On Attachment and Impermanence

I promise this isn’t a plug for a book… BUT: If you haven’t read Dog Years (Mark Doty), you’re seriously missing out.

I was traipsing around a cute little used bookshop on the bay and came across his famous memoir. There was literally almost no one else in the shop, but I grabbed it and clung to it as though it was the last copy anywhere in the world. I finished it the next day (naturally; after all, it is Doty), and was grateful to have found one more soul in the universe who feels the way I do regarding just about everything. Ever.

Why is it that we shouldn't be too attached?

I wouldn’t call myself an overly emotional person, nor would I ever consider myself clingy. But when Princess, our 14-year-old collie mix who had been my best friend since birth, who had lost her front left leg to cancer, who had been banished to the basement when the great grandmother with allergies had moved in, who had survived litter after litter, move after move, needle after surgery after treatment after old age – died, I honestly felt like I wanted to leave the earth. (I was 10). What HELL to lose the one you love most, even if it makes sense for them to go.  And I know most kids go through this with pets, this devastation at a loss – but eventually grow out of it. As we age we learn to regard death/loss (of pets, of people, of self) as just “part of the circle” of things.

Not me.

A couple years ago I went through a very dark time in life. Out of seemingly nowhere (other than some dark, looming vortex over my head, following me around like a bad comic strip), I began to dwell on the idea of death. Not in any way did I ponder the pain one may encounter in dying, or contemplate the fear of that crossing-over that no one can possibly ever know the real nature of until it’s their turn. It was simply a deep pit that began to form inside me, a great emptiness and sorrow originating from that primal acknowledgement of the impermanence of things. At some point I looked around, thought – wow, I’m in love with all of this, and these people, and these feelings – and felt queasy knowing that one day all of it would fade.

There are various forms of this acknowledgement. Impermanence is one of, if not the most important foundation of many Eastern religions. Bumper stickers encourage us to carpe diem. Famous musical artists compose songs about the circle of life. A close friend of mine, as we dished over coffee, watched me break down a little as I was just coming out of this murky shadow that had plagued me for months. Now, while the general depression I was in stemmed from existential questions that covered everything, the object of my despair became my grandmother. In her early seventies but healthy, I suddenly (and irrationally) felt I was losing her more quickly than the way I’m losing, say, Tad. My friend calmly reminded me that each fleeting moment is always right behind us, and never in our possession, because we live HERE and NOW. Attachment to earth, to things, to people – it’s all in vain, and to some degree, pointless, since we won’t have it forever. I appreciated her words and was consoled, if only for a moment; but try as I might, I could not remain on that side of things, and don’t know that I ever will.

Doty and I share this feeling. In one striking scene, Doty is walking his aging dog, and happens upon an elderly woman who comments on the dog’s age. She makes a pleasant remark in passing about how “lovely” it is that we’re here for a time, part of the cycle, and then we go. Doty explains it thus: “She wanted to assert that in the great current of being, the particularly elderly struggling creature in front of her didn’t really matter, that his particular condition was not tragic, because he was just a flash in the great motion of the whole. To which I wanted to say, though I did not, **** you” (13).

Why do we consider grief a failure? Don’t misread me – I’m not talking about those unfortunate few who become so overcome with anguish at a loss that they ignore everything else that’s important in life, and can never re-assimilate. I’m talking about the way we ignore our own mortality. The way we hide old people away in separate communities so as not to face the fact that yes, life does come to an end, but not before we lose our strength, beauty, and minds. I’m talking about the church ladies with their “It’s for the best. He’s in a better place.” While that’s probably true, it minimizes the real – the emptiness where someone once was. I, like Doty, feel that that the grief we carry does not accomplish an erasure of this existence, but offers us evidence and testimony that this exact space was not always empty, but was once filled with so-and-so. It offers a presence somehow.

For some, accepting the impermanence of this life is just what it is – acceptance, and true acceptance at that. But for most of us, it’s a over-romanticizing of sorts: “The oversweetened surface of the sentimental exists in order to protect its maker, as well as the audience, from anger … Sentimental images of children and of animals, sappy representations of love – they are fueled, in truth, by their opposites, by a terrible human rage that nothing stays.” Try as we might to be ok with death, even from a Christian perspective, the fact remains that we’re here, we’re mortal, and we feel pain and emptiness when we lose someone. Even the loss of self upon entering into the symbolic order as a child is tragic, and we can feel it here and there, when trying to explain a feeling and finding that words are hopelessly inadequate. Then again, do we really want that privilege? To retain the self to that degree, that it can join us in this arbitrary system of signs? “Maybe we should be glad, finally, that the word can’t go where the heart can, not completely. It’s freeing, to think there’s always an aspect of us outside the grasp of speech, the common stuff of language. Love is common, too, absolutely so – and yet our words for it only point to it; they do not describe it. They are indicators of something immense” (48). If, in all of our science and promise and endeavor, we could somehow communicate, express, or even accept the business of the heart, would we be left with anything? Isn’t that, after all, what makes it the heart? Its uncommunicativeness? Its impossible-to-understand-ness?

I’ve rambled incoherently and I apologize. I guess what I’m trying to say is that, to me, grief is not failure. And neither is the mourning long before the loss. Is it so bad, to feel the highs and lows, and take them as they come? How else will you recognize those brief, glimmering highs? I will, then, continue to remember that yes, things are impermanent, but nonetheless HERE. The very idea that one day these damp, green trees, sweet with Spring, will die – as will these deep memories, this brass laughter ringing its wild echo in the hall – makes me wither with sorrow. But I will not hide from it behind philosophy or sentiment; I will meet it with grace, and use it to cherish the now more than ever. I will continue to be attached, to reject the seeming perfection of the “circle.” Love, after all, isn't love without that proper ache that leaves you without a heartbeat now and then.