Animals

For a good part of my adult life, I lived on a farm shared with sheep, pigs, horses, ducks, geese, turkeys, chickens, guinea fowl, cats, dogs, the occasional llama, and lots and lots of goats. Feeding the animals twice a day, gathering eggs, shoveling manure, growing and processing hay provided a rhythm and a sense of purpose. I miss that life, or at least parts of it.

Now I live with just one non-human animal: my cat Lim-Lim (pronounced Leem-Leem). The name “Lim-Lim” evolved from her original name “Lemur-Cat,” which was selected by my oldest daughter and Lim-Lim’s original owner because of her large lemur-like eyes. Every morning she jumps on my bed and lies on my chest facing me, Sphinx-like, stretching her neck so I can scratch her the way she loves to be scratched, sometimes sparking  jealousy in my wife. I’ve come to realize that now, a sole non-human animal is enough for me. One animal is a pet while a farm crowded with them is a full-time vocation with all its constraints.

While I know that I am Lim-Lim’s God, shepherd of her life and provider of all good bounty, she is my “daemon.” It is an idea that was introduced by Phillip Pullman in his trilogy of fantasy novels, “His Dark Materials.” In Pullman’s imagined world, a “daemon” is a non-human animal that is the alter-ego or really the essence, a guiding spirit, of the human with whom it is associated. Most daemons are oppositely gendered from their humans—like me and Lim-Lim. She, like many daemons, intuits the emotional state of her human and responds in kind. I like to think there is a shared energy, a light from within, that passes back and forth between us, most obvious when I “phantom pet” her. I move my hands in a petting motion adjacent to her body, not actually touching her, while whispering her name and its variants over and over. She moves her body and purrs as if I really am touching her. It makes me think I am playing her like a Theremin.

But in a heartbreaking contrast to Pullman’s daemons, who die when their humans die, animals generally live shorter life spans than we do. My lifetime of loving animals has therefore also been a lifetime of loss after loss. There was:

• Zorro, my first pet, a black cat, named after my early childhood obsession with the black-caped swordsman.
• Buffy, my childhood dog, who nearly died from a tumor that filled half her chest before being given three more years of life by a top human cardiothoracic surgeon.
• Pumpkin, the dog, lean as a Whippet and fast as a Greyhound;
• Felix, the cat, brought back from Africa where I had worked as a physician and where I bribed airport officials to let him through. He was killed six months later by a speeding motorist in front of my first house in Rhode Island.
• Ruby, the cat, aka Ruber-Duber-Guy, an old adopted stray;
• The twin cats Vanya de Doodle and Oedi-Pus, aka Eddie-Bob the Fat Fat Fellow.
• Opie, aka O-Di-Do, O-Di-Do, a Papillon, who would wiggle like Lim-Lim in response to his name and nicknames.
• Ajax (Ayax), one of many livestock guardian dogs, a Great Pyrennes, kept to bond with the goats and protect the herd from coyotes and stray dogs.
• Molly and Pee-Wee, the first of countless goats. Molly was the subject of an essay I wrote called “Molly and Mahler,” written after a concert performance of Gustav Mahler’s 6^th Symphony, which I witnessed shortly after Molly’s death. The symphony includes the tinkling of bells, like those worn around Molly’s neck, to elicit an Alpine scene, a feature that Mahler described as representing “the last earthly sounds heard from the valley below by the departing spirit on the mountain top.”
• Shukum, a Vietnamese Pot-Bellied pig, named after the all-purpose word my oldest child made up when first learning to speak as an indicator of anything and everything.
• And, of course, Eppie, Ajoka’s Hepsibah Harvest (her AKC name), aka Yuppie-Fur the Puppie-Fur, YupYupYup. Named after the little girl orphan in George Eliot’s “Silas Marner,” Eppie, a yellow Labrador Retriever, was the pre-child dog in my first marriage, definitely my daemon at the time. As a young dog, she would leap straight up when excited, all four feet in the air with a tail flapping like a helicopter’s rotor. Eppie, I will always love you.
• And then, even after life on a farm with its abundance of animal mortality, the losses kept coming with my three-legged cat Monty-Schma, the dog Ruby and her son Zeke, and the daemon of my second wife, the cat Pumpkin.

All this loss, this heartbreak, could, of course, be avoided by simply not assuming any responsibility or relationship with animals other than seeing them as useful commodities, but such an option, in my view, would be denying oneself one of the richest sources of love and joy in life.

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Nothing is immortal and that is, at the risk of sounding trite, a fact of life. In truth, why would anyone want immortality? One of my favorite operas, “The Makropulos Case,” by the Czech composer, Leoš Janáček, asks such a question. In the court of a 16^th century emperor, an alchemist’s young daughter, Emilia Marty, takes an elixir that provides immortality. Over the course of the opera, she experiences many successive lives, each with a different identity, though all her names have the initials “E.M.”  As she lives one life after another, everyone around her including lovers and children grows old and dies. As a result, she grows weary and finds living painful.

I’ve lived, as many of us do, with Emilia Marty’s nightmare when it comes to animals. I often weep thinking about the ones I have named, the ones with whom I have shared mutual affection.

I look at Lim-Lim who is of an indeterminate age, young enough, though, to leap four feet up onto my dining room table each morning in anticipation of her breakfast. She sits with me now, staring out through my west-facing window—as she does each evening—watching the sun go down and flocks of seabirds flow north into the cove in front of my house. Maybe I’ll be lucky, and she’ll outlive me.

Author Bio: After 37 years on the faculty of Brown’s medical school and about half that time as a farmer, Randy Rockney is now retired from both. He enjoys writing and reading and has published numerous medical articles, some of which could be categorized as creative nonfiction. He now turns to non-medical topics.

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