Stopping the indomitable heart

At about 7:30 PM on May 23, 2013, I stopped Grendel's mighty heart. The whole process, so carefully planned, so many times run through in my head, proved only that some things move according to their own logic. Though I am sure Grendel did not suffer in the end, I am left wondering what I might have done different, what I might have done better. He's been dead just over three days now, and though the grief still hovers perceptibly, I am able to reflect that it was the right call to make.

The penultimate day of his life was what I had come to think of as one of the "good" days. Yes, he still slept the vast majority of the time. There was still pain when he ate, and occasional blood in his saliva. He wobbled when he walked and had little interest in going farther than necessary. But he was still enthusiastic to see us, and on that day he wagged his tail more than on other days in his decline. He begged for his supper and, especially, for the London broil I grilled for dinner.

Such improvements, though, served only to underscore how precipitous his decline had been. Even a few weeks ago, he would have been in our faces trying to get food. Now, with the exception of the beef, even the most perfunctory efforts to beg were too much. I felt like we had reached a tipping point, and that having passed it, having seen that he no longer took joy in the things he had loved all his life, that it might be time to let my puppy go.

The final day confirmed it. Though he ate his breakfast with relative gusto, and even managed to scale the couch one last time, most of the day was spent laying under my desk, unmoving for hours, the scared look that had become so common in his eyes when he was awake. His morning walk was painful to watch as he wobbled and occasionally stumbled, his tail tucked between his legs. A call to the vet was the help I needed. She told me that though it would not, based on my description, be inhumane to keep him through the weekend, neither would it be inhumane to euthanize him. I pondered my position and the thought of putting him through more days of pain just so those of us who love him could have a few more days of his company was too much to bear.

I scheduled his euthanasia for 6:40 that evening.

After I made the phone call I broke down, my sadness increased by the evident concern in Grendel's eyes as he stirred from his slumber and looked up at me. He didn't rise, but his tail twitched as I petted him, and once more I was struck by how he tried to comfort me as he was able. As I went about the remainder of the day, there was a clock counting down in my head to 5:40, when I was to give him the overdose of Valium, in the expectation that it would knock him out so that I could take him to the vet unawares.

I brought my wife home from work about two hours prior to that, and we spent the time struggling to choke back the tears and to share as much love as we could. My decision was made harder by the fact that, upon our arrival, Grendel had risen to greet us with wags, and nuzzles, and kisses. But very soon he was prone again. His enthusiasm was briefly roused at dinner, when I gave him his normal pain pills, and then again when I gave him the ten doses of Valium, wrapped in pieces of the London broil from the night before.  I'll always feel a little guilty for wrapping what was essentially his death in a tasty treat, but it seemed a good way to ensure delivery and he very much enjoyed the beef.

Grendel very quickly became woozy and lay down on the floor. We joined him and petted him, occasionally receiving more nuzzles, as we waited for him to sleep. But he wouldn't. Though very clearly affected by the drugs he simply would not fall asleep. Forty minutes after the drugs were administered, when, in order to make the appointment on time, I should have left, Grendel tried to stand up. After several attempts, it was clear that he was going to hurt himself, so when his front legs were fully extended, I lifted his backside and for a second he stood again, indomitable. His eyes were glassy and if I had let him go he would have fallen, but Grendel had again shown us his uncanny strength.

Realizing that though he was not asleep, neither did he seem anxious, and hoping he would fall asleep during the half-hour ride, I put Grendel in the back seat of my car and set off for the vet. Since he didn't seem concerned, I didn't feel so bad that this part of my plan had gone awry, but as I drove all I wished for was that he would sleep. Instead, about three quarters of the way there, I was surprised by the feel of a cold, wet nose on my elbow. It was still not clear how aware he was, but he had maneuvered himself into one of his customary travel positions, his backside on the back seat and his head on the armrest. I was devastated and proud at the same time.

When I arrived at the vet, she came out to my car to administer a sedative.  I spent the next twenty minutes in the doorway of my car, stroking his head and whispering to him as he went to sleep.  When his eyes had rolled mostly back into his head, I cradled him as gently as I could in my arms and carried my friend for the final steps.

