Canines and Death

Thoughts on mortality and the road to silence

Photo by dan carlson on Unsplash

I love the fall. Crumpled, brittle red and orange leaves everywhere; that late November chill in the air. I thought this as I walked two dogs this morning. I am dog-house-sitting for neighbors literally three houses up from my apartment, in Santa Barbara. I live in a little 400-square-foot studio above the garage of a house. On the plus-side I also have a private 500-square-foot balcony, where my Tuxedo cat likes to parade around wildly, prevented from leaping onto the roof via tall chicken-wire surrounding the whole area. (Like San Quentin prison.)

Today was a busy one. Three dog walks in a row—boom boom boom. I made some dough though, which is nice. I had the two small dogs I mentioned, who I walked in my neighborhood. Then the English Mastiff/Frenchie combo in Goleta. And finally my 155-pound black Great Dane, at U.C.S.B. extended housing. I logged just under seven miles in total. This is why I cherish dog-walking: It calms me; I get paid; AND I get good exercise/calorie-burn. Usually I listen to political and/or philosophical/intellectual podcasts as I walk. Today it was a 2-plus hour conversation between philosopher, neuroscientist and NYT-bestselling author Sam Harris and New Yorker writer and Georgetown computer scientist professor Cal Newport. They discussed the inanity and absurdism of Twitter and social media in general and why its gotten us where we are now, aka fractured into lean, ruthless, angry, ideological tribes. Fascinating.

Anyway, last night I drove nine minutes across town (the stars were brilliant out where I live, along Highway 192 at the foot of the Los Padres mountains) to meet a potential new dog-house-sitting client. (I found out today I got the gig!) This will be an eight day sit. Good money. As I drove there, I paused the music I was listening to (Counting Crows), and suddenly felt this rush of sadness pulse through me from head to toe, culminating in a gut-punch to my solar plexus. It was my father. The idea that he’s going to die. And soon, most likely. Three months? Six? A year? We don’t know. We’re waiting for the oncologist to call today, in fact, for more information re the “clinical trials” we’re supposed to consider. (Surgery and chemo are too risky at this juncture.)

As I drove, winding along suburban streets and then jumping briefly onto Highway 101 South, I realized roads had always been a meaningful metaphor in my life. Literally, too. Throughout my twenties I drove across and hitchhiked across and around the United States. Roads always represented freedom to me. Ultimate freedom. Trains did, too. (I also took Amtrak across America half a dozen times in my twenties.) Those long, narrow, twisting roads of my golden youth growing up in Ojai, and the profound, Kerouac-like open highways of my terrible, tumultuous, tortured twenties. Roads that get dark from surrounding forests, making you feel alone and scared. Backcountry roads where you worry you’ll get stuck or blow a tire. Unknown freeways across cities in this nation, like the 405 and 101 in Los Angeles, or FDR in New York City, or Highway 5 going through Portland, Oregon, and like a vein north-south along all of California and the Pacific Northwest.

I thought of all the roads I’d taken in my life, and all the roads I would take in the future. I remembered driving trips as a kid, to Baja, to Montana, to Lake Nacimiento, to coastal Oregon, to Washington. I saw my father driving many of those trips, clear blue eyes, pale face, balding dome, even when I was a kid.

I saw my father holding my hand at the Amtrak station in Oxnard, north of LA, when I was five, waiting for the next train north to see my grandmother in Bend. I remembered the drives along Pacific Coast Highway during Christmastime when I was young to see my paternal grandfather and his mistress in their massive home atop a hill in Malibu, the floor-to-ceiling windows showing off the sparkling blue Pacific down below and the sinuous, snaking ribbon of highway along it. Grandpa died when I was 17, in the year 2000, just when the drinking and trouble was beginning. One chapter ends, another one begins.

Where my father is going next is his final road. I cannot follow him there. This will be where the road ends for us. Sitting there last night, parked and waiting to meet this new potential client, I understood how permanent and final this reality is. My father will leave me, never to return. I will go on living, making mistakes, being in love, reading, writing, contributing in whatever little ways that I can. Several friends of mine have died in the past. Two grandparents. My childhood best friend’s father—who was like a second dad to me—of a rare skin cancer in 2014. But this is going to be my first real heartbreak. My first sincere death. The one that honestly, deeply hits home.

My father and I have always been estranged best friends. We’ve never really understood each other. I’m all artist; he’s a computer engineer. I’m very much in touch with my emotions and am an oversharer; he keeps his emotions tight to his chest and keeps his secrets even closer. He’s traditional; I’m unconventional. Different generations; my dad is 37 years older than me. A Boomer versus an Original Millennial. He’s never grasped why I am the way I am, or why I do the things I do.

And yet we share a profound bond of love. That has always been there, even during my angry, fractured, malevolent teens and early twenties, when the bottle did most of my screaming for me. My father is a good man, no question about that. I may not have felt “understood” or “seen and heard” by him, but I know he always loved me and he’s always been there. Maybe not “there” emotionally, but “there” in other ways, even if in silence. Silence, in fact, was our closest communication; our secret language. A respectful road we mutually agreed to walk upon together.

Now his road will lead him to ultimate silence.

And that is okay. That is normal. Natural. Good, even. Human. One day I, too, will drive the car off the cliff into the silent abyss of Glorious Nothingness. As Nabokov wrote in Speak, Memory (his memoir): “Life is but a brief crack of light between two abysses.”

Indeed.

With love and gratitude and joy.

Michael Mohr