HOW DOES AN ATHEIST EXPLAIN DEATH TO A CHILD

This is in response to Cormac James on Aeon, who worries about what to tell his five year old son about death because Cormac is an atheist.  Big deal.  What’s God got to do with it?  There’s a particular irony in this man being named “Cormac,” a writer whose accounts of evil, suffering and death has hypnotised the whole field of Western literature profs.

Cormac says “Sigmund Freud’s belief that ‘in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality’”.  I think not.  I think everyone is convinced of their own consciousness being THEM and that their consciousness can escape their bodies and endure somehow out there in some form with no body.  But if all consciousness AND unconsciousness has left the body forever, that’s the definition of death.  That’s when someone can note the “time of death,” certify a “cause of death,” and dispose of the body since there’s no more use for it.

The idea of God is really an identity with no body -- nobody, nobadaddy.  Indefinable.  Can’t kill it because there’s nothing. It’s an idea, one that transforms and disappears.

The best lesson -- and a five year old should by now have had a pet that died -- is simple before-and-after.  Bob’s first wife was working in a nursing home that cared for an old woman who was only living because a machine breathed for her.  This caretaker was not “churchy” but she protested to the head nurse that she thought it was cruel and simply making money for the institution.  The old woman didn’t even have any living family.  The head nurse said,  “Okay.  Turn the respirator off.”

“I don’t have the authority,” said the hapless CNA.  

“I give you the authority.  YOU turn the machine off or you’re fired.”

Hapless needed the job.  She turned off the respirator.  The old woman died in a moment or two.  Hapless felt very strange and she never forgot.  Figuring out death is only a task for the living.  

It’s the EXPERIENCE that can only be felt.  The brain-dead are body-dead, identity-dead, GONE.  It is the living who know it and ONLY the living.  Everyone knew that once in the days when there was chicken for dinner on the farm and someone went out and killed it.  You can’t eat it alive.  Have you no culture?

On my cat post a few days ago I talked about reducing the size of a kitten litter by “human intervention.”  I drowned the extras.  (Cat litters can go as high as 13, though it is “normal” for there to be three or four.)  Three.  I cannot catch this feral female, Patches.  If I could, I would get her spayed -- if I had money or could find help.  Men here have offered to shoot her, but it's against the law to shoot in town.  

There are pop-up cat spay clinics on the rez, but not advertised off it.  If I COULD catch her and her kittens, I could take them to the nearest humane society (thirty mile drive), where they would be killed by plunging a needle into their hearts, because they are untameable and because all the kittens on the planet are born about the same time in a great wave of synchronicity.  Many of them will die soon, because this is the crushing wheel of life that creates thousands of beetles or whatever, and then kills most of them.  Kill death by reducing fertility.  Predators have to eat, too.  There are no vegetarian predators.

I asked the veterinarian for cat tranquilizers so I could catch them.  He was shocked and horrified.  “Just stop FEEDING them,” he said.  They’d find a way to eat, but it wouldn’t be as nice.  He charges several hundred dollars to kill a cat.

My bathroom sink is rather splendid.  I knew within an hour when the kittens were born.  Patches came for breakfast much thinner. I carried them gently, used warm water and it took only a minute or so.  It was not that different from a womb.  I wept.  I did something I can’t call prayer because who would I pray to?  Call it mindfulness.  Call it poetry.  

Then I took the little bodies out to the trash roll-off.  “Been gopher huntin’?” asked the old rancher unloading his pickup.  

“Had to drown some kittens and feelin’ bad about it,” I told him.

His wife said,  “A terrible job, but sometimes it has to be done.”  

What’s so privileged about kittens that it’s okay to kill gophers but not kittens?  Kittens are domesticated, meaning if they are tamed (ie: form a bond with a human, like the fox in “The Little Prince”) they are different, in a different category.  We’ve attached, or at least find them useful.  Owned so we protect them.  Give them individual names.  We tamed a gopher once.  It drowned by jumping into the toilet when someone left the lid up.

Why does the United States kill five-year-olds, not entirely by accident?  Sometimes with malice and enjoyment.  So long as they’re not OUR children.  Only Other.  Only Feral.  Meaning, no identity, no attachment, no duty to protect, no value.  Unless there’s a use for them, which use might not be sitting at a kitchen table eating Cheerios, without names.

And why does Cormac worry about what HIS son thinks when feral children have already found out about dead things, sometimes human -- call CSI.  The domestic children get up in the night and search the Internet to look for pictures of death, torture, suffering, to understand what it’s about that it’s so secret, a big door on the front of the subject marked “GOD,” who is purported to be unkillable, at least if you accept the proper definition.  Otherwise you’ll notice that God is dead.  ALL the gods are dead.  They’ve lost their identities except for poetry.  (Actually, by age five most American kids have seen a LOT of death portrayed, heard a lot about it.)

