In the same day, a good friend has lost a very beloved English Bulldog and a Dancing Monk has asked for resources for handling heartbreak. So, I'm posting the passage that I think has helped me through heartbreak the most. The scene is Ruth's apartment. Jason and Ruth are having one of those late night discussions and Jason has remarked that he would never have a pet.
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"Their lives are so short. Just so fucking goddamn short. Okay, some people lose a creature they love and then go on and transfer that love to another one. But it hurts; it hurts."
"Then why is love so good?" He had brooded about that, in and out of his own relationships, all his long adult life. He brooded about it acutely now. Through what had recently happened to him, up to Emily Fusselman's rabbit. This moment of painfulness. "You love someone and they leave. They come home one day and start packing their things and you say, 'What's happening?' and they say, 'I got a better offer someplace else,' and there they go, out of your life forever, and after that until you're dead you're carrying around this huge hunk of love with no one to give it to. And if you do find someone to give it to, the same thing happens all over. Or you call them up on the phone one day and say, 'This is Jason,' and they say, 'Who?' and then you know you've had it. They don't know who the hell you are. So I guess they never did know; you never had them in the first place."
Ruth said, "Love isn't just wanting another person the way you want to own an object you see in a store. That's just desire. You want to have it around, take it home and set it up somewhere in the apartment like a lamp. Love is"--she paused, reflecting--"like a father saving his children from a burning house, getting them out and dying himself. When you love you cease to live for yourself; you live for another person."
"And that's good?" It did not sound so good to him.
"It overcomes instinct. Instincts push us into fighting for survival. Like the pols ringing all the campuses. Survival of ourselves at the expense of others; each of us claws his way up. I can give you a good example. My twenty-first husband, Frank. We were married six months. During that time he stopped loving me and became horribly unhappy. I still loved him; I wanted to remain with him, but it was hurting him. So I let him go. You see? It was better for him, and because I loved him that's what counted. See?"
Jason said, "But why is it good to go against the instinct for self-survival?"
"You don't think I can say."
"No," he said.
"Because the instinct for survival loses in the end. With every living creature, mole, bat, human, frog. Even frogs who smoke cigars and play chess. You can never accomplish what your survival instinct sets out to do, so ultimately your striving ends in failure and you succumb to death, and that ends it. But if you love you can fade out and watch--"
"I'm not ready to fade out," Jason said.
"--you can fade out and watch with happiness, and with cool, mellow, alpha contentment, the highest form of contentment, the living on of one of those you love."
"But they die, too."
"True." Ruth Rae chewed on her lip.
"It's better not to love so that never happens to you. Even a pet, a dog or a cat. As you pointed out--you love them and they perish. If the death of a rabbit is bad--" He had, then, a glimpse of horror: the crushed bones and hair of a girl, held and leaking blood, in the jaws of a dimly-seen enemy outlooming any dog.
"But you can grieve," Ruth said, anxiously studying his face. "Jason! Grief is the most powerful emotion a man or child or animal can feel. It's a _good_ feeling."
"In what fucking way?" he said harshly.
"Grief causes you to leave yourself. You step outside your narrow little pelt. And you can't feel grief unless you've had love before it--grief is the final outcome of love, because it's love lost. You do understand; I know you do. But you just don't want to think about it. It's the cycle of love completed: to love, to lose, to feel grief, to leave, and then to love again. Jason, grief is awareness that you will have to be alone, and there is nothing beyond that because being alone is the ultimate final destiny of each individual living creature. That's what death is, the great loneliness. I remember once when I first smoked pot from a waterpipe rather than a joint. It, the smoke, was cool, and I didn't realize how much I had inhaled. All of a sudden I died. For a little instant, but several seconds long. The world, every sensation, including even the awareness of my own body, of even having a body, faded out. And it didn't like leave me in isolation in the usual sense because when you're alone in the usual sense you still have sense data coming in even if it's only from your own body. But even the darkness went away. Everything just ceased. Silence. Nothing. Alone."
"They must have soaked it in one of those toxic shit things. That used to burn out so many people back then."
"Yes, I'm lucky I ever got my head back. A freak thing-- I had smoked pot a lot of times before and that never happened. That's why I do tobacco, now, after that. Anyhow, it wasn't like fainting; I didn't feel I was going to fall, because I had nothing to fall with, no body. . . and there was no down to fall toward. Everything, including myself, just"-- she gestured--"expired. Like the last drop out of a bottle. And then, presently, they rolled the film again. The feature we call reality." She paused, puffing on her tobacco cigarette. "I never told anyone about it before."
"Were you frightened about it?"
She nodded. "Consciousness of unconsciousness, if you dig what I mean. When we do die we won't feel it because that's what dying is, the loss of all that. So, for example, I'm not at all scared of dying anymore, not after that pot bad trip. But to grieve; it's to die and be alive at the same time. The most absolute, overpowering experience you can feel, therefore. Sometimes I swear we weren't constructed to go through such a thing; it's too much--your body damn near self-destructs with all that heaving and surging. But I want to feel grief. To have tears."
"Why?" He couldn't grasp it; to him it was something to be avoided. When you felt that you got the hell out fast.
Ruth said, "Grief reunites you with what you've lost. It's a merging; you go with the loved thing or person that's going away. In some fashion you split with yourself and accompany it, go part of the way with it on its journey. You follow it as far as you can go. I remember one time when I had this dog I loved. I was roughly seventeen or eighteen--just around the age of consent, that's how I remember. The dog got sick and we took him to the vet's. They said he had eaten rat poison and was nothing more than a sack of blood inside and the next twenty-four hours would determine if he'd survive. I went home and waited and then around eleven P.M. I crashed. The vet was going to phone me in the morning when he got there to tell me if Hank had lived through the night. I got up at eight-thirty and tried to get it all together in my head, waiting for the call. I went into the bathroom--I wanted to brush my teeth--and I saw Hank, at the bottom left part of the room; he was slowly in a very measured dignified fashion climbing invisible stairs. I watched him go upward diagonally as he trudged and then at the top right margin of the bathroom he disappeared, still climbing. He didn't look back once. I knew he had died. And then the phone rang and the vet told me that Hank was dead. But I saw him going upward. And of course I felt terrible overwhelming grief, and as I did so, I lost myself and followed along with him, up the fucking stairs."
Both of them stayed silent for a time.
"But finally," Ruth said, clearing her throat, "the grief goes away and you phase back into this world. Without him."
"And you can accept that."
"What the hell choice is there? You cry, you continue to cry, because you don't ever completely come back from where you went with him--a fragment broken off your pulsing, pumping heart is there still. A nick out of it. A cut that never heals. And if, when it happens to you over and over again in life, too much of your heart does finally go away, then you can't feel grief any more. And then you yourself are ready to die. You'll walk up the inclined ladder and someone else will remain behind grieving for you."
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