I had spoken to Del’s sister only once, surreptitiously,
while she was going on and on by long distance phone call about peculiarities
of her difficult life. I had the phone because Del handed it to me, wanting
confirmation that her sister was not making much sense. I confirmed this and
handed the phone back. She was already suffering, in that florid human way, an
unraveling of mind and body. Del had gone off to visit her on what turned out
to be her deathbed. She made it before the end of heartbeat, but not before the
end of consciousness. She returned and I witnessed her grief. From the outside,
it has an unfamiliar shape. Grief looks very different than it feels. I have
lived such a lucky life! The death of celebrities might shock, but I don’t fall
into the trap of thinking that I know them, no matter how much I might know and
love the work. I have never been close to anyone who has died. The card from
the vet pushed me over the edge and into an unknown void of despair in the span
of time it took to read the sentiment and glance at the artwork. By the time I
put the card on the mantle, I was no longer able to keep my emotions in the box
that I had been trying to keep them in.
My Summer of Grief had begun with the usual liberation
from the weekday necessity of commuting and working at the University. Off
contract, I turned to my fancies. This particular summer, I tried and failed to
read a book by Foucault on the meaning of things/words. I didn’t have the
concentration for it. I recorded a series of pieces, accompanying myself on
guitar, recording on magnetic tape rather than computer. One of these had the
refrain “Requiem for Amethyst.” It is actually a song sung to Amethyst, who was
still alive, napping in the next room, lamenting her death in advance, perhaps
preparing me for the eventuality of the “transition” that I greatly feared and
surely anticipated. I re-read Tom Wolfe’s “Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” and
looked at related materials. I was seeking escape. Was I haunted by a
premonition of the emotional storm that loomed on the horizon? Something like that was certainly on my mind,
not very far beneath the surface. I re-read Julian Jaynes’ “The Origin of
Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.” Jaynes’ monumental work,
as indicated by its monumental title, is a bold hypothesis that accounts for
the physical and psychological origins of our familiar narrative-weaving
mentality. Jaynes posits that we did not always think this way. He describes an
ancient mentality quite different: once we heard voices, particularly when
stressed, and acted much more automatically than we do as conscious beings. He
calls the ancient mentality ‘the bicameral mind’, in support of his thesis of a
neurological basis for the disembodied commanding voice. Jaynes writes about
the sources of stress in ancient times. One of the most significant stresses
was the death of a powerful person. The ancient Egyptians, a bicameral people,
buried their kings complete with their retinues and pets. The moment of death
was not apparently understood as the end of communication. The dead continued
to “speak;” why should they not continue to have their usual needs for food and
companionship? Such a mentality persists in us in vestige, perhaps more than we
would admit. Such vestigial bicameral experiences range from the occasional
peculiar sensation to florid schizophrenia. I was about to have a very Jaynesian
lesson in the power of grief to prompt small ghosts.
Back and forth the memories dart, like eyes in the skull
of a frightened person. There is no way to bring the dead back to life by
constructing a narrative. My memories of my dead companion animal are too
numerous. She was part of my daily life for seven years, and when she died
there was a persistence of memory. I saw her out of the corner of my eye, as I
had when she was alive. I had to return to consciousness to remember that she
was gone. It was not hard to remember putting her stiff, still warm corpse in
the cardboard box. It was also not hard to remember her lifting her head in
greeting, or appearing from around a corner to enter the room I inhabited. She
seemed to be just around the corner still. It didn’t take much, perhaps a bit
of fluff (cat fur?) in the eye to get her ghostly form to appear. Not the least
of the Jaynesian effects was that I continued to converse with her. My most
common remark was to the effect that I knew she didn’t really want to leave me,
especially not the human food in crinkling packages, but that I also knew that
she was tired of the cage her body became, and she was not wanting to stick
around to put up with that level of discomfort and disability.
