When the body fails the person
What are we doing, what are we witnessing, when a dear one’s body fails?
Today we ended our cat Shadow’s life.
Since January he had been struggling against a rapidly increasing loss of mobility caused by major spinal disc degeneration and arthritis.
With the help of two first class, all-women vet services, we had found one medical or physical accommodation after another to keep him active. Able to get around with a floppy hind end, able to use his litter box, able to demand and enjoy treats and bellyrubs.
Every time we feared that he had reached end-stage conditions, some change of meds and surroundings would give us more time with him. He kept giving us cues that he was still very much alive.
This week, though, total loss of hind end use had confined him to the living room sofa, with food, water, ramp, litter box—everything arranged within a few feet so he could pull himself to it with his front legs.
Where is the person?
When the body fails, where is the person?
I am not helped much by traditional notions of an immortal soul. There may or may not be some reality gestured toward by that metaphor. But the whether-or-not is for me what the Buddha called “an unprofitable question.”
I am a poet and mystic, but I am also a student of biology and psychology, in particular the neurobiology of consciousness. Nothing in my experience answers this question, so I have to simply step back and observe what I do experience, without drawing conclusions.
For months after my mother died in 2011, I experienced a recurring cognitive dissonance. I will let Crippled Wolf, one of my totem animals, retell the story (excerpted from “Bereft,” on my old Walhydra’s Porch blog, 7/11/2021).
Crippled Wolf continues to be confounded by his mother Senior Witch’s death in January.
In the 2006 movie Eight Below, a team of husky and malamute sled dogs take care of each other and survive for six months in Antarctica after a severe storm forces their human companions to abandon them.
The part of the story which resonates most for Crippled Wolf comes when Dewey, one of the huskies, falls off a steep slope and is fatally injured. The other dogs stay to comfort their teammate until he dies, but then they move on—except for the youngest dog, Max. Max, seeming not to understand what has happened, stays beside Dewey’s body for a day or so longer before following the others.
Crippled Wolf sees himself in Max. Rationally he understands what death is, yet that deeper animal part of him continues not to understand.
How can a person simply stop being?
He keeps going back to that nursing home bed with the curtains drawn around it and sitting next to the body, just as he did repeatedly on the night his mother died. Looking at the still face, touching the hands. Unable to reconcile memory of her with physical reality.
Wanting to hold onto the person
When the body fails and the caregivers must decide, when the person can no longer use the body, or at least not without great suffering. What then?
This morning, watching Shadow sleep on the sofa, I said to my husband Jim, “I feel like we are getting ready to kill the person we know.”
I know this is the right caregiving decision, but my animal being does not want it.
Where is the person?
But still….
Human beings are trapped in the illusion of linear time: things begin, continue, change, and end.
But still, here is an alternative that I cannot claim to have experienced directly, yet which all of my experience seems to confirm:
Every moment of everything exists all at once, as if in an infinitely dimensioned sphere of Being. The path of our mortal lives is just a fragment of a line through that sphere along which we move.
And so it is,
Blessèd Be.
Image Source
“Shadow in his element,” by Mike Shell (4/19/2023).
8 comments On Shadow (4/8/2007 – 8/11/2023)
Oh, I’m so sorry that you had to make this terrible, but necessary, decision. My sympathy to both you and Jim. Personally, I obviously don’t know what happens to the part of life that isn’t physical. I accept the law of the conservation of energy. We know the physical body is energy. I think the part of us that isn’t physical is also energy, so I don’t think it ends either. I don’t know what happens to it.
Thanks, Linda. I sort of agree with you about the non-physical part also being energy. Despite what I wrote in this post, I’m not troubled about what happens after death. It has to be some sort of continuity with the whole of Being, however that happens.
Hi Mike,
Thank you for this tender reflection on Shadow and your ending of his life, with the wondering of what we are witnessing “when a dear one’s body fails.” I feel deeply with you.
I appreciated hearing Crippled Wolf’s experience of his mother Senior Witch’s death and your alternative to a linear time path of our lives seemingly confirmed by your experience.
My heart is full.
Loving blessings,
Susan
Thanks so much, Susan.
Dear Y’all.
Such a tender time.
What came to mind were the choices my parents made as they thought about the ends of their lives. ( my physician mother & minister father- 37 years as missionaries mostly In remote places in Nigeria- well acquainted with suffering & death). They had the faith of their long lives. And they had a ” desire for a natural death.” Even if your Shadow has an assisted natural death, you have also provided him with an assisted life extension. Don’t know if this thought is helpful. I hope his transition will be tranquil. And may your grieving be a reflection of your affection for him & what he has contributed to your lives. Love, Gita
Yes, Gita, and thank you. We had such good, affectionate exchange with Shadow right upto and beyond his death. I found I had to hold him for a while and to pet him for longer still, in order to allow my brain to register that this was now a dead body. As I just wrote to another friend, I’m not at all troubled about what happens after death. I know it has to be some sort of unity with the whole of Life.
I understand completely how you feel as you do. Your experience with your Mom is very close to mine with my Dad. Your time with Shadow after was like my time with Cuddles when I had no choice but to let him go. They are family members and we feel what they are feeling. My thoughts and prayers are with you and Jim as the following days unfold.
Thanks, Libbie.