Appreciation (50) – Toots gone too soon

Torrey Orton
May 26, 2013

Honouring her…

 

Toots went out a few days ago and did not come back.  I didn’t know she wasn’t coming until I got a phone call from a vet up the road from us later that morning…not Toots’ vet. He announced, in the de rigeur, indirect way that’s common now, she had “passed away”. Toots was a two and a half year old, short-haired tortoise shell domestic with four white paws and a white chin, amplifying eyes and whiskers of unusual grandeur. She had encountered a car somewhere over the back fence from us, the vet imagined. Damage was slight and death was quick.

A woman had brought her in to the vet’s and left without leaving a name we would have liked to thank her for her effort. Strange what people don’t want to be involved with these days – the prospect they might be thanked which turns into a prospect they might be blamed for a samaritanism spontaneously provided. Let this be our thanks. Otherwise Toots might have been an Otty – our cat who disappeared a year ago and is a fate for us worse than death.

Toots seemed to be much more weighty dead than alive. Perhaps a feature of death that the loss of life weighs more with us, or its value is more present to us in some respects than life?? Presenting her to me for her last ride, the vet had wrapped her in a greenish towel and tied up her package with a length of light purple tape, topping it off with a note saying “Honour” - her original registered name they found from the micro-chip identity tag which had brought them to me a few hours earlier…

Toots started as of a few days ago to push up daisies in our garden along with many of her predecessors, under a rock or a bush as the habit of each epoch’s burial over our 40 years here assigned them. She will probably push more vigorously than some because she had a certain sparkling liveliness mixed with an intensity of gaze that commanded attention.

Toots was Lulu’s caretaker, to the last ensuring the younger, deeply traumatized long-haired owl-faced one was cleaned up on request and providing a pillow for most sleeps. There was occasional testing of the pride lines, mostly initiated by the junior who now still wonders at her senior’s absence, retreating to her earlier anxiety about the great outdoors of our garden, wandering forth with more cautious steps because Toots isn’t there to lead the way. They had shared a caged existence for 6 months in a local cat shelter before we found took them away with us 8 months ago.

We miss Toots lots…too short loved, too long gone. Lulu does, too.

Appreciation (38) …Poppy died today

Appreciation (38) …Poppy died today

Torrey Orton

Oct. 4, 2011

There's an absence here today

I keep expecting to see him in his usual haunts – before the dining room radiator, on our bed, beside the pond in a corner outside Jane's study. I have never known, or just forgotten, the absence of a presence in this way. It began early yesterday when I looked in the early half-light for him near the radiator and couldn't see him. He had shrunk it seemed, though on closer view was laid out in a relaxed, balanced array - head to the heater and back legs and tail fanning away from it on his two ply sleeping pad. And lifeless, already stiffening by 6AM.

Or is it the presence of absence that's happening? He howled his way into death earlier that night, already having lost much of his locomotion when his back legs failed under him as they had been threatening to do for a couple of months. He had woken about 2am and struggled around a bit and we went to see him and then left again and ½ hour later he set off one, the last it turned out, of his trademark howlings. This mimics with convincing similarity the roar of a lion, even to the pose of the head thrust forward and down a bit which gives throat to the sound - ouaagh, repeated on a rising crescendo of pace and volume, to tail off in a couple of fading breaths. Altogether, about 8 calls.

This performance was almost always elicited by emptiness, by rooms in which he found himself unexpectedly (?) alone. Audible in the street, neighbours say. This was his last alone, throated with the fullness of his late ageing self. Just to write it brings tears for me. Such a roar! He also beset the garden at times after meals as if some latent memory of a long not present competitor arose to take the meal off him.


We finally buried him the next day a few feet away and just as far down as his predecessor Moon's resting place in the enclosure outside the bathroom - like her, wrapped in plastic and topped with a rose and a sprinkle of white wine and tears. Later will come the azalea above.

