"Seen From Above"

On page 41 of A Book of Luminous Things is Wislawa Szymborska's poem "Seen From Above." I picked this poem to potentially discuss in class today, and it affected me so strongly I thought I would blog about it.

The poem discusses the sight of a dead beetle and discusses how humans view an animal's death. When humans die, we euphemize it, saying they "passed" or "they're no longer with us." But as the poem says, "For our peace of mind, their death seemingly shallower, / animals do not pass away, but simple die." Animals' deaths do not need to be put into less harsh terms. For some reason, animals' deaths aren't serious or harsh enough to merit denying it. In today's world, we deny death. People don't die; they pass. Death is rare in our lives, and when people do die, they usually die quietly in a hospital. Then they are promptly whisked away to a funeral home where they are embalmed and prepared for burial. The funeral is a quiet and muted affair. People do not openly mourn and wail and cry. They sit silently and primly in black. They do not hug or embrace the body; they tactfully keep a distance.

But for animals, none of this seems to be the case. "Their humble little souls do not haunt our dreams, / they keep their distance, / know their place." I'm not sure this is necessarily true. The first time I put down a pet, I was broken-hearted. My dog Hank had lung cancer, and we finally put him to sleep (another euphemism) when the tumor was blocking his airway. My whole family stayed in the room as they put him down, and the pain was more than I could bear. My whole family cried and sobbed together as we said our goodbyes. Fortunately we were in the room. I didn't want him to be alone. Hank's death was the first time I watched death happen, and I think that his loss didn't keep his distance. He was a family member, and his loss hit us all.

We recently had to put down Max, our 16-year-old Westie. We had had him since I was two; I don't remember a time without him. It's funny that when I moved in to college and my childhood effectively ended, Max's life went into a sharp decline, and less than a month later, he stopped eating and we put him to sleep. His loss was great, too, so I disagree with the poem in that sense. Yet I understand what Szymborska is trying to say. The death of a parent, sibling, spouse, or child weighs much more heavily on us than the death of a pet. We are able to push their deaths aside more easily. We recover quickly, and their loss does not sit in our chest for months on end. We do not become consumed by grief. Yes, we have sorrow, but we do not mourn for months on end.

"What's important is valid supposedly for us. / For just our life, for just our death, / a death that enjoys an extorted primacy." "Extorted" for me is a rather harsh word, and the diction in these last few lines of the poems says something sharp about humanity and how we view ourselves. It is okay to put an animal to sleep when they are suffering, but it is never okay for us to let a human die or to end their suffering. We value a human life far above an animal life. And apparently we "extort" this "primacy." She makes it sound negative that we view our lives so far above an animals', a difficult point that vegetarians try to counter.

The sadness for this beetle is "mitigated," "strictly local," and is not "contagious." No one minds or cares that this beetle is lying on a dirt road, dead. The sky is blue, and the death of the beetle is "seemingly shallower."

Death today is far removed. Death is no longer a part of life, as so many people often say. Before modern science, death was indeed common. Even young people died of contagious illness. Women died in childbirth, sometimes their children along with them. People got severe injuries that today would seem trivial. Babies became sick too soon and died long before they got the chance to live. And a community would grieve. Today, our grief is limited and kept in check. We do not encounter death enough to know how to handle it. We keep our heads bowed, our hands in our lap, and our condolences are expressed in the form of a frozen casserole.