The Meaning Of Life In A Dog’s Death
When our dog was dying, I asked the vet if our dog was dying. He said, “as long as you’re shitting and eating, you’re fine.” I think about what he said often. It’s the closest I’ve come to the meaning of life.
I think about children, how you immediately have to feed them or they disappear. I remember assiduously monitoring my babies’ poops and pees to make sure everything was being processed correctly. Now I’m sitting with slowly dying relatives, seeing diapers on top of the almayrah while attendants try to feed them. It is what it is, this is all life is. Energy is neither created nor destroyed, it just passes through us. It’s cute on the way in and sad on the way out, but it’s the same thing.
Despite their obvious importance, there is little philosophy of food and even less of shitting. But just wait till either of them gets interrupted, then it’s all you can think about. These are our real, simple connections to life in general and we ignore them for them for complicated, disassociated abstractions. Descartes says ‘I think; therefore I am’ when the truth is closer to ‘I stink; therefore I am.’ As much as we think we’re ‘higher’ than the animals, we’re all just a bunch of walking intestines.
