Death and The Animals: A Meditation on Life

A day in early June. Driving home from our children’s kindergarten. My wife and I. A parents’ meeting. The car in front of us stops; I honk. It’s inexplicable—how can he just stop like that? in the middle of a busy road?

After a moment he pulls forward and I see it. A raccoon—just hit. Bleeding, still twitching, still trying to drag itself to safety. “How terrible,” my wife says. “Smashed on a hot road.” And there’s something particularly heartbreaking in this—in the hotness. Dying on the asphalt—but being burned by it, as well.

* * * *

My dad as a child, living outside of Cairo in 1941. He gets an infection in his knee and it blossoms. In the era before antibiotics, he nearly dies: Seven months in the hospital. He loses one of the two bones in his lower leg.

He has a dog, a beloved black-and-white mutt, who is always at his side. But my grandfather decides that he can’t have the dog anymore. Too dangerous. Risk of another infection. So my grandfather asks Fatima, the maid, to take the dog on the tram towards Cairo.

The Cairo Electric Railways and Heliopolis Oases Company. In those days there is still desert between Heliopolis and the Egyptian capital. Ten kilometers of railway tracks. But there is the occasional oasis—sparse, shocking, green—a cluster of palms and scrub grass in the midst of the Sahara.

Coming around a corner towards one of these oases—the slow, clattering progress of the electric tram—and Fatima leans out and drops him. She drops the dog into the sand. Like my grandfather has requested. The train continues on its track. Nobody says a thing.

Two weeks later, my father is sitting on the balcony of the family home.

He is very lonely. He can’t walk; his leg is bandaged; the wound is still open. He’s just sitting there, looking out into the twilight. And then—and then my father sees him. His sweet little dog. Covered in mud. Limping. His head down. And my father calls out, a yell of wordless joy—and at the sound of it, at merely the grain of his voice, the dog is suddenly sprinting, head held high, excited. He is coming home.

Forgiveness is a part of the body. It lives there, unseen, unimagined.

* * * *

I have been a bad custodian. I have cared poorly. To care for animals you also have to care for yourself. I have struggled with this. I have been unable to summon the necessary constancy.

* * * *

It is the end of The Odyssey. Odysseus has returned, unrecognizable, from his exile. He’s been wandering for ten years; his home has been appropriated, his family has abandoned him for dead.

But just outside of the palace, there is a dog—a single, thin, wretched creature—lying in a pile of cattle manure. Odysseus’ old dog. And instantly, he recognizes his human companion.

And so the dog, Argos, lay there,
covered with ticks. As soon as he was aware
of Odysseus, he wagged his tail and flattened his ears,
but he lacked the strength to get up and go to his master.

But Odysseus is disguised. He cannot betray his emotion at seeing Argos. He weeps—a single tear—which he hides by turning his face as he enters the palace. And then Argos dies.

Death darkens his eyes—after he’s seen Odysseus for the first time in twenty years.

* * * *

At my grandmother’s house, with a friend. A summer day. I am fifteen. My body is a torture. My mind is a torture. There is a thud, and a bird has flown into the house. It has flown through the open door and it has hit a window. I pick it up.

There it is, the bird body, in my hands. It is surprisingly light. It is surprisingly like nothing in my palms. The bones of birds are hollow, I will one day learn. It is how they fly.

But there it is. And suddenly it springs up. It is a blur of motion. I can’t even track it, it is moving so fast. Instinctively, it flies back out the door. Alive! Glorious and alive! It is a resurrection!

Two weeks later, my friend gives me a nest of twigs—laboriously handmade—fashioned into a heart.

The cone cells of the eyes of birds—they have a tiny droplet of colored oil, which allows them to see more colors than we do. They can even see ultraviolet light. This is how European kestrels hunt voles—their primary source of food. The kestrels track the ultraviolet light reflecting off the voles’ urine trails.

* * * *

“But dad—the dog—what happened to him?”

“We came to America.”

“And so?”

“What do you mean, and so? We couldn’t take a dog. We gave him to the bawaab. The bawaab was supposed to take care of him. Your uncle, Farid, he was paying for it. But then—we found out a few months later—they just put him to sleep.”

* * * *

I return to North Africa in 2015, to live for six months. Near my apartment in Marrakech, I begin to take photographs of stray cats. They are everywhere; I am astonished. They are emaciated, skittish, quiet, often in mysterious transit from destination to destination.

In the souk they crowd around the butchers’ shops, loitering in attentive ardor, waiting for scraps—for gizzards, or chicken fat, or cartilage, or even bones.

Surah Al-Baqarah, The Surah of the Cow, the second surah of the Qu’ran.

