The wheezing begins, seemingly out of nowhere, as it usually does as I sit on the cushioned rocking chair in my friend’s basement. The cat, possibly the fattest I’ve ever seen, huffs and puffs, the spasming of the comically rotund belly beyond the control of the poor, obese feline. His head, having the illusion of being rather small but in actuality being the size of a normal cat’s, provides me a window into which I can see the cat that could have been: a healthy cat, considerably smaller and definitively more agile. I imagine what he looks like beneath the immense mass of all this lard, picture the skeletal frame, of normal cat-size, holding him up, surely weak and aching from supporting such an unusually large load. 

But alas, my illusions bring me no release from the discomfort I feel looking at this cat—Bubba is his name—, for the reality of it is that this cat is doomed. Fat beyond saving. He continues to wheeze. Coughs that jolt his body. His eyes go wide, fear blanketing his whiskered face. When his lungs are not convulsing, desperately longing for a full, proper breath unimpaired by the crushing weight of his own body, he is flighty, on edge. He walks around cautiously, as though every step brings the possibility of more pain. He knows something is not right, though none can say to what extent he recognizes his fate. Does he know that he is dying? 

I do. I can not look at Bubba without igniting a fire in my chest, a choking anxiety that tingles throughout my body, which is why I do my best to look away from him. Everytime he begins to wheeze, my eyes mirror his, going wide with fear. Unlike Bubba’s, however, my eyes turn away.

​

***

​

Why do we look away from the death and suffering of others? I believe the answer, strangely enough, is empathy. All living things are reiterations of one another. We all act as mirrors through which people observe reflections of themselves. And so when we look in the face of death and suffering, we see the potential of our own death and suffering shining back at us. It is when we have not yet come to terms with our own death and suffering that we tend to look away from it in others. 

​

***

​

When I witness Bubba suffering during one of his wheezing fits, I so clearly see my own suffering within him. Every jolt of his body takes me back in time to the traumatic memory of my own cat, who, like Bubba, had his own lungs fail him.

​

My cat, Jax, was a sleek and slender little thing, only a year old, white with big brown spots covering his back and head. We knew something wasn’t right with him pretty early on. Eerily similar to Bubba, he would have panting fits, moments where he would have to open his mouth to get air, much like a dog on a hot summer day. Though typical for dogs, this behavior, unbeknownst to me at the time, is a sign of something fatal in cats. Based on research I’ve done ex-post-facto, it is likely that my poor little Jax had feline asthma or something of the sort. Jax’s asthma attacks, which surely always froze me in place in fearful anticipation of something horrid, always passed after a few minutes, until one day, it didn’t. 

It was a late night in August, the day before my first day of fifth grade. My parents had spent the day taking pictures of me and my siblings in a nearby horticulture garden with my mom’s fancy camera, attempting to freeze moments in time that gave of the illusion of a happy family and happy kids, though the reality of it was something of a mess. My sister, going into eighth grade and pubescent hormones raging at full blast, was being “difficult” all day, to put things nicely, clearly irritated by her freshly and unfortunately cut swoopy bangs and the August sun bringing about beads of perspiration on her already oily face (puberty is fun for no one). In every picture we took that day she looked something like a Medusa of sorts, glowering fiercely in a way that dared anyone to test her, lest she turn them into stone. The pictures were so bad, in fact, that my parents decided to take us back to the horticulture garden that evening, now that my sister was cooled down and considerably less Medusa-like. We thought it would be fun to bring Jax along. Though it's unclear exactly whose idea this was, I’m sure I, ever the cat-lover, advocated hard for his accompaniment; after all, wouldn’t it be lovely to get Jax in some of our family photos? So Jax came along, breathing in the summer air thick with pollen, running alongside his human counterparts, and taste-testing various plants along the way. Any one of these could have been what led to his asthmatic demise later that night, or perhaps it was simply an inevitable tragedy that would have occurred regardless of the day’s activities.

We returned home and went on with our night, the pre-first-day-of-school jitters in my belly and the excitement of new beginnings in the air. Outfits were laid out, backpacks were packed, and lunches were made. Things, however, never seem to go quite as planned. 