My mother's mother in the center,

Her sisters second in from each end.

My mother took the photo.

When my mother was dying, she asked me what I thought the “other side” would be like.  I said,  “It will be like where ever you were before you were born.”  She pondered that as a good Presbyterian, then moved over to science.  “I hope the next planet will be as much fun as this one!” she said cheerfully.  She was acting.  For our sake.  Her cousin knew.  “What were her last words?” she asked.  But can you count the muttering of a comatose person without their dentures?  I told her the “next planet” thing.

My mother’s identity was not lost.  Neither was her mother’s nor her grandmother’s.  Her identity was genetically and culturally blended from those of the people who raised her.  She was lucky.  Neither catastrophe nor drugs tore those identities out of her.  Some  people have to leave a hole in that place or invent a fiction or just not think about it or -- the worst, to regret the identities that created their own.  I knew that early and therefore refused to have children.

It didn’t do any good.  There are still people whose identities are in part derived from mine: students, readers, people I so dearly loved and tried to be like even if it meant damage or suffering.  Still, there a little part of me that remains feral.  I think it came from my mother.  Or maybe from books.  It makes me risk -- like telling you this.  I can already feel the hands slipping over my mouth.

"Hop"

My mother used to say, “All cats are gray in the dark.”  I would agree.  Except that sometimes a little gray half-kinkajou invades us despite resistance and now sleeps behind my knees. I’ve finally decided Hop is NOT related to any of these yard ferals -- in fact he’s not feral, just unfed.  Sometimes some cat like that will come busting onto the scene and his identity will be so loud, messy, stinking, and otherwise vivid that you end up tolerating the beast -- even though it just flipped my computer mouse on its back for the third time.  Can I help it if he gets comfort against my throat?  Makes it vibrate with his purring?  His song.

Double in size and still growing.

Very messy eater.

CAT BEGATS

Browning cats from the Sixties.

I resisted the idea of cats in the Valier household until I was hired to teach English in Cut Bank and felt I could afford catfood.  Then I answered a classified ad in Great Falls and came home with Squibs and Crackers.  It turned out to be a bad decision since I quit the teaching job in about three months and couldn’t even go on unemployment since I had quit.  (Quitting pleased the principal, a chunky little woman with bitten nails who had never wanted to hire me in the first place.)

New and suspicious Squibs and Crackers

A few years after coming to Valier, I noticed a white cat with spots of brown and black, one of two feral mother cats living along the street.  I called her “Patches.” I tried to be friendly with no success.   She hissed like a teakettle.  I held out my hand and drew it back dripping blood from slashes. The other queen was a tuxedo cat, also evasive and then mysteriously gone.  In my decrepit back shed I would occasionally find kitten remains, usually long dead, just a fuzzy patch.  I don’t go out there much.  There are feral cats all over town.  People dump them off because of a fantasy about sweet apple-cheeked grandmas who will take them in.

Teens everywhere climb trees.

Then a couple of autumns ago, Patches came marching past the computer window with a row of kittens behind her.  One was Smudge, a little gray runt kitten I couldn’t even see at first, until I finally realized that the shadow behind Patches that kept bumping into her was another kitten.  There was a splendid gold and white kitten I called Ming because of an emperor-like high-arched neck, and a beautiful female calico with mascaraed eyes who later had a broken shoulder, maybe from a fall.  It healed crooked but she learned to walk with a crumpled leg.  I’m notorious for inanimate things from the roll-off dump and spotted a nice dog house, one of those fiberglass igloos.  I towed it into the decrepit building and stuffed it with old comforters.  They passed the winter there.  

The Crip, Ming and Patches

Then they disappeared.  I spotted them once, marching in a line, but this time Ming had a crippled back leg -- probably imposed by a full-grown Tom -- and when they disappeared again, Smudge stayed behind.  Patches came back, had four kittens in the igloo and this time her four kittens were reduced to one, due to human intervention.  That was the yellow patched kitten I called the Skeezix, who disappeared while still a kitten.   No clue how.

Patches, Skeezix, Ming, Smudge

All these kittens were unapproachable except when they were newborn and couldn‘t escape.  I have a live trap but the kittens were too small to trip the trigger and Patches was too wary.  I did catch something and only heard a lot of commotion and screaming.  When I went out, nothing was in the cage.  Then I stopped because if I caught Patches, what would the kittens do?  If I caught a kitten, I would have to hand-feed it. 