O you who believe! Eat of the good things we have provided for you, and give thanks to God, if it is Him that you serve. He has forbidden you carrion, and blood, and the flesh of swine, and what was dedicated to other than God. 

Cats, waiting for their bloodless meal.

But—also—I see them in surprising places. Unusual places. Places I don’t expect to see them. Animals in a human world—adapting.

* * * *

Friday, June 28, 1946, in The Bakersfield Californian—from the article, “Life in United States Amazes Cairo Family.”

Another thing that caused wonderment at first
was the total absence of donkeys and the
scarcity of cats and dogs on the streets. In
Cairo, Mr. Toutonghi noted, the three animals
are so numerous and commonplace that we
noticed their absence almost immediately.

* * * *

With your left foot, pin the chicken’s legs.

With your right foot, hold down the wings.

Be firm but gentle. Give the chicken a drink of water, if you can. Hold it in place. Pluck the feathers from the front of its neck so the knife doesn’t have to cut through feathers.

Say: “Bismillah. Allahu akbar.”

Cut the neck of the chicken until you reach the bone. Do this as quickly as possible. Do not cut the head off. And do not, under any circumstance, let go. The jugular veins and windpipe will be severed. Hold the bird until it dies. Hang it upside down to drain the blood.

* * * *

There is a café across the street from the family home in Heliopolis. It is 1927. My grandfather reads the paper there each morning—Al-Muqtataf, my grandmother’s uncle’s paper, recently relocated from Beirut to Cairo.

On this morning, though, my grandfather hears yelling in the street. “Ya sidi, ya sidi,” someone is calling, and he stands and sees three men in the café doorway. One of them is beckoning to him. He walks over. My grandfather’s dog, it seems—a kaleb kna’ani—has gotten into trouble.

“What kind of trouble?” my grandfather asks.

“Come see,” the man says. “Come see.”

And they lead him to the public toilet, which is just a bricked-over hole above the open sewer line. And there—barking madly, snarling, saliva flying from his jaws, is my grandfather’s dog, Lion. He has chased someone’s goat there—a goat from the market. In its panic, the goat has thrown itself into the toilet, and it is stuck. Its horns make it dangerous, so Lion can’t quite get to it. He can’t get in there for the kill. But the dog’s ferocity ensures that the goat can’t get away. And the men can’t come near enough to help.

It is a stalemate.

* * * *

Tell me again where I do and do not belong. Tell me again what I am and am not worth. Tell me what I can and cannot say. Tell me where I was born and what that means. Explain to me what I signify. Build my identity for me.

* * * *

Towards the end of his life, my grandfather travels throughout America, visiting his children in California, in New Mexico, in Washington. At my uncle’s home in Sacramento, he awakens one morning and goes to the bathroom. He washes his face; he looks for his dentures. But they’re gone. They’re missing. He’s ninety years old but this—misplacing his teeth—would be an astonishing level of deterioration. He is bewildered.

And then—he hears it. Crunch, crunch, crunch. The unmistakable sound of gnawing—coming from the nearby living room.

He follows the sound. He goes over to the couch. He leans forward and peers behind it. And there are my uncle’s dogs, both of them. They are huddled together. They have my grandfather’s dentures between their paws. They are overjoyed. Their tails are wagging. They are chewing the dentures to bits, licking away the particles of food, savoring the taste of last night’s dinner.

* * * *

2010. Driving in Portland. My wife is pregnant with our twins. We are on Sandy Boulevard when a cat bolts into the roadway. The truck in front of us hits it; we can hear the animal going under the tires. The driver doesn’t stop. He just keeps going.

We pull over.

I get out. It’s instinct, but I’m rushing over and kneeling down. The cat is injured, really badly injured. And so I take my shirt off. I pick her up and cradle her in my shirt. I am hurrying to the car. We are going to take her to Dove Lewis, we decide, the city’s emergency pet hospital.

And then I hear: “Starla! Starla!”

And running towards me, wailing, is a middle-aged woman. Her neighbors have seen it all; they’ve gone to her apartment and alerted her. And so I hand over my shirt, wrapped around her dying cat. My nakedness is somehow accentuated, then, my skin more exposed to the air. It is cold, I notice, just over forty degrees.

Starla is still breathing. The woman stumbles a few feet and sits down on a concrete stairway, the front stairway to her apartment building. I worry that she believes we are responsible. That we have struck her cat—not the truck in front of us. Otherwise why would we stop? But there is nothing I can say. No way I can explain this. And it doesn’t really matter, not really. We get back in the car.

I leave the shirt behind.

* * * *

But what happened to that goat?

What happened to the amazement of that family from Cairo?

What happened to Odysseus—restored to his family home—but bereft of his life, of something that couldn’t be restored?

What happened next, what happened next, what happened next?