Jax began another one of his coughing fits. Or panting fits or wheezing fits or whatever you want to call them. It began as normal, he stood in the hallway, frozen in one spot, opened his mouth and panted for air. Unfortunately, I can’t say that this one ended as they normally did. Instead, Jax began thrashing around the hallway, spazzing and convulsing and leaping in circles, futilely attempting to escape an inescapable enemy. He hissed in fear, my poor baby, hardly older than a kitten, so fearfully confused as to what was happening to him. Even now, over ten years later, I can not write about this without breaking down into tears. My mind holds no visual memory that is more shocking or heartbreaking than this one. The scene is forever ingrained into my brain, and has been replayed countless times, always invoking such a deep sadness, for never have I seen such dramatic, intense suffering so up close and personal. We tried to pick him up, to help him, to rush him to the emergency vet, but he was thrashing his way throughout the house—the kitchen, the dining room, the living room—ricocheting off walls and away from anyone who tried to come near him as he slowly suffocated to death. I remember everyone yelling and screaming, all three of us kids eyes-wide in shock as we watched this tragedy unfold before us, though that’s not to say my parents were not equally as shocked—witnessing death is surely traumatic at any age. I remember his tongue turning blue, near the end of this catastrophe. I did not even recognize it as his tongue at first, just some horrible bluish purple lump, swelling up till it seemed that he choked on it. Then, it was over. His frantic escapades around the house came to an end. What felt like an hour of agony watching him suffer was probably more like five minutes. He laid there on the floor, unmoving. No more thrashing, no more spazzing. He was dead. I had just watched my one year old cat die before my eyes. I went to my first day of fifth grade the next day.

***

​

When we look upon someone in pain, we recognize the frailty of our own bodies, we become aware of our own potential to experience that same pain. Similarly, when looking upon someone who is dying, we feel bad that their time on Earth is coming to an end, we feel fear for how they will feel in the moment of their death, we feel uneasiness about where they will go after death. But these emotions we feel for the departed are actually projections for the emotions we feel about our own departing. When will our time on Earth come to an end? How will we feel in the moment of death? Where will we go after?  I see our ability to feel this empathy for each other, to see ourselves within one another, as proof that we are pieces of a larger interconnected whole. We are all connected and bound by our humanity, the fact that we can all suffer, the fact that we will all inevitably die. It is what makes us like one another, it is what unites us. It is what makes us care for each other, love each other.  

​

***

​

In her essay, “The Flood,” Lacy Johnson writes about her experiences during a hurricane and subsequent flooding of her hometown of Houston, Texas, but what her essay really is is a story of humanity and compassion and love for your neighbors. Johnson provides anecdote after anecdote of people in her community coming together and helping one another during this time of need. Most of these people are all complete strangers to one another, yet Johnson’s repeated choice to refer to them as “friends” reminds us of our intrinsic love for one another. She speaks of people, her husband included, going out in canoes daily, risking their lives to save others. She speaks of people doing each other’s laundry, finding people beds to sleep in, providing rides, food, and money to one another. Johnson discusses the concept of the Stranger, similar to the idea of the Other, in which the Stranger is “a person who is in the group but not of the group,” and is “treated with contempt and suspicion because [they] exist in the presence of those who believe they are known to one another and performs the function of consolidating difference in a single body, allowing all other differences among the group to seem to fall away.” However, this concept of a “Stranger” is nothing more than an illusion, which is exemplified by Johnson herself when she says, “And yet it is strangers who sometimes arrive with the help they are able to offer, and this simple act confirms our common humanity” (214). 

At the end of the day, we are all held together by our indisputable ability to feel suffering and to recognize that suffering within one another. This is where empathy and compassion are born. This begs the question, though: to what extent does our empathy and compassion go? Even Johnson recognizes that a horrible tragedy is what it took to bring all of these strangers together. “People are very good at showing up for one another in their times of desperate need,” she states. “What we are less good at is maintaining that kind of deep, abiding empathy on the scale that will give us any hope of surviving the next storm like this: like how to care for one another equally.” Surely it is beautiful that we can stand together united in the face of great tragedy, of death, but why does this empathy not extend to lesser tragedies, to everyday sufferings?