Before that had already come the clean-up, especially of bowls. He had three flash water bowls of distinguished design: one outside the back door, two inside - one by the eating space in the kitchen and the other near the heater in the dining room. They supported his mild struggle with failing kidneys over the last two years. He, however, sought often the pleasure of more natural containers – pot plant saucers' remnant traces or the pond's more prodigious offerings – passing by the flash without a nod.

He was just 18 and been with us 12 years or so, after a neighbour offered him …his many other virtues can be found here.

Here's potted Poppy in his youth, always a good fit for a tight spot.

6 views of death – some measures of life

6 Views of death – some measures of life

Torrey Orton
May 31, 2009

“You're driving down a road in the desert, and the engine suddenly stops. . no Pep Boys, no Auto Club to help. Whether the road continues is of no consequence. It has ended for you.”

This is Edward Schniedman, dead at 90 in LA, predicting his own death’s nature. While death is death, what it means seems to be a matter of opinion. Even what it is seems so, too. So, I offer some views of death as my contribution to the debates and discourses about death. I have a stake. I’m old enough (66) to know that I’m nearer the end of my term than its beginning. I’ve outlived my father and his father by 2 years. I’m pretty clear I want to die when I want to if I can and have taken steps to encourage its probability.

I share this view and intent with my wife. We’ve signed the necessary papers to ensure (there’s a wondrous claim these days) that the ‘life support’ technologies are turned off, or left off, if we’re incapable of being consulted. Some things stand in the way of my confidence, mostly others with other meanings to death, who may want not to accept what I have legally decided. These stem from their meanings of life. Some of them are catastrophically confronting for people like me. How can I understand this better, and maybe them, too? This is the terrain of naturally fundamentalist thinking in fact, not merely in faith or theory. The resurrected are only seen in faith tracts and films.

This series of views is undertaken with intellectual wonderment at the difficulty of the task of making sense of death. The counter point is my emotional wrenching by the uncertain fulfilment of my preference to choose my own death time as much as that’s possible. Some of the pathways to the views may traverse the following terrains.

Some initial takes on life-death

For instance, there is the common notion of a ‘good death’. Dying on one’s own kitchen floor or over-night in bed, as one of my parents did, qualifies for this label. In some pre-modern societies there was an understanding that one’s time had a limit and making ways for others was both necessary and honourable. A next-best ‘good death’ may be that at home with more or less extended periods of relatively painless decline and social intimates present continuously on the way.

Then we have the increasing squeamishness of late modernity about any damage to the self, driven by an implicit assumption that we can be protected from all imaginable dangers (see some of the submissions to the Victorian Royal Commission based on assumptions that the actual bushfire conditions could have been foreseen and planned comprehensively for).

The handmaiden of this feeling, this aversion to the material tribulations of everyday life, is the philosophy of ‘nice’. It has been enhanced by the actions of the damages lawyers and the health marketing fraternities. The latter sell hopes of endless life and instant recoveries (you deserve a lineless face of pot-less gut as much as you deserve a Gucci or a Ferrari) from the costs of living (obesity, wrinkles, varicosities and lost hair among them).

So, we are not to see death or damage in public (my ex-countrymen took this even further by banning the showing of those dead from defending the country). Nor even should we speak them. Our public servants are trained (I assume; why else this tortured rhetoric and toneless, robotic delivery by cops and docs and pols?) to say anything but ‘dead’, ‘body’ or similar explicits. Rather we are given ‘the deceased’ who ‘passed on’ (just to somewhere else?) or more grimly ‘passed away’ (finality is acknowledged), or, more evasively, just ‘passed’ (like a train in the night?). Yet all are “tragedies” (with the exception of registered crims and malefactors by acclamation) in print, on screen and in the mundane discourse of our neighbourhoods.