Whenever in the past I had picked him up, he had always resisted, and this resistance in some ways made carrying him easier.  This time he was simply weight, still breathing, but completely relaxed.

I carried him into an examination room, the same room in which he had had his first checkup a dozen years before, the same room in which we had mapped out options to handle his dysplasia, the same room in which countless digestive tract and ear infections had been treated, and I set him on the table.  The vet then shaved a patch of hair from his left forepaw, attached a tourniquet to raise a vein, and inserted a needle into it.  First she injected saline, and then the lethal drug.

Once the tech removed the tourniquet, the vet touched a stethoscope to his chest while I stood there, stroking Grendel's muzzle and wishing him farewell and thanking him for being.  Very quickly--within seconds I would say--she put away the stethoscope.  Grendel yawned, the body expelling air still in the lungs, and he was gone.  As I stroked his chest, I felt a flutter beneath the skin, residual electrical activity, a flutter that lasted perhaps three seconds and then stopped.

They left me then, alone with the remains of my dog so that I could weep for my loss.  Spent, I collapsed against the wall and stroked his body until I could stand to leave.

I did the very best I could by him, though in the end all I could do was be there with him and hope that it was painless and free of anxiety.  I miss him terribly.  The first night was the worst, as at every turn there was some reminder of him.  At the sight of his empty bed, the air rushed from my chest as though someone had stomped on it.

Grendel was the best of dogs, and I was obscenely lucky to have had him.  I miss his presence under my desk as I write this.  I miss the sound of his snoring.  I miss his spotted tongue and his cold, wet nose.  I miss the unusual softness of his fur under my fingertips.  I miss the companion to whom I could talk without fear of interruption or judgment.  I miss the one being to whom I was always completely honest.

The fear and pain are gone, leaving the grief of those he loved and who loved him--and to know him was to love him.  We are all better for that love, the world a slightly crueler place without it.

Approaching the end...

He is scared and in pain and I can take that from him.

I first had this thought a week or ten days ago, as I took Grendel for a late-night walk.  Then the fear was an occasional companion, and the pain seemed manageable.  He was very much interested in food and in attention.  But I knew this to be true—that he was scared and in pain and that I could take it from him.  It was then that I decided that the time to bid my final farewell to him would be when this thought was uppermost.

I think the time is here.  He has been on a slow decline since we found out about the tumor, with good days and bad days.  Recently, though, it has become harder to square my desire to keep him in my life with my wish for him not to suffer.  The weekend was good.  We had company and for a moment, he seemed inclined to play with my parents' much younger dog.  He seemed relatively happy at the attention he was getting.  He wagged frequently.

Yesterday, his birthday, was also good for the most part.  Of course, as with most days, he slept the greater part of the day, but he received many extra-special treats, treats which had to be cut up so that they did not irritate the growing mass in his mouth, the red horror that is visible if he yawns widely enough and that is the source of his fetid breath.

It also bleeds.  Grendel has always slobbered.  His drool has been wont at times to form into long "droolcicles" that hang down several inches from his mouth, and these have become more viscous and more likely to have a crimson tinge to them.  His water dish occasionally has the same tint.  And in many places the floor is stained with his blood, where he has either licked the carpet—perhaps in an attempt to ease the irritation the growth causes in his mouth—or where blood has dripped from his mouth.

Today, though, he seems to have taken a turn for the worse.  He has been even more lethargic, it seems.  When I tried to give him his pain pills, wrapped this time in a small ball of bread, it must have hit the growth and hurt him, to the extent that he fled as I approached him with the bread again and would not eat for awhile.  The strands hanging from his jowls are bloodier than usual.  He is weaker and less interested in walking.  And the scared look in his eyes stays and he seems to beg for release from his fear.

But…

This is the hell of it.  This has not been an easy day, as you might guess.  There have been tears aplenty, from me and my wife. In those moments, he has looked to us with concern, apparently worried more about our pain than his.  Then, when I think he is down for the count, when I think that, yes, the time has come, he gets up and climbs on to the sofa, reducing me to tears.  Whatever else has gone wrong, his heart is loving and strong as ever, his will seemingly inexhaustible.

