(I had a counsellor who decided that it would be therapeutic for me to express more emotion than I generally do. And thus in every session she brought the conversation round to how I felt about the death of my previous – my first – cat Brix, in a scene I had not witnessed but had been described to me by my braver partner. Much emotion then flowed.)
My father’s health declined in steps over 10 years. At each decline I’d react with a kind of shock and horror but then get used to it. The first time he had a TIA and was taken away in an ambulance, it seemed awful. But by the third or fourth time, it didn’t seem terrible any more. When he first became delusional, it really upset me. But for whatever reason it happened – often a humble UTI – he always returned to the space of reasons. I’m pleased that that remained so at the point of his death.
By contrast, when my mother was rushed to hospital with leukaemia, I was told that I had to get there that very day to see her alive. That turned out to be false: she lived – in hospital – another 2 months. But there still didn’t seem time to get used to it. It seemed like a single slow crash (like an oil tanker heading for an inevitable collision because it cannot be stopped within miles).
It is, of course, odd to compare my reaction to the death of my parents with that of pets. But the similarity lies in the affect. Whether or not it is right, I do feel related sadness. That's increased by the way I generalise symbolically from one instance to all others. I re-live all deaths.
Still, standing back, the key difference is surely just this: only those in the space of reasons can feel existential dread and regret over lost opportunity. The ending of a narratively structured life – whether or not one thinks that rational beings have narrative lives, we have the capacity to conceptualise them narratively – is something that can seem wrong both for the subject and for others in a way that goes beyond the non-narrative. For a cat, being is more in the moment. Elizabeth Anscombe famously ascribes intentionality to a cat stalking a bird, which implies a telos. John McDowell suggests that animal mentality is is merely a different species of the same genus: mentality. (Donald Davidson took a firmer line: the non-intensional is non-intentional, as it were.) But for cats in my experience, perhaps an association with the unpleasantness of the cat basket continues for weeks. Perhaps there’s some anticipation of breakfast after a long night with a closed kitchen. But the end (the End!) isn’t an end for the cat. Their end is an end for us but not for them. That’s the thing I find hard to keep a grip of. Sentimentality edges its way back in without me noticing. It comes to seem the saddest thing in the world because ending just is the saddest thing in the world.
