+ Unhooking from Your Position: Reversing Execution
A lesson about the gift of death from Will-ing the book.
+ Unhooking from Your Position: Reversing Execution
Pity is the biggest lie of them all. Just like all nasty things, pity is nothing but a symptom of a kink in the core, but its bite is fierce, and its sting adds insult to injury like salt in a wound. Pity, as an emotional category, is employed more by over-present people than by anyone else. But when on the receiving end, pity is felt very acutely and intensely by these very same people. And they can tell you about the finer implications of what pity is in a way that average people cannot.
Over-present people will tell you, among other things, that “taking pity on someone” is not an act of kindness or charity. It’s an act of dominance pressure and also a red flag that the pitier has latent anxiety about a condition of imbalance of power. Pity is felt by the people who are afraid of the power of those they pity. If you think about it, (or more accurately, if you feel about it) pity doesn’t relieve suffering as much as it creates suffering. You see, pity requires the absence of empowerment in order for its special kind of blossoms to bloom. The biologist’s and medical practitioner’s tool called euthanasia is an interesting tool. In its standard application, it has a lot in common with pity.
Although many of us confuse the following two actions, euthanasia is not the same as killing. Euthanasia is: taking Willee’s life away at the bequest (imagined or actual) of Willee. Killing is: taking Willee’s life away from him or her, regardless of what he or she wants or wills. For reasons of territory, food, self-defense, resources, and rivalry, killing is the oldest profession. It even pre-dates prostitution, as “eating” pre-dates copulation, which was only invented in animals as late as 380 million years ago. As a biologist, a gardener, a medical problem solver, and a die-hard carnivore, I believe in killing.
I also believed in euthanasia, that is, until I got to know it like a blower knows his horn. Because at some point, years into it, I had played that same jazz tune with enough variation so that I could start to step back from the painting and see how all the years of dots painted a bigger picture… of what it’s like for animals (as far as I can glean from observation and attention) to die. Currently, I’m not sure that making Willee’s decision for him, to die, is a bad thing to do, but I’m definitely now not sure that it’s a good thing to do.
There is a very clear prime directive in the world of captive animals: what lives for a “lengthy while” in hotel-quality captivity shall never be returned to the harsh realities of the wild. In fact, bird and mammal and reptile rehab facilities have to claw their way through tons of red tape to get permissions from everyone to run the pipeline in the other direction, toward the out door. For the vast, vast majority, what is brought to Vegas stays in Vegas, and that’s final. So, although our institutional mission was to provide the best preventive health, wellness, and medical care possible to all residents of the aquarium, one could not care for the living without also caring for the dying; the two conditions are related.
That’s why our cabinet that held the overdose drugs was the most frequently opened cabinet in the hospital. We euthanized everything and everyone from captive jellyfish to those stressed and dying wild pilot whale mothers and calves writhing and calling out to each other on the north-facing beaches of Cape Cod. I have personally witnessed or performed the euthanasias of probably 650 exotic animal species, at least one of every species that lived there, and for a myriad of reasons including just old age suffering, was eventually put down there.
But that’s par for the course on a job erroneously but commonly perceived of as “whimsical and fun.” The health status of euthanasia cases covered the gambit from over-populated babies to geriatrics, from the perfectly healthy to the moribund. Such is normal work in an exotic aquatic hospital that serves the medical and autopsy needs of researchers, temporary exhibits (there are no unions for out-of-work critters), aging populations, captive breeding programs, and wild ecosystem catastrophe crews.
The thing that surprised me least of all about my ten years in the aquarium’s largely self-directed veterinary department was NOT that I got desensitized to all of the euthanasia. I definitely got used to it, the same way an alcoholic gets used to stashing bottles in the back of the toilet. But what surprised me most about the 10 years, more than anything else, was that, as I amassed more and more seasoned experience, I came to question euthanasia as a tool for the prevention of suffering.
Seeing so many euthanasias in all different variations, experienced by so many different kinds of individuals, who all had so many different kinds of lives, and suffered so many different kinds of ultimate ends, I feel like each one was a little piece of a huge jigsaw puzzle in the “idea” of “the zone” between alive and dead. The moments of killing and dying that went “fast” as the clock flies, ultimately, in my own perception, slowed down to a slow-motion “dance.” And the dance eventually devolved enough so that I could follow each footfall like we used to follow the bouncing ball on the Saturday morning cartoons.