In that moment, I permit myself to think that this isn't the time, that he has some good days left.

I know, logically, that I am fooling myself.  I don't know how to calculate the value of a good day against a day of suffering, but with so many good days behind him—I place the number at over 4650 of the 4749 days he has lived, but I didn't know him for about the first ten weeks—I'd rather potentially rob him of a few "good" days than add to his suffering.  It is both awful and awesome that I bear this responsibility, that I am left to perform this calculus.

And so, perhaps tomorrow, perhaps the day after, but probably no later, I will give Grendel a large dose of diazepam.  It will render him unconscious, whereupon I will swaddle him in the blanket that has been under my desk,  the space we refer to as one of Grendel's "caves," and take him to the vet for euthanasia.  Afterwards, his body will be cremated and I'm not yet sure what will become of the ashes.  Unless he goes quietly in his sleep, it's the best I can do.

Our family, then, will be reduced.  Spots on the carpet will be cleaned, perhaps the carpet itself eventually replaced.  We will find his hair in unexpected places, probably for as long as we live here.  Avery, the adorable scamp who came into my life along with Serena, who already knows something is amiss, will mourn in his own way.  Our daughter will be born, and we will regale her with tales of Grendel, whom she will never meet, but whom we hope she will know.

Grendel sleeps on the sofa now.  He is stretched out to his full length so that the entire thing is his.  Occasionally, one or more of his legs twitches as he pursues imaginary prey.  I would like to freeze this moment, so that I can look at it from all angles, so that I can cherish it, because this could be any one of thousands of such moments and because I know that time will dim the memory of each.

I have never known the like of him before and I doubt I ever will again.   It is a rare privilege to have such a companion, and the sadness of the end a small price to pay.  

The Enlightenment, "Moral Relativism" and the Holocaust?

Note: I dashed most of this off as soon as I heard Penny Nance's absurd declaration that the Holocaust was a product of the Enlightenment and submitted it to the local paper, where I was on a winning streak.  They declined to print (which I thought a distinct possibility) at least in part because "the peg was obscure."  It's not the first time, they have rejected me, but it was the first time they gave me a reason, so that's good.  

As a sort of counter-programming move to the National Day of Prayer, humanists and atheists called on May 2  for a National Day of Reason, to celebrate freethinkers and call attention to what Roy Speckhardt of the American Humanist Association has called "assaults on the wall separating church and state."  As part of these celebrations, Charlotte mayor Anthony Foxx issued a proclamation celebrating the day, a move that prompted Fox News commentator Penny Nance to  declare, among other things, that reason, a product of the Enlightenment, was the source of the "moral relativism" that ultimately "led us all the way down the dark path to the Holocaust."

Leaving aside for the moment questions of whether reason and faith must be at odds, we need to explore this rather extraordinary claim in the light of history.  It is, needless to say, completely wrong.

I have been trying to reconstruct the train of thought that connects the Enlightenment, the time in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the tools of reason, already opening new vistas in science, were being applied to social and religious questions, to the mass murder of six million Jews and a like number of various other "undesirables."  It is difficult to trace.  One sees references to a rise of "secular anti-Semitism" linked to the rise of reason, supposedly separating anti-Jewish racism from its religious underpinnings.  One can imagine a line from the Enlightenment, through Charles Darwin, Social Darwinism and culminating in genocide.  

Nance seems to find problematic the application of reason to religion which, she claims, stripped morality of its basis, allowing for moral relativism.  Yes, the application of reason to religion led many to abandon traditional religion in favor of deism or atheism.   On the other hand, it led others  to a stronger embrace of faith in the so-called Great Awakening, in which some religious thinkers rejected Enlightenment thinkers, while others used it to strengthen their faith.  The Enlightenment is, in a way, the origin not only of modern science, but of modern Christianity.

Darwin is certainly a grandchild of the Enlightenment, who is famous for his theory that all life on Earth as evolved through natural selection.  I suggest Darwin as her starting point because the eugenics programs of the twentieth century, of which the Holocaust was a type, result from so-called "Social Darwinism," the misapplication of Darwinian theory to "better" society.  If this were actually the root of the matter, we might stop here.