Politics of life-death

The politics of life-death are this: a few (about 20 %) of the electorate in Australia are prepared to fight to the death to preserve the right of every conception to come to term and every adult to be constrained from dying on their own terms, assisted or not. They get a larger electoral influence because the field of voters is finely poised between the major parties and small factors shift small margins in finely poised electorates. Electorally correct and ethically unfair.

The facts of death – who, how many, when, but not often how or why – are available daily, along with births. With one exception: suicides, successful and attempted are seldom reported unless unavoidable and even then only implicitly (notably death by train. So the fact that we begin and end are matters of public record, presumably because enough of us are interested to warrant the use of space that might otherwise be sold for ciggy and alcopop ads. One of these facts is that we cannot meaningfully speak of death or birth separately without being in denial of the absent partner – life is death and death is life; we are living-dying beings; we live for a while, and, however long it never amounts to how long we have not existed.

In addition, the boundaries are a bit suss. For example, where does IVF fit with naturally occurring conception; similarly where does life support machinery fit with naturally occurring death. Notice that neither of these options is available to the poor anywhere. Some of the poor some places do have the chance to sell a part of their biological resources to the rich (comparatively) elsewhere And, as the Everest example below highlights, human rights are easily over-ruled by specific disabling circumstances, plus variations in courage (or, as I’d have you think, variations in need for martyrdom, which is just a label for a split-second decision). This is also the land of everyday hospital triage under disaster conditions.

A program of explorations

I hope, after building various views of life-death, to arrive at a place where fully rounded treatments of life-death issues can more often be achieved. This would mean, for example, considering all specific issues in the context of the materially and socially enabling factors through which any resolution is constructed. In other words, to use consistently the biopsychosocial construct on which some evidence-based medicine supposedly stands as one for all life-death matters.

So here’s a contents page for some views of life-death to come at this site in this series. The first I have elaborated a bit to give a sense of the material argument. The rest are skeletal images. The order is not assured, nor are the topics guaranteed as stated. I’ll be learning as a I go and that may change my overall perspective and the features in its view.

1) Extreme sports and....the permeability of rights in pursuit of meaning – for example:

Cathy O’Dowd’s Rewind 1999 piece in Sunday Life (24 May ’09, pg. 30; Melbourne) included a report of her passing by a dying woman on the north face of Everest. “The general public don’t get this: they think, ‘As long as she’s alive, you can’t leave’. But they live in a world where you can call the police or an ambulance. You can’t do that on Everest.” The same story was reported in 2007 with a more extended treatment, and the same ending.

High risk sports – not tennis, basketball, net ball, bowls - like sky diving, paragliding, bungee jumping (?), base jumping, peak bagging, have been around since lion-baiting was the entry price for manhood in sub-Saharan hunter-gatherers. These are the actions of people whose meaning is tenuous enough to require excitement-enhanced expression.

In Australia we have our own (but don’t others, too?) sport - binge drinking: specialty of the young and younger olds, with death dealing potentials and fulfillments every weekend. These are called “tragedies” when they are merely excesses of youthful riskiness. Some don’t even apologise for the damage to others it occasions – both male and female (e.g. -Maria Makridakis, 26; THEAGE May 23, ‘09).

2) Beginning of life and ...rights to life.
Why is IVF a government sponsored medical alternative whose clients believe it is their right – namely the right to have a child even when it’s not naturally happening for them?

3) ‘Normal’ end of life and...death is for embracing or defeating?
What is normal in life-death matters? What’s a good life-death in various cultures? Well-beings on offer.

4) Martyrs and those who serve and...
People join armies and police forces and fire brigades around the world with a heightened prospect of having to pay with their lives for the safety of their fellows (and, in the case of armies and police, by intentionally taking the lives of Others). How can this be integrated into the meanings of life-death.

5) Suicide attempts, successes and failures...
A story of coming to life by attempting to die...
The reporting of suicide ( if at all) as an individual problem while the social settings are seldom mentioned, as factors; and never mentioned as pre-conditions.