​

***

​

Lee Durkee is a taxi driver in northern Mississippi, the poorest state in our country. In his essay, “Hospital Runs,” he talks about a multitude of characters he has given rides to, often patients leaving the hospital who are “dirt poor” and in need of a ride home. Throughout his essay, Durkee talks to an inner turmoil within himself about the capacity of his compassion and kindness, as he interacts daily with those who have almost nothing. He tells the story of one girl he drove home. A “meth head” with a baby. The cops had busted a house, and they called Durkee to give her a ride home, allowing her to go free while arresting everyone else. The cops wouldn’t allow her to bring anything with her, not even diapers. Durkee had to negotiate with the cops for them to allow her to even bring a carseat for her baby. She was poor, she had nothing. When she got out of the taxi, she paid him $6 in “snotty” bills out of the $25 that she owed him. He later reflects on how he could be so heartless, accepting the last six snotty bills that this woman had, and driving away leaving her with her baby in need of a diaper change. He struggles with the shame that this brings him, thinking, “Next time I am going to do better...Next time I am going to be kinder. So every morning, unless I’m too hungover, I get up and meditate on compassion. Some days it works, but most days compassion hits the end of its leash. After a certain number of exasperations the tank of human kindness runs dry.” Johnson came to a similar conclusion in “The Flood” when she theorizes, “What kind of blessings can each of us afford to give? No doubt more than we actually do” (208). Why is this? To what extent are we obligated to help one another? Does it make us a bad person to look upon the suffering of another and do, well, nothing? 

​

***

​

On my way to Walmart I drive by a homeless person holding up a sign asking for money. I don’t have any money to give him. And if I did I’m not sure I would even take the time to stop and roll down my window and give it to him. I avoid eye contact with him. I try to pretend like he isn’t even there as I pass by. I turn away from him because he is holding up a mirror, and I see the worst parts of myself reflected back at me. He is showing me where my compassion ends, showing me that I am not caring enough to pull over and help him, that I am privileged and selfish and unkind. He is reminding me that I am a hypocrite, that I can preach day and night about oneness and unity and empathy, yet it means nothing if I do not act upon it. For this I can not make eye contact with him. I can not make eye contact with myself. 

​

Is this the real reason I can not look at Bubba as he pants and wheezes? Is it because I feel implicated in his inevitable death by my refusal to do anything about it? I’ve told my friend he should take Bubba to the vet. He claims that he has. I doubt that this is true. I know he does not have a lot of money and, quite frankly, can probably not afford a trip to the vet. It’s crossed my mind that I should just take him to the vet myself, or offer to lend him money. I’m not wealthy by any means, but I would have enough money for a vet visit. If it were my own cat I would take him in a heartbeat, without a second thought. Yet I’ve been working endlessly to save up my money so that I can hike the Pacific Crest Trail in a few months, I can not waste it on a vet visit that might not even be able to help him. I am selfish. I look away from Bubba.

​

***

​

Durkee can not escape those from whom he has withheld compassion. Their suffering stays with him. He states, “None of them are [gone], not really. They are always with me...They are all crowded into the back of my Town Car like some incriminating photograph I see, only for a moment, every time I check the rearview.” Their suffering has become his suffering.

​

***

​

If we turn away from the death and suffering of others because it reminds us of our own imminent death and suffering, the question now becomes, why do we turn away from our own death and suffering? Where does our fear come from? Is it simply the self-preservation of our species? To protect ourselves so that we can carry on our line?

​

The issue here is the pairing of death and suffering together, as if they are one entity joined as one when, in fact, quite the opposite is true. Suffering is not inherent to death. Suffering is not even a part of death. For death is nothing that we experience while we are alive. We do better to view suffering as a potential part of dying not of death itself. And death and dying are two separate things. When I watched Jax die, it was not his death that was sad, it was not his death that was traumatic. In fact, once he lied still after all of his thrashing and thriving, he seemed quite calm. It came as a relief to see him so still and serene after all of the chaotic commotion of his suffering prior to death. 

​

***

​

The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus stated, “Why should I fear death? If I am, then death is not. If Death is, then I am not. Why should I fear that which can only exist when I do not?”