I’m told that the town owls eat kittens, killing them the way seagulls open oysters, flying them high and then dropping them.  I’m also told that coyotes pick cats off on ranches, so that ranchers always welcome new cats and don’t care if they’re feral.  Squibbie narrowly escaped that fate in her kittenhood, but I was monitoring pretty carefully.  It was a hawk that time.  It sat on the telephone wire and watched all one day.  I don’t know why people identify cats with sweet cuddly little soft toys.  My cousin asked me why I couldn’t write about something nice, like kittens.

Indoors cats or are they sofa cushions?

The neighborhood cat who seems indestructible is Caspar, who lives across the street and tries to kneecap any human who bothers him.  I always pick up a stick when I run him off.  Except that he’s not male -- Caspar is an altered female.  Trans, I guess you could say.   Aggressive, hard on kittens.  Longhaired white, slant yellow eyes, long nose, gray tail and ears.  Determined to own my yard.  And any catfood that’s outdoors.  I feed the ferals, though I should not.  Caspar’s owner objects to ferals.  Once in a while a feral dog will begin to pick off cats, but the old women in this town despise loose dogs as much as they hate weeds and dust, and are soon on the phone to the sheriff.  The two crippled half-grown descendants of Patches disappeared as well as the Skeezix.  Patches was gone.  Smudge had four kittens, reduced to one I called “Hop.”

"Hop"

This one was evidently not feral, just pushy.  Maybe it was testosterone.  He came marching through the cat flap and demanded food.  He assured me he would help wash the dishes but he wasn’t supposed to jump on drainboards and, ick!  There was water involved.  He could have used a bath himself and emitted the foulest swamp gas in such volume that I wondered how a small striped cat could manufacture it.  (Actually he had as many dots in his coat as dashes.)   Lucky for him, I don’t get upset by stink.  But he had other symptoms which I suspect were from worms.  So I bought some pills, crushed half of one and put it in tuna fish, which this kitten, still claiming to be famished, refused to eat.  He was also beginning to “play” which meant anchoring his twenty small fishhook claws in whatever: my hand, the comforter on the bed, a crumple of paper.  Squibbie tried to return the favor, aiming for his little balls.  When he connected, he got a terrible shriek and respect.  For a while.

By now I was calling him “The Martian Weirdo” because he had an alien bug-eyed big-eared head but a scrawny pliable body plus a lot of strange traits, esp. an aggressive and voracious appetite even though he didn’t always eat the food.  He wanted to drink out of the toilet, which I don't allow.  There ARE limits!

Each of the three indoor cats, had food dishes in different corners.  I put the food out, they each eat a couple of bites, then go over to the next cat’s dish and kick them out so as to eat THEIR food, so that cat goes to the next dish.  The two little original charming kittens of mine are more than a decade old now, big and opinionated.  They smacked the Martian around to no avail.  What worked was getting his belly full enough that he would sleep for an hour.

"Hop"

My mother read Paul Gallico’s cat books and admired them.  In “The Abandoned,” a kitten is lost and remembers his mother’s advice:  “When in doubt, wash.”  My mother went around advising us to wash when in doubt, but it never took hold.  Maybe we just weren’t very doubtful.   But this pushy kitten believes it.  Despite stinking, he is constantly washing to regain his poise after being smacked or rather violently lifted off my keyboard.  As he grows, he stinks less but still squalls, yowls, shrieks, and claims murder attempts.  He’s growing into his eyes and ears.

But in the midst of all this, he will suddenly drop the aggression and sweetly sneak onto my collarbones for a tender nap, purring like a well-tuned two-cycle engine.  Finally I was looking for an image on the computer and ran across some starving kids.  That reminded me where I’d seen this kind of weird other-worldly look and obsessive persistence: starving children.

"Martian" -- not the movie

When I was working for animal control as the education coordinator, my boss let me indulge my belief that the officers needed in-house training about animals in general.  I invited the Oregon Primate Research Center to come and tell us about their work.  They were reluctant.  One project was deliberately starving baby monkeys and then, when it was almost too late, experimenting with ways to begin feeding them again that wouldn’t make them sick, as well as recording the effects of starvation.  It was meant to help save human babies, but it was excruciating to watch.   Even the tough guys turned their heads away.   The Primate Center became very secretive because it horrifies people to see such a thing -- unless it’s human children dying, whom they shut out of their minds.  Those children have that same Martian look, which comes back at night in fantasies of spaceships.

This summer's kittens

I have tried not to name the latest batch of kittens, which are just entering adolescence and run like foxes even when I just look out the window at them.  There are two yellow ones I call the Goldfish, and one black and white I call the Panda, and there was a little grey one that caught something and shriveled up and disappeared.  I thought it had died, but this morning it was out there again, restored, along with Smudge and Patches.  If the sentimentalists knew about it, they would want to save it and they’d call it “the miracle baby.”  If you want it, swing by my house.  Bring a butterfly net.

They say California is the future