The Unspeakable

by Meghan Daum

  I won’t lie. Rex’s passing was the worst grief I’ve faced in my life so far. Even weeks after the fact, I had bruises on my forehead from where I’d dug my fingers in while sobbing. Even when he’d been gone for nearly a year, during which time I acquired two new dogs for whom my fondness grew every day, his absence felt like a hole I was forever stepping around. I often thought about how, as a high school actress with desultory ambitions of growing up and going pro, I’d worried about my inability to cry on cue. In the era of postmortem Rex (and actually for months prior, when, despite his relative spryness, the mere anticipation of his demise had me choking up on a near daily basis) I pictured myself triumphing as an inconsolable, suicidal Ophelia, summoning images of Rex while flooding the scenery with a monsoon of tears.

  But it was not just Rex himself that brought out such blubbering. Upon his death, as though enduring a series of aftershocks nearly as traumatizing as the main event, I had the misfortune of receiving from several well-meaning parties a copy of a poem called “The Rainbow Bridge.” Actually to call it a poem might be pushing it. It’s more like a pitch for an animated children’s television show that’s been broken into lines of verse. Except it doesn’t even always appear in verse form. Sometimes it’s more like a five-paragraph essay. Often you see it printed out in a fancy font on pastel-colored paper, like a morbid wedding invitation. On YouTube there are multiple video versions, many featuring gauzy footage of clouds and pastures and using the music of Enya, surely without permission.

  The idea behind “The Rainbow Bridge” is that there’s a vast green meadow “this side of heaven” where pets that were especially loved by their owners go when they die. In this meadow, which is also the entry point of a bridge that is literally made out of a rainbow and that leads to heaven, all sickness disappears and all injuries heal. The animals return to the spirited, bright-eyed creatures they were in the prime of life. In this meadow there is always fresh food and clean water and the sun always shines and the animals spend their days frolicking happily together, though they always miss the special human they had to leave behind on earth. Every once in a while, however, one of them “stops suddenly and looks into the distance.” Body quivering, he leaves the group and runs across the meadow as fast as he can.

  You have been spotted and when you and your special friend finally meet, you cling together in joyous reunion, never to be parted again. The happy kisses rain upon your face; your hands again caress the beloved head, and you look once more into the trusting eyes of your pet, so long gone from your life but never absent from your heart.

  And then you cross the Rainbow Bridge together …

  I try to avoid this piece of literature at all costs. Whenever I encounter it online or run into it in a veterinary office, where it will frequently be laminated and tacked to a wall amid pet-themed thank-you cards from grateful owners, I avert my eyes the same way I do when approaching something on the road that might be a dead dog. I do this not because the poem is bad, though it certainly is, but because by the third line my eyes will be glazed with tears and I will have to make a very conscious effort to shift my thoughts to something less personally upsetting than pet death. For instance, rectal cancer.

  According to Michael Schaffer’s One Nation Under Dog, a book I devoured a few years ago much the same way, as a teenager, despite never having owned a dog, I devoured Your Neapolitan Mastiff and You, “The Rainbow Bridge” emerged sometime in the early 1980s and has been published online at least 35,000 times. The byline almost always appears as “Anonymous,” though several would-be authors have claimed credit over the years. These include a psychologist who says the poem appeared on a dog club’s website after he wrote it for a grieving friend, and at least two authors of self-published books about the Rainbow Bridge, one of whom threatened to sue Universal Press Syndicate after it appeared in a Dear Abby column.

  Over the years, Schaffer explains, the poem has been tweaked to satisfy certain gaps in its logic. There are Christian versions floating around that use scripture to challenge the traditional precept that animals lack souls and therefore cannot go to heaven. There are versions that retrofit the Rainbow Bridge so that it’s accessible not just to especially cherished pets but to all living creatures everywhere. After all, how rainbowlike can a bridge really be if it accommodates the bed-sharing, carefully fed, bathed, and vaccinated animal companions of the world but not the millions of nameless, tagless, unwashed, and unbrushed creatures that die in shelters or perish on the streets? It would be like saying that the only people who will be reunited with loved ones in the afterlife are those lucky enough to have had a soul mate.

