I’d been feeling emotionally low the last few days. This happens, sometimes. I just feel down, more than usual. I sleep much more than usual. The antidepressants don’t always work as well as one would hope - though in practice, it’s normal to be down sometimes. Not every day, or week, or month can be a winner, regardless of how much you try and get yourself to focus.
I woke up this morning. I had some coffee, tried to get myself excited for the day. I assembled a cat tower. I took my cat, Zero, outside for a walk on his leash. He loves going outside.
That was when I found the body.
It was a blue-tongue lizard. I’d seen it a few times before, hanging out in the cracks in between the rocks of the retaining wall. We have lots of lizards in our yard, but they’re mostly smaller ones; the blue-tongue was easily the largest. We’d first seen him within the last month - a happy moment that sparked joy. We’d fed him some slices of apple, and though he’d run away when we put them down, they were gone when we came back later. I’d not seen any blue-tongues since moving to Queensland; there were many more down in New South Wales, at least where I lived. I was glad it was here.
There were flies coating it.
I held out a small sliver of hope - maybe it was just resting - but the stench of the body hit me, and it was clear it was gone. I didn’t know what to do. I remember, when I was younger, I was walking home when I saw a bird miscalculate and fly head-first into a gutter and fall to the ground, stunned. I sprinted towards it and saw it was still breathing, though motionless. I didn’t know what to do. I picked it up as gently as I could - it was breathing, it was breathing, it might be okay - but I, personally, didn’t know what to do. The nearest building was a Hungry Jack’s (the Australian version of Burger King). I took the bird inside. I don’t remember exactly what I said to the people behind the counter. It was probably something along the lines of asking if anyone knew what to do. And of course, the minimum-wage teenagers had no idea what to do. A strange man walked in with a damaged bird. This wasn’t within the normal parameters of the working day. They just kind of shrugged. Birds get hurt and die all the time. We just don’t think about it. By good fortune, the bird stirred back to life shortly after. I took it outside, laid it down; it righted itself and flew away.
I took Zero out into the front yard. No need to suddenly stop everything. Zero enjoyed his time outside. He didn’t know what I knew. He hadn’t seen the body.
Another memory, of the first place I lived at in Brisbane. I made a habit of carrying a first-aid kit with me. I always had some band-aids in my wallet, too. I was always planning for contingencies, and worst-case scenarios. There was a busy crossing nearby, right across from where I lived. And I was leaving one day, to go to the shops, I think, when suddenly a cyclist was hit by a car. He fell and he wasn’t moving. But I had the first aid kit! I ran over - initially, standing beside him, arms outstretched to stop any vehicles from running over him entirely. He was breathing. Other people were there. I had the first aid kit. I did not know how to use the first aid kit. Thankfully, thankfully, there was an Actual Adult nearby, rather than just me, pretending at being a Grown Up. I gave her the first aid kit - I think she mentioned she’d worked at a hospital before - she took over the situation, she took control. I didn’t need to think about it, the onus of responsibility wasn’t on me. I didn’t continue going on to the shops that day. I went home and spent the rest of the day in bed.
The neighbours got home, and Zero, nervous about strangers, wanted to come back into the backyard. I kept his leash short while I re-locked the gate, so he wouldn’t find the body.
I’m not good at dealing with death, or things like it, or near to it. I’m bad in a crisis. I’m fantastic when everything’s fine: when the sailing is smooth, I find the energy to persevere. But when something hits that’s outside the norm, I lock up. My emotions overwhelm me. And if I have to keep Doing What I Am Doing, then I have to shove them back down. Because there’s something that Needs To Be Done, and I don’t have the luxury to Feel right just then. I can save the Feeling Of Things for later.
In February 2020, the wide-ranging Australian bushfires were the biggest news of that year so far. Some friends of mine were getting married, but their venue burned down. They got through, rescheduled, the wedding was lovely. A relief that they were able to handle that chaos and get through.
Then the rest of 2020 happened, which I don’t think needs an explanatory hyperlink. I did not go so well that year.
In February 2022, I was living in the ironically named Land Street when I was flooded in. We had no power for weeks, no hot water for longer. The air circulation in the building was poor at the best of times, and at the height of summer the temperatures became sweltering. We filled a tub with as much clean water as we could, while we still had water pressure. Other residents of the building were evacuated on boats by emergency services. We stayed put - we couldn’t find anywhere to stay, since we weren’t the only ones in that situation; every hotel was fully booked, and that’s ignoring that we’d need to find somewhere we could bring a pet.
Shortly after surviving the floods, we got evicted from our apartment, since the owners wanted to sell. On short notice, we had to find a pet-friendly, wheelchair-accessible building, during one of the worst rental markets in Australian history. Our rent nearly doubled at the only place we could find, and we only secured it by offering three months’ rent upfront. At our new place, the lifts regularly went out, and the building manager refused to inform us when this occurred, which on multiple occasions resulted in missed appointments.
There’s a game I liked well enough, called Dysfunctional Systems; but in particular, I remember it for its incredibly strong subtitle: “Learning to Manage Chaos”. I think it sums up life, generally, for me. There is some unanticipated element that hits, and we have to learn robustness, perhaps even aspire to antifragility, to embrace the eustress and become stronger for having been tested. The one core skill of life, universally applicable, is to manage chaos.
We had to bury the blue-tongue lizard.