But we can't, because while Social Darwinism might have provided a theoretical justification for eliminating "undesirables," it took the ideology of Naziism to provide a moral justification.  Far from representing moral relativism, Naziism was the application of a rigid morality to the control of society.  This is notably expressed in the Nazi encouragement of traditional marriage and exhortation to produce babies for the Reich, as well as in the suppression of the vibrant—and sexually charged—Weimar culture that preceded it.  

Were we to examine the sources of this morality, we would not find them in the Enlightenment, but in the Romantic movement that arose in response to the Enlightenment, and which embraced what were perceived as older values, which valued community over the individual, emotion over intellect , and faith over reason.  This movement reached a fever pitch following the failure of what was seen as the ultimate Enlightenment project, the French Revolution.  Romantic values were associated by many with the middle ages.  It is no accident that when the Palace of Westminster, home to the British Parliament, burned in 1834, it was rebuilt in a neo-medieval style.  It is no accident that the legends of Arthur and Robin Hood were revived, nor that the aesthetic of Dante Gabriel Rosetti and the pre-Raphelites in England reflected medieval themes.  In France, Romantics looked back to the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, before the conclusion of the Wars of Religion.  

Germany also proved fertile ground for the Romantic movement.  Romantic ideals permeated Germany during the period of its unification under Kaiser Wilhelm in 1871 and church-state relations, which were more and more estranged in England and France, became cozier, despite the speed-bump of Otto von Bismarck's attempted disestablishment of Catholicism in Prussia, the so-called Kulturkampf.  Medieval themes are evident in Wagner operas.  In literature, German romanticism was characterized by the embrace of German folk tales, themselves set in the pre-modern past.  German romanticism is also evident in the foundations of history as a scholarly field.  "Western civilization" itself was constructed in part to link Germans to their noble, pre-Roman forbears, before the corruption of the German Volk by the ways of Romans.  It would eventually be extended further, to connect them to the civilizations that were  being uncovered in Iraq.  This period, it should be noted, is the period Hitler would later identify as the Second Reich, showing he was not drawing on Enlightenment traditions.  The First Reich  was the Holy Roman Empire, founded in the tenth century in the German heartland.   

The Romantic period not only revived the forms of the middle ages, but also borrowed and built upon the anti-Semitic fantasies, such as the accusation of ritual murder and Host desecration, that began circulating in the twelfth century.  The idea of Jews as a group apart, secretly plotting, had festered for centuries.  Using the nascent mass media, this revived anti-Semitism saw expression in the circulation of the forged Protocols of the Elders of Sion and in the treason accusation against the French officer Alfred Dreyfuss in the 1890s.  If you want to look for markers on the road to the Holocaust, these are good ones.  Hitler imbibed the anti-Semitic thought that lurked in the background and channeled it by radio, motion pictures, and mass rallies.

Hitler, then, while he embraced industrialization and eugenic notions of Social Darwinism, was no child of the Enlightenment.  The ideology that drove him was a romantic ideology, born in the Romantic reaction to Enlightenment and laced with medieval anti-Semitic fantasies.  Its image is not the clockwork universe of the deist or the scientist at his bench, but the knight in armor that featured in so many Nazi propaganda posters, defending "timeless" moral truths against the encroachments of modernity.

Who Cares What You (or I) Believe?

Thomas Jefferson once famously wrote in the section on religion of his Notes on the State of Virginia, “it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods or no god.  It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”  He wrote this in the midst of a discussion on religious freedom, wherein Jefferson argued that opinions could not rightly be subjected to coercion, writing just prior that “[t]he legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others,” in limiting rights to expression.  At its core, though, it is a call to live and let live, so long as what my neighbor does is not injurious.  My neighbor's religious opinions are harmless to me, so long as he does not seek to impose them on me.