  On the other hand, an equal-access Rainbow Bridge presents some real problems. Think of the overcrowding, the noise, the poop, and kennel cough. I imagine arriving at the bridge, fresh from my deathbed, only to wonder if the place I’ve come to is really a giant municipal dog pound—in other words, hell. What if I’ve been sentenced to an eternity surrounded by yapping Chihuahuas and nonrehabilitable fighting dogs? What if—and this part is almost too devastating to contemplate—Rex cannot find me among the throngs? What if he stops suddenly and looks into the distance only to lose all traces of me as quickly as he sensed them? What if I am left to cross the bridge alone, without Rex, like a traveler who’s lost his dog on some far-flung highway, a lifetime away from any scent markers of home? This, of course, is worse than death. It’s worse than watching Rex die. It’s worse, I imagine, than dying myself. It is the absolute essence of abandonment. It’s what dying alone would mean to me.

  So, there, I’ve admitted it. The Rainbow Bridge poem makes me cry because as much as I want to never see it again I want even more for it to be true. I want Rex to escort me into the afterlife the way he ushered me through real life—at least thirteen years of it. I want to believe that Rex will be there when I die because, like anyone, I am afraid of death and, like a lot of owners of “especially loved” pets (though most are smart enough not to say it out loud) he would bring me more comfort than any other creature, human or otherwise, I can currently think of.

  l suppose that’s a sad thing to say. I suppose what I’m really saying is that I can’t connect with people, or that I don’t want to, or that I’m unwilling or unable to do the work required to be someone for whom the idea of having a human loved one beside me at my deathbed is a source of comfort rather than ambivalence. I suppose it’s even worse that this ambivalence can easily tip over into dread. Granted, like anyone, in my final hours I want to be surrounded only by the people I really care about. At the same time, I don’t want to put the people I care about through something as disconcerting as watching me rattle and wheeze my way into oblivion. I know to some this logic sounds twisted. I know this is the opposite of how most people think—or at least say they think. I also know it’s entirely possible—perhaps probable—that when my time actually comes I will see all of this very differently than I do right now. But if you asked me today—and if you’d asked me on any other day going back to that “Happy Birthday, Animal Lover” ice cream cake and beyond—I’d tell you that my ideal exit from this world would involve a dog at the foot of my bed and another dog (preferably Rex) running alongside me as I drifted into whatever state of consciousness lines the edge of whatever comes next.

  I’d say this not to hurt the humans I love but to spare them a certain kind of grief. Not the grief of loss but the grief of performing the loss for the sake of others. Because one of the disadvantages of being human rather than canine is that humans are so often called upon to be phony for the sake of decorum. And the miracle of dogs—of all animals—is that they’re incapable of phoniness. Even when they’re performing a trick, they’re doing so out of instinct and muscle memory. As much as we like to think they live to please us, the truth is they don’t care about our pleasure. They care about getting fed and taking walks and not being left in a hot car. They care about maintaining a baseline of contentment. Which is precisely why they give us such intense
surges of pleasure.

  It’s always said that pets provide unconditional love, but of course that’s not true. The dog that is neglected or abused by its owner may try, for his own safety, to satisfy his owner’s whims, but he will not love him, unconditionally or otherwise. Humans could take a lesson from this. “Unconditional love,” as a term, rolls nicely off the tongue, but people say it without meaning it. The idea of loving someone no matter what they do is overrated, not to mention largely impossible. What is unconditional about dogs (about all animals, really, but somehow dogs have made an art of it) is their authenticity. No matter where they are or who they’re with, dogs are incapable of being anything but themselves. Show me a dog that puts on airs or laughs politely at an unfunny joke and I’ll show you a human in a dog costume, possibly one owned and licensed by the Walt Disney Company. Show me a dog that is sentimental and I’ll show you one of those children’s books whose frowning animal characters my mother had to draw smiles on.