​

***

​

If we are not to fear death, why does suffering so often precede it? What is to be said of those with terminal illness, suffering in excruciating pain daily as they make their way towards death? In her essay, “You Owe Me,” Miah Arnold details her time working as a children’s writing teacher at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, where she has been witness to the death and suffering of countless children. Throughout her essay she tries to come to terms with all that she has seen as she guides us through anecdotes, allowing us to get to know some of the children who she has worked with, some of the children who have died. Johnson grapples with the question of how something as unfair and tragic as the suffering of these innocent children can exist. She comes to the conclusion that there is no specific reason. Their suffering does not exist as a lesson for us to learn. However, she examines the ways in which so many people want to attribute meaning to their deaths, and how doing so makes it easier for them to accept and process. She states:

"People don’t mind being reminded that ten-year-olds die so long as they get to hear the story of that child’s life, so long as it is a story of resilience, a story about a soul ragging on long after the funeral because it touched so many people's lives and changed them for the better. From my current perspective, demanding so much of a dead child is sick." (31)

​

But what if I proposed that there is something to learn from these sufferings? Now, I don’t believe that the suffering of others is means to the end of me learning a lesson. Arnold is correct in that there is no inherent explanation for the suffering of these children, but is that not to say that we can not still learn something from it? I believe what Arnold is getting at is that we want death to have meaning in order to take away the fear and discomfort we feel towards the complete unknown of death, and, in this case, surely she is correct in saying that children with cancer did not die to give us a meaning. However, what if the lesson to be learned is not the meaning of life or death, but, rather, the fact that the meaning is, in fact, unknown. The lesson is that we can not explain it away. We do not know the answer. Let the unpredictability of death be a lesson in the unpredictability of life. If we were meant to know what happens after death, then, surely, we would.

​

***

​

My friend told me about a quote that Albert Camus once wrote: “Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?” While some take this to mean that life is meaningless, that it makes no cosmic difference whether you kill yourself or have a cup of coffee, for nothing has meaning, I find this nihilistic view to be quite reductionist. I believe what Camus was really getting at is that we create our own meaning. If a cup of coffee makes you happy, make that your meaning. There may be no other meaning than the meaning we make for ourselves, but that does not make it any less meaningful. I mean, are humans not the ones that created the concept of meaning in the first place? Does the concept of meaning not only exist within the confines of the human mind? That in and of itself is profound. That in and of itself is meaningful. My friend told me, “meaning can be found in the process itself rather than the fruits of the process; all of the fruits will wither away in the end.” 

​

***

​

The process of watching someone die, of knowing that a terminally ill loved one will soon meet the end of this life, brings about a multitude of emotions. We may weep for them, we may fall down in shock, we may laugh and rejoice in memory of our good times with them. All of these emotions are exactly what it means to be alive. Surrounded by death is when we most feel what it is like to be human. It is as though the anguish that we experience in the face of death is, in reality, a moment of highly concentrated, over-saturated life, squeezing itself into one place before it bursts and flips us over into death.  Only in looking at death can we really see life. Without death there would be no life. Without good there would be no bad, without happiness there would be no sadness. Everything must return itself to balance. 

​

However, for many, the idea of something as unknown as death is terrifying. Yet, is death not the most known thing we have in life? It is the one thing we truly have: The surety of our own mortality, the awareness of something so unknown. It is easier to push it away, to not talk about it or think about it. But what purpose does this feigned ignorance really serve us? 

I can not say why these children had to go through what they did anymore that Miah Arnold can or you can. I can not say why Lacy Johnson’s city flooded or why Jax died or why Bubba suffers. I can not say why pain and suffering exists all over the world every single day. I am not sure what its purpose is or if there is a purpose. I like to believe there is a deeper meaning to life, a reason, a test. But we really don’t know. And that assuredness of the unknown is really the only concrete thing we have. We know that we do not know. This helps me see that life is just life. C’est la vie. Horrible, unfair things happen everyday. I do not know if they can be solved, but I do know that we have no choice but to live through them. We truly never know what life will throw at us. A thousand tragedies could be hurdled our way and we have no way to stop it. C’est la vie. So is life. Brene Brown says, “we don’t get to control the actions of others, but we get to control the reactions of ourselves.” We don’t get to control what life throws at us, but we do to choose how we react to what it does. Whether that be with activism, love, gratitude, curiosity. The unknown scares us. But we must settle into it. We must embrace the comfort of the unknown of death, balancing it with the knowledge that we are united in the unpredictability of what it means to be alive. For only once we come to terms with our own death and suffering will we no longer turn away from the death and suffering of others.

​

Works Cited:

Arnold, Miah. “You Owe Me.” Michigan Quarterly Review, 2013.

Durkee, Lee. “Hospital Runs.” The Sun Magazine, March 2018.

Johnson, Lacy. “The Flood.” The Reckonings, October 2018.