But even if we’re not psychologically capable of fully comprehending our own death, we are able to feel its presence, however dimly sensed or no matter how imperfectly we might be able to articulate it. Even without staring directly at the sun, it’s possible to point to its place in the sky. Literature is humankind’s best record of who it is—most everything else is, at best, either reality-corroding clichés or, at worst, egocentric self-advertising—and the most compelling evocations of death in literature (whether in the form of novels, short stories, poems, memoirs, or essays) approximate Mallarme’s Symbolist poetic dictum: “Paint, not the object, but the effect it produces.” We might not possess the psychological equipment to take a clear and definitive photograph of death, but, by snapping away at its varied effects, we can know the unknowable a little bit better, just as the mystic doesn’t speak directly of “God” but, instead, of God’s manifestation in nature, music, or the experience of love.
It’s because impression, metaphor, and inference (and their employment in literature) are superior to purely conceptual thinking in disclosing some of death’s mystery that philosophers tend to obfuscate more often than illuminate. Art is empirical and therefore the ideal tool for handling something that is understood, to whatever degree, on a primarily experiential level. “No reader who doesn’t actually experience, who isn’t made to feel . . . is going to believe anything the . . . writer merely tells him,” Flannery O’Connor counselled. “The first and most obvious characteristic of [good writing] is that it deals with reality through what can be seen, heard, smelt, tasted, and touched.”
Even philosophers who make a point of differentiating themselves from other thinkers deemed cripplingly logocentric tend to double death’s riddle by obscuring it in a mess of twisted syntax and near-meaningless nouns and verbs. Here’s Martin Heidegger taking a crack at the subject with characteristic Heideggerian clarity and linguistic grace: “The existential project of an authentic being-toward-death must thus set forth the factors of such a being which are constitutive for it as an understanding of death—in the sense of being toward this possibility without fleeing it or covering it over.” And, yes, many German philosophers do seem to believe that it’s a virtue to construct prose that goes down about as well as a tinfoil sandwich, but here’s a sample sentence from Being and Nothingness, France’s most well-known twentieth-century philosopher’s, Jean Paul Sartre’s, magnum opus: “Death is not my possibility of no longer realizing a presence in the world but rather an always possible nihilation of my possibles which is outside my possibilities.” Got that? Have the scales begun to fall from your eyes? One immediately thinks of Friedrich Nietzsche, one German philosopher who did write with perspicuity, elegance, and even (rare for his profession) wit: “They all muddy their waters to make them appear deep.” No matter how impressive their academic credentials or how long their list of prized publications, as the nineteenth-century man of letters Jules Renard avowed, “So long as thinkers cannot tell me what life and death are, I shall not give a good goddamn for their thoughts.”
More than our opposable thumbs and consequent ability to create such contemporary wonders as Twitter, shoot-and-splatter video games, and reality television, foreknowledge of our own mortality is humankind’s defining characteristic. We may not know when we’ll die or how or why or what happens afterward, but we do know we are going to die. It’s ironic, then, that often our first encounter with death is through the loss of the family pet, who, lacking our gift (curse?) of self-consciousness, is denied this bitter wisdom. Our beloved cats and dogs may have felt pain and loss of vitality preceding their expiration, but not anxiety or sadness or fear at their impending annihilation. Those feelings are left for us to experience, often for the first time.
My first pet was a bushy-tailed grey Persian cat named Pepé, as in Pepé Le Pew (she came with the name—we inherited her from an elderly neighbour who couldn’t care for her any longer), who died when I was nine years old. Unlike children who are raised on farms and see the life cycle up close on a daily basis (“Don’t get attached to the animals, they’re not your friends, they’re food”), those of us who grow up in suburbia or in the city tend to be shielded from death’s glare. One day Pepé seemed to be lying around more than usual and wasn’t interested in her toy mouse as much, and the next day, when I came from school, she was gone. My mother told me that she and my father had taken Pepé to the vet because she hadn’t been feeling well, and the vet said she was very, very sick, and it would be cruel to let her suffer, so they’d had her put to sleep. It was then that I noticed that her food and water bowls were gone from their usual place on the kitchen floor and that the living room wasn’t littered with her balls, toys, and the long piece of silver tinsel she’d claimed as hers from the Christmas tree a couple of months previous. My mother told me that dinner would be ready in about half an hour. We were having pork chops and canned green beans and boiled potatoes.
I’d heard the expression “put to sleep” before, when our next door neighbour’s beagle had been euthanized. I was friends with the family’s younger brother, who was my age, but it was his older brother by a year who I overheard saying, “I wonder what Molly is dreaming about” when the subject of their recently deceased dog came up. My friend smiled and said, “Squirrels, probably,” and his brother smiled too. “Yeah, probably,” he said. I didn’t know what happened to Pepé or Molly or anyone else’s pets once they made their only one-way trip to the veterinarian, but I knew they weren’t sleeping. Not what we called sleeping, anyway. People who said that their pet “had to be put down” seemed closer to the truth. Put down wasn’t much more helpful in aiding my understanding of what actually occurred behind the veterinarian’s walls, but the polite violence of the phrase felt, uncomfortably, right. Poor Pepé: she’d been put down.
I felt sorry for her, that she wouldn’t get to slap at her piece of tinsel again. I felt sorry for me because I wouldn’t get to tease her with it again, holding it in front of her face then pulling it away, the way she liked. I missed her because other people’s cats weren’t her, were different colours and different sizes and didn’t like to play the same way—weren’t my cat. I felt funny because someone who was here all the time suddenly wasn’t anymore. She was just a cat, I knew, but she was Pepé, and now there wasn’t a cat called Pepé anymore. It didn’t seem fair. It didn’t make sense.
The first person I knew who died wasn’t someone I knew. Not really. My mother’s grandfather died when I was four, a year or so before my almost-epiphany at the train tracks. He lived in a small building behind my grandparents’ house—actually, a tarpaper hut no bigger than a large garden shed that lacked running water and its own bathroom—and I only remember, when visiting my grandparents, being aware that outside, out back, there was an old man—a man even older than Grandpa—who lived in a shed. My mother’s parents were French-Canadian exiles from the nearby farming community of Paincourt, who’d moved to Chatham looking for better-paying work. I’m not sure they ever found any. My grandfather eventually got a job driving a dump truck for a sand and gravel company, and he and my grandmother rolled their own cigarettes, drank lots of whisky and listened to loud country and western music, and would switch to French whenever they didn’t want anyone else to know what they were saying. But the old man in the shed . . . That’s about it: an old man standing in the doorway of a shack while a grey sky pours down cold autumn rain, and even then I’m not sure my mind isn’t making something up and calling it a memory merely because I’m trying to come up with one. A quick phone call to my mother reveals that he’d worked the bush in both Quebec and around Paincourt as a hunter’s guide, that he could roll a cigarette with one hand, and that they discovered a cyst on his back that turned out to be fatally cancerous. I remember his funeral better than I remember him.
But that’s a lie; an exaggeration, at least. I don’t remember the ceremony. I don’t remember