  And therein lies the irony of the dog exception. I may love dogs because they are so inherently without sap, because they are immune to manufactured emotion or self-engineered cuteness. And yet I express my affection for them in the most sentimental terms imaginable. I dump schmaltz on them by the truckload, cooing over my own charges in cloying baby talk, fawning over strangers’ dogs in the park in the manner of a pervert casing the scene at a merry-go-round, writing Daily Puppy profiles in the first person and then slapping them on Facebook in a bid for the same attention craved by parents of toddlers who’ve mastered their mini-commodes. I’ll wait in line for an hour at my neighborhood’s annual Pet Photos with Santa holiday fund-raiser, force my dogs to pose with antlers on their heads, and then make custom cards using the portrait, which I’ll later decide not to send out for fear of seeming pathetic. I’ll then give in and send the card to a select few who I know will appreciate it.

  What does it say about the human need for mawkish emotion that, when met with some of the least counterfeit souls on earth, when graced by the presence of creatures for whom affectation is simply incompatible with their DNA, we roll them in sugar as if they were candied apples? What does it mean that people like me, who recoil in the face of culturally enforced cuteness, take the placid tabula rasa that is the essence of dogdom and write all over it in loopy purple letters? I used to think such carrying-on was for people who needed to get a life. Now I wonder if such carrying-on is proof of life. How can we deny the urge to cover the blank spaces with our gooeyist impulses, to take the unknown and fill it with rainbows and wet furrylicious kisses? And what is more unknown than the contents of an animal’s mind? What do we yearn for more than knowledge of what our dog is thinking—specifically, what he thinks of us?

  Maybe only death is more unknown. Maybe the only knowledge more prized than a glimpse inside the mind of another living thing is a glimpse inside the end of life itself. And maybe that’s because pets are, in a way, living embodiments of death. They guarantee us nothing other than the near certainty that they will leave us well before we leave them. They are ticking bombs that lick our faces. They are prescheduled heartbreak. They leave us no choice but to dread the Rainbow Bridge while secretly hoping it really exists. Our love for our pets is what separates us from the animals. Our love for animals is what makes us human. Which I guess is another way of saying it makes us both totally pathetic and exceedingly blessed.

  ON NOT BEING A FOODIE

  I hate food. Not that I don’t consume it. Like any decent American I often consume too much of it. I just hate thinking about it. I hate shopping for it, preparing it, serving it, and cleaning it up and putting it away, though I would take cleaning up over cooking any day. Cooking fills me with a dread I can only describe as the sum total of every negative feeling I’ve ever had about myself. It takes my chronic impatience, divides it by my inherent laziness, and multiplies it to the power of my deepest self-loathing. For reasons I can only trace back to my lifelong inability to put effort toward things that don’t immediately interest or come easily to me (a character flaw that has its roots in my grammar school mathematics career and eventually grew to include team sports, Middle English literature appreciation, and the proper application of eyeliner), my approach to cooking is not unlike the approach many people take when confronted with their least-favorite exercise in a fitness class. That is to say, I fake my way through it and hope no one’s watching. I wait for it to be over.

  I have never learned how to properly chop up an onion. Instead of making small, radial cuts along the curve like you’re apparently supposed to, I hack at it as though splitting a coconut. Dicing vegetables like carrots or tomatoes takes me five times longer than it should. Since I almost never read recipes all the way through before getting started, any prep work I deign to undertake is inadequate at best. I leave out ingredients. I botch the timing in countless ways. Since I have no innate understanding of flavor combinations or heat transfer and an utter disregard for precision, I forgo measuring spoons, ignore burner settings, and choose pans based not on their suitability to the task but on the degree of difficulty involved in extracting them from the cabinets or hoisting them onto the stove (I have absurdly weak wrists).