When we moved the body, we saw there was a dead toad nearby. The lizard, through no fault of its own, tried to get some food. There was an odd jumping thing nearby, that it caught, and took a bite of. And then it seemed to know something was wrong. It had dug its way into a little ditch, it seemed. Tried to surround itself. I can’t imagine what it would have been like, for it. The toad’s as much a victim, too - though its flesh was poison, so it went into the trash bin, double-bagged, for the safety of anything else that might try to eat it. The toad, were it edible, would have died to become food. This would have been better than the actual case - it died, and in death, killed something else. The blue-tongue had died for essentially no reason. Chaos had gotten it.
Entropy gets us all in the end.
There’s a patch in our yard where I throw the lawn clippings. Over time, they break down, decompose into dirt, gradually building up a pile of dead plant matter. And then plants grow from that. Apparently, most of the matter of plants is carbon from their carbon dioxide absorption, rather than anything they pull from the soil. That’s why hydroponics in plain water can work for many grasses. It’s not dirt-to-dirt, that cycle. It’s making dirt from the air. A special kind of biological magic.
I dug a trench, there. Deep and long to suit the body. I had to cut through compressed clay layers with the gardening knife, break up that dirt. Loosen it and throw it out. We aren’t going to mark it. We didn’t really know this animal. We just saw it once or twice. It’s just going to break down.
Why is my emotional response to this so intense?
I cried for it. It died for nothing. We put the body into the hole and put the dirt on top of it and pushed down on the dirt to re-compress it and didn’t mark the grave. Wild animals suffer and die all the time, constantly, continually, and there’s nothing we can do about it. So do humans, so do pets, so does everything. Chaos happens and things die for nothing.
I hadn’t dug a grave before.
I felt some kind of catharsis, afterwards. There was a finality to it. The blue-tongue was gone, and now it was in the ground; some worms or bacteria would make a feast of it, rather than flies, and I can pretend that’s a kinder fate for the body than being host to maggots. It’s somewhere I don’t have to see it, or think about it. It’s gone into the ground, and will become dirt. One day that’s probably what will happen to me, too, or something similar. I’ll decompose and rot, so long as they don’t first pump me full of formaldehyde. Of course, all that makes me “me” will be gone by the time that happens. The zaps in my brain will slow and stop, and that’s when I’m gone; my body will get redistributed and that’s another kind of gone. While the body is intact, there’s still a referent; that’s “where I was”, when I was here, that’s my shell, even if the ghost is gone. The ghost dissolves into the shell; the shell dissolves into everything else.
I felt like I should say a few words over the grave. But I had nothing to say. I didn’t know it, it didn’t know me, there was no emotional connection beyond that kinship between things which live and think and likely have some sense of selfhood. There’s a kind of vague, religious, folk-magick feeling, that all animals are “the same” in some sense. But I think something more concrete than that nebulous sameness. I think selfhood is not so much an illusion that can be dispelled, as the Buddhists might have it, but a thing which can be done; an integration of information, some Totoni-esque task performed by a construct. And the universality, I think, is that “selfhood” is probably performed about the same way by everyone.
My brain’s some configuration of neurons, as is yours. And there’s many paths of perturbations to those neurons, or even going atom-by-atom, which would move from the state-space of Me to the state-space of You. And I suspect there exists a path where every intermediary brain has its own sense of self: that it could run fine, in some body, and think and be, some odd mixture of the two of us. And the important thing I’d like to claim is that, along that trajectory, locally, each “self” being performed is nigh-indistinguishable from its neighbours.
And so this trajectory from My Brain performing My Self and Your Brain performing Your Self has a continuum of other, intermediary selves. And each of those doesn’t quite have My Brain or Your Brain. But I think the “performing of Self” is likely the same across them. Which is to say, while your brain and mine might be different objects, the abstract platonic “self” of ”what it is like to be, from the inside” which is being performed is (roughly) the same (citation needed, but left as exercise to the reader). The claim: Selfhood feels the same from the inside, to all of us; we all “feel like ourselves”. And that’s the kind of universality I think can be well-defended, though there’s some assumptions taken as granted along the way. If you don’t think of yourself as Your Brain, but simply think of “self” as the one thing being performed by many things, then “selfhood” becomes a kind of panpsychism. And if you identify Your Self not as The Selfhood In Your Brain, but as The Performance Of Selfhood By Any Brain, then in that sense you and all other selfhood-performing organisms are part of the one platonic, abstract self.
That’s what’s going through my mind as I stand over the grave of the blue-tongue lizard. That it, probably, had enough neurons to be doing selfhood. That there was Something It Was Like To Be That Lizard. And that its selfhood was, from the inside, the same kind of feeling as my selfhood. And so when it dies, there is a feeling that I died, too. That’s empathy, I guess, arrived at through reason, or else post-hoc justifying the emotional response. I was it, and it was me; when it died, there was one less part of me, or instantiation of a thing like me, or however you might want to put that philosophy. If I let my self be selfhood, then every self that dies is my own death.
A complicated feeling over a dead lizard.
The frog went in a bag, and the bag went in the bin, and we came back inside. We’re back with the cats that are our charges, to make as happy as we can get, for as long as we have. And we’re back with our selves, the ones that are still around, and think and do and feel. I guess in as far as the lizard was part of me, I am part of the lizard. It’s not that a part of my selfhood dies, so much as the selfhood the lizard was doing is still around. There’s other selfhood being done, and to be done, and the busywork of life and managing chaos until our selfhood runs out.
Today, I dug my first grave. And today, I dug My first grave.
And both felt awful.