Although I sometimes refused to kill animals for the occasional staffer who was ducking the accountability policies and trying to sweep thousands of their excess animals under my rug, I was pretty ok with doing my duty. [Staff sticking me with their Karmic bar tab over and over meant never having to alter their priorities, but I was not feeling injured by my role.] I never really suffered from burnout or Post Traumatic Stress (there are no “disorders’, there are only un-healing injuries). The slow-motion was instead occurring because I was compiling a wider and more complete understanding of the details of “reversing” life. These were details that would apply to the pilot whales, to the penguins, to the deaths of my own pets, and to my own death, if euthanasia were ever to be on the table for me.
It seemed like, at the final seconds, when “live and keep trying,” or “die and stop trying” was totally negotiable, when it was all happening in super slow motion, when euthanasia came down to a vote at a meeting, or when we were waiting for the feelings of a last holdout person to get on board (imagine taking a euthanasia needle to a Shamu), whether it was down to one last good-measure gram, or one extra cc, or down to whatever little tiny toggle of the switch, when it was down to a dark room with just them and me and the fine line of the razor’s edge… stopping someone else’s life in order to ultimately benefit them felt more and more like a hard sell for one weird reason, and one reason alone. Because I am sure I would have felt like I was relieving suffering, preventing later suffering, or giving a gift if only someone were there to receive that gift, but there wasn’t. They were dead. There was nobody left there to thank me.
The problem with euthanasia death is that Willee is often not the one pulling the plug. If Willee pulls his own plug, whether in clarity of mind, in irrational mind, in dementia mind, in suicidal mind, or in a battle to the death, I’m all for it. I don’t care what state of mind s/he’s in. S/he has the ABILITY (all judgment aside) to make the ultimate decision, and that’s enough for me. If you can choose it, you can do it. That’s the law of the jungle. But when someone else pulls the cord “for the benefit of Willee,” it feels unbalanced to me. When Willee is gone… who is there to benefit?
And when one well-worn pathway seems like, “been there, done that before” what’s stopping you from turning around to look for another road?
Chip the seahorse is a case I’ll remember for a long time. Seahorses are a dime a dozen at your local public aquarium. And when one gets sucked down a drain, really, who’d notice. But, when only half of a seahorse got sucked down the drain, someone noticed… “He’s obviously toast. I don’t care about the seahorse, but can you save the life of my filter grate? I don’t want to lose it.” That was not an unusual or unreasonable request on the job.
But this wasn’t just any half-a-seahorse. All fish-o-philes know that male seahorses hatch and carry the babies of their species in a kangaroo-like pouch. Now imagine a male-associated accident of atomic wedgie proportion, something akin to a time warp wormhole pulling only your scrotum through it so that it becomes the size of a small car, but it’s still attached to your body. Now you know how this bugger felt when only his male pouch had been sucked down the drain for what looked like-- hours.
He looked near death too, from shredding and hemorrhage, and traumatic shock. So, like any good person would do, I killed him. I gave him enough drug to knock out a real horse. I waited a long while, asking her to come back later for her filter… When she did, 30 minutes later, I hacked off the inches long “abdominal” pouch in its entirety to free the plastic from the animal. But when I did this, to my surprise, the insides of his outsides didn’t look as bad as I was sure they were. A “castrated” seahorse… this now eunuc-corny little dude definitely looked unique and wrong, but all of a sudden I realized that he no longer qualified to be dead.
So, even though he had been mutilated, killed, pulled from water, left for dead, and hacked up… I did the appropriate fishy CPR, detox, ICU, etc. and “Chip” lived another two years, educating kids in our hospital exhibit about male seahorses from his unique vantage point- from the inside out. (Plus he was a hit at the Halloween parties.)
What I learned for the first time ever, from Chip, was something I had never learned at any “euthanasia review” meeting for any beloved and federally protected mammalian mascot. I learned that not only is Willee “the die-er” a negotiable role, but that Willor “the kill-er” is also a negotiable role. I learned that that role can remain flexible. Dying for anyone is a continuum, and killing of anyone or anything is a continuum of its own kind. You can make your choice anew at every single stage of the game, as if that new stage is the beginning. Because even though it’s not over till it’s over, whose “over” counts anyway? Yours? Or Willee’s? And this is not just about die-ing. And this is not just about kill-ing.
If the corpse of your dashed hopes and dreams suddenly sat up on the autopsy table in your mind and sang, “Hello my baby, hello my honey, hello my ragtime gaaal!!…” would you notice? Would you hear it? Would you see it? Or would you be expecting another picture. Would your expectation be causing… dead?
Because any process that can be shaped, in theory, can be shaped in reverse. So before you write anything off entirely, be aware that your own Will provides opportunities for reversal of the “permanent” all the time. And if you have NO idea how to go down that terrifying road in high-speed reverse, just let Willee drive.