  Sometimes, in an attempt to relax or simulate some magazine-spread version of “sensuous living” (barn-wood cabinetry, copper pots hanging like a Calder mobile over a butcher-block kitchen island, bottle of Shiraz sitting objet d’art–like on a countertop composed of handmade ceramic tiles), I’ll pour myself a glass of wine and take grateful little sips as I perform my incompetent maneuvers. But one glass has been known to turn into two. Throw in an empty stomach and before I know it I’m cooking slightly intoxicated. Before I know it I have even less energy for the venture than I started with, which seems barely possible.

  Like I said, I don’t actually mind cleaning food up all that much, especially if it means throwing a lot of stuff out. There’s something cathartic about picking up the greasy remains of a rotisserie chicken or a half-eaten tub of ice cream and depositing it in the trash. You are expecting me now to confess that I have an eating disorder, that I’m a binger and purger, that the reason I throw out the ice cream is that I fear the alternative is to eat it all in one sitting. But I don’t have an eating disorder. I have a living disorder.

  Food enthusiasts, when trying to determine if someone is a member of their tribe, otherwise known as a “foodie,” like to ask the question “Do you eat to live or do you live to eat?” My answer would be that I live to avoid thinking too much about what I eat. That’s not to say I’m one of those people who forgets to eat. On the contrary, there is no more reliable antidote for boredom or writer’s block than a trip to the refrigerator, where, for lack of anything more substantial, packages of lox and containers of leftover Vietnamese takeout beckon like street hookers. It’s more like I forget to taste.

  I eat neither particularly well nor particularly badly. Most days I consume some combination of sprouted-grain bread, honey, almond butter, kale, tofu, Brie, dried fruit, prosciutto, and chocolate. I’m pretty sure I could eat nothing but Indian food and sushi for the rest of my life and be perfectly satisfied. I haven’t eaten McDonald’s-style fast food in decades. At the risk of sounding more affluent than I am, my definition of fast food is the prepared sushi sold in packages at Whole Foods Market. This is also probably my favorite meal in the world, even better in some ways than very expensive sushi at a fine sushi bar, which can be stressful and overwhelming and therefore detract from the experience. These packages cost in the neighborhood of eleven dollars each and every time I buy one, which I often do during a shopping excursion that involves the purchase of very little else (maybe a box of Popsicles or an organic lavender-scented cleaning product), I pass through a cloud of self-admonition that begins with guilt over spending too much money and ends with a mild panic born of one of the central anxieties of my life: that my carelessness and boredom around eating and cooking point toward a deeper pathology, one born of a more general care
lessness and boredom about being in the world. But then I exit the market and get in the car and am pulled into some story or interview on public radio. I start thinking about health care or filibusters or the new novel by an author who’s being interviewed. My anxiety abates. Unless it’s a cooking show or a segment about the latest food craze, for instance the croissant-doughnut love child dubbed the Cronut, in which case I flip to a classic rock station and hope something great like Grand Funk Railroad’s “We’re an American Band” comes on.

  My mother was herself an unenthusiastic cook. Some people whose mothers were bad in the kitchen compensate by going very far in the other direction. The New York Times food critic turned Gourmet editor-in-chief Ruth Reichl has written about how her mother’s idea of cooking involved opening the refrigerator and tossing everything she could find into a bowl, scraping off mold where necessary. My mother was more the boiled-chicken type. Her definition of spaghetti was a plate of unseasoned linguini with heated tomato sauce dumped on top. After a few unsuccessful attempts, in the mid-1970s, to prepare fried chicken using Team cereal flakes and Wesson oil, she gave up on making that particular dish from scratch and, to my delight, began buying the frozen kind. The meal rotation in our house comprised roughly the following: Swanson’s fried chicken, macaroni and cheese from a box (again, the generic brand), spaghetti, hard-shell tacos made with hamburger meat and refried beans, and boiled chicken with a side dish such as corn (which I liked) or peas (which I did not and therefore made a dramatic display of swallowing as if they were pills). In almost all cases, vegetables came frozen and desserts were prepackaged or made from one kind of boxed mix or another (cake, brownies, pudding, banana bread).