However, there are people for whom the formulation that an opinion is harmless so long as it picks no pockets nor breaks any legs is anathema.  Indeed, they see the opinions of their neighbors in some cases as declarations of war on fundamental beliefs.  There are, of course, the usual suspects—those conservative Christians, especially evangelical Protestant Christians, who seek by various means to maintain the ascendancy of their symbols in the public square; Catholics and evangelicals who oppose abortion, and in some cases contraception, and seek to write their beliefs into law; opponents of the teaching of Darwinian evolution, or who seek to “balance” it with the canard known as Intelligent Design.  In other countries, we see this or that religious sect trying to enforce its own particular brand of a given religion on the populace, to the (occasionally violent) exclusion of others.  Less formally, there are those whose mission is to convert everyone to their belief, whether they are willing to use the power of the state or not, and whether their targets find what they had heretofore held lacking.

But another group that seems to find this notion problematic is a vocal minority the growing non-theist segment of society.  This is the segment that finds religious belief (by which they never mean their own belief, only those traditionally perceived as religious) so odious that it must be purged not only from the public square but from the minds of men.  As the gospel of Matthew says of false prophets, “By their fruit you will recognize them,” and these evangelical atheists are easy to pick out.  They inveigh—on Twitter, on various Internet forums, on television, in bestsellers, and wherever their voices might be heard—against the irrationality of religious belief, and seek confrontation to bring believers face-to-face with this irrationality, an approach that I have argued elsewhere seldom brings about the desired result.

These non-believers seem to believe that, once we as a species are shorn of our religious beliefs, which is to say once they have successfully evangelized people of faith to faithlessness, an age of enlightenment will follow.  An age of peace, too, since it seems that only religious beliefs lead to war and privation and other forms of strife.  It is akin to the sort of re-ordering of the world that Christians believe will occur after the arrival of the messiah; it is millenarian thinking at its core.  It is also a pipe dream; history shows us that people will always find things to fight over, and that most of these battles seem to stem from a perception of who is “in the tribe” and who is not.  Religion is certainly a part of the process of determining who is us and who is them, perhaps the most visible in certain areas today, but it is not the only one.

They also seem to think this is achievable.  But religion is going nowhere.  It is part of our cultural equipment, itself at least partially the result of natural selection. That it endures means it must have had some utility in ensuring the differential reproductive success of religious people when measured against the non-religious.  It serves as one of the binding forces in societies, encouraging altruism towards in-group members and cohesion against outsiders.  Religion continues because it provides a source of meaning for its adherents and does not, apparently, negatively affect the ability of those adherents to pass their genes to the next generation, despite what we might perceive as a lack of truth value.

In attempting to eradicate religion in order to bring about a better world, in attempting to make non-believers out of believers, non-theists make a serious mistake and, ironically, it is similar to the one religious fundamentalists make.  They reduce believers to a caricature, indeed, they have reduced believers to their belief, an essentialism that denies the reality that we all travel in multiple cultural contexts.  It's the same sort of thing that fundamentalist Christians do when they decry atheists as ipso facto immoral, a position that I, as an atheist, certainly reject.

Though beliefs certainly inform the way people act, people are not their beliefs.  And, often in the case of religious belief, people find themselves driven to act in ways that are socially useful to all, involved in ways that, as pope Francis recently put it, serve "to defend human dignity, in building a peaceful co-existence between peoples, and in carefully protecting creation."  As I have argued elsewhere, atheists and those among the "nones" should take up this offer.  When Christians, for instance, take the opportunity to follow Jesus’ radical message of love for all their fellow humans,  atheists should meet them with open arms and work with them, not try to change their beliefs.  This non-evangelization pact should go both ways.

This, then, is the main point that I wish to finish on and that brings us back to Jefferson.  I don't care one whit what you believe concerning any deity or deities.  Really…I don’t give a damn.  Your beliefs are harmless to me.  Nor should you be overly bothered by my opinions about the existence or not of whatever deity or deities you might follow.  Because your beliefs (and mine) are not what make the world a better place for all of us.  Changing my belief to yours (or yours to mine) will not make the world even slightly better.  Our actions do that, and if your actions are consonant with my values, human values that so many of us, theists and non-theists alike share, then you are my ally, whether you believe in one god, or twenty, or none.