6) Near deaths and...insights from those who passed over and back again.
How it feels to have a stroke - Jill Bolt Taylor http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyyjU8fzEYU

Right to die / right to live and...so, what’s it all mean to me?

Appreciations (4) …my “sick sinus syndrome” saviours

Appreciations (4) …my “sick sinus syndrome” saviours
Torrey Orton
May 21, 2009

Here I revisit a “heart event” I had six years ago. Much of the following text was written four weeks after that event and I present it as written with a few editorial deletions and insertions. Some additional setting description and commentary (like this) is added in italics.

I was walking down Clarendon Street in Sth Melbourne on my way from one meeting to another about 9:15 am. I’d been walking 30 minutes at my normal quick but not breathless pace, feeling fine, when I suddenly felt faint, fuzzy, weak and thought, ‘where can I sit down?’ – which was the last conscious thought I had until I woke up on my back looking up at Jane and some medicos around 11:30am the same day in The Alfred Hospital trauma unit. Lesson number one: if you feel faint just sit down regardless of the dignity protocols that may be compromised in the act. I figure it was 1-2 seconds between the first conscious sensations of losing my senses and fully doing so. I’ll try to remember that – though I shouldn’t have to again if the pacemaker works. ….

And I haven’t had to remember for safety’s sake, but the story is a powerful one for showing the difference between the speed of thought and unconscious processes. As for my dignity, it’s still likely to be a cause of concern.
…
It appears that I had hit the curb from my full height (191cm, which the trauma people told Jane was twice the minimum level considered a dangerous descent) with a significant proportion of my full weight (107kg, at the time), fracturing slightly “a small bone” a bit above the right ear, leading to internal bleeding in the brain which prompted a seizure that went on for some minutes – thrashing around enough in the public pathway to chew a tear in my tongue, bounce my head on the hard parts a few more times, swallow a reasonable amount of blood into my stomach, inhale a portion into my lungs and attract the attention of someone who did two smart things (at least): call the ambulance service and take my handkerchief (I almost never use the things these days but have always carried one in the same place for 35 years of more) from my right rear pants pocket and stuff it into my gnashing mouth. …

..and on the way did not take anything out of the other pockets – keyset, wallet, watch: all present in the hospital bedside cabinet, including the blooded handkerchief..
…
The role of chance / luck in all this – One example: if this moment had occurred at the same time a day earlier I would have fallen out the door of a Bridge Road tram under one of two cars that were illegally passing the tram after it had stopped (I was leaning out to check if any yobbos were passing the stopped tram, which they do so often here that not looking before getting off a stopped tram is an invitation to an earlier death). Another example: if this moment had occurred while driving us around the Falls Creek neighbourhood a week earlier we could still be unfound down a ravine, which was subsequently incinerated a week later by the bushfires we could see ringing the high country we were driving through. And so on. A newly acquired respect for fate, luck, chance, etc, …
…
Finally, there’s the status of me as meat* – which is the only intellectual position from which I can summon the images of my unconscious states, especially in the first hour of the events. It’s a peculiar result of seeing myself as an object / subject of fate – as an entity whose intentionality is wholly in the hands of a series of others (some of whom I never saw – the critical care ambulance guys and who ever called them!). These others collectively by their actions affirmed what I could not: that I was more than meat and thereby made it true.

My experience of being saved by the system is what I want to recognise and celebrate. I am very aware from living in other places – notably China – that this kind of health system is not widely available across the world. Second, where it exists, it may not be well run, especially at the level of service provision. The para-medics service (Ambulance Victoria) has been an object of political contention and governance doubt for some time, but whatever the sources their service was excellent. Third, it is stunning that a matter so life and deathly should be handled with such precision and care both by the stipulated role holders and the passing public. My thanks, again.


*See here http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/TheyMade.shtml for a wonderful take on ‘meat’ which illuminates various pretensions of the meat class of conscious beings.