purpose
June 12, 2011
Page Three
My sense of purpose in life also came largely from living with animals. It was a purpose that I always regarded as meaningful and ennobling, moreso with every passing year of living. When someone needs you in order to live and to live reasonably well, it gives you a sense of your own value, and it gives your days an important mission. It’s the same set of feelings that parents derive from raising children, and I too had these feelings raising a child: mission and importance and purpose. But the raising of the child lasted a mere seventeen years, and long before the age of seventeen, the child no longer needed me for many things that she had when she was younger. The hands-on doing that my soul seems to need gradually evaporated, as it does with any human child. I need that daily caretaking, that feeding and walking and medicating and litter-box duty, etc. The nuts and bolts of caring for someone who needs you, and whom you need in return. And for me, it is far easier and more rewarding to daily care for animals than for people. I find people difficult, confusing, scary, and deeply unsettling. For animals, all the adjectives are different: easy, straightforward, loyal, always appreciative of my efforts on their behalf.
The animals were always there. My parents had animals when I was born, and continued to have them until my father died in 1999. When I was six, I was allowed to start having animals of my own, in addition to the family animals. They were always there, always around me and always a large part of my life and my personhood, until certain people deliberately and with malice took all of that away from me in 2008. They were food for me, filling up apetites in my heart and soul. They also fed my intellect, since I constantly studied them and their ways, as species and as individuals. Little is as fascinating and absorbing for me as watching and studying an animal.
Purpose number one for forty-nine years: I am a person who loves and helps and takes care of animals. Gone. Wiped out in the space of less than an hour on a hill in Turners Falls, three years and three months ago.
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read… Lifelines… Stolen stars… All my stars…
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