DEATH AND PUPPY COMFORT

These days, DEATH is on my mind. Since the new year, five people that I know have died, three of whom I have known since my boyhood days in Vanguard, Saskatchewan, and the other two, a former student of mine in Regina, Saskatchewan, and my cousin’s husband who has resided in Victoria, British Columbia for the last 50 years. All five expired from natural causes.

Death is inevitable I know, but rarely does it come at me in familiar fives.

VANGUARDIAN, MURRAY (R.I.P)

VANGUARDIAN, JOHNNY (R.I.P.)

VANGUARDIAN, RICHARD (R.I.P.)

In life there is always much ado about death. The pedestrian idioms and euphemisms referring to death are plenty and multifarious: Passed, passed on, passed away, dearly departed, and resting in peace (RIP). And countless others even being comedic: bit the dust, kicked the bucket, met the maker, six feet under, pushing up daisies.

From a planetary perspective, 61 million people died last year. Combine this information with the fact that 134 million babies were born last year, 134 million minus 61 million means a net earth population gain of 73 million people in 2023. Or to factor this another way, 0.91%.

Factoid: In the coming decades it is expected that the number of births will continue to be around 130 to 140 million per year, while during the same time as the world population ages, the annual number of deaths is expected to continue to increase.

Another factoid: As the number of deaths approaches the number of births, the global population growth will end. Surprise, surprise! But enough of these actuaries.

As a kid, my pals and I used to kill. In our early teens we drowned out gophers in the pastures; we stoned frogs along the creek banks. In our later teens armed with .22 bolt-action rifles we shot gophers in the pastures; we shot frogs along the creek banks.

However, a view to a kill of an animal lower on the food chain is significantly different than viewing a human corpse. By presenting this food change comparison, I am certainly not suggesting that we ever killed these gophers and frogs for food. Sadly, we killed them only for sadistic sport. And while I am still ranting on the evolutionary food chain, we Homo sapiens are not the head honchos. Fittingly (Darwinian pun intended), we are surviving between the pigs and the anchovies, well below the top-seated polar bears and orca whales. All of this, true dat, according to the wildlife biologists.

But I digress.

The first dead human I ever laid eyes upon was Shorty, who had been a bartender at the Vanguard Hotel. Shorty was on display at the local funeral home on the main street in Vanguard Call it simple curiosity, but my buddy, Brent, whose family owned the hotel, and I walked into the funeral parlor to have a look. That look-see moment has been etched in my mind now for 60 years. Joe McKenny, Shorty’s drinking buddy, a look-a-like combo of W.C. Fields and Humpty-Dumpty, was duly having “guests” sign the register when they entered the funeral home to view the body. And there he was, Shorty, all five foot two of him stretched out on his back, his Brobdingnagian nose noticeably protruding above the gunwales of his coffin.

Of course, since that first view of human remains, I have seen, literally, hundreds since. Being now in the autumn of my life, deaths around me seem as common as the leaves I see falling from the trees. The five friends I listed in the first paragraph of this essay, are sadly now piles of bones amongst piles of leaves.  

If the skinny of Zen is “To live is to suffer,” then the skinny of Zen must also be “To die is to assuage.” At best, this is just a philosophic puppy comfort.

MY COLLEAGUE'S PUPPY, GEORGE