Winter’s bear laid bare:

an essayed essay (to the bear and all-folk)

The winter bear bears much weight, but waits ’til spring to bare it’s butt. The hibernation process is an annual event which the bear is prepared for by first a feast and then a famine year-on-year. The weight of words chosen here lay bare the homophones of human life. The human world is more complex than that of the bear. We bear complexes inwardly (that we rarely bare). We feast on the complexity we create by the multitude nature of our abstract ideas. We famine only in ignorance of the complicated language devices we bear. Some humans opt not to bear that burden, and instead lay bare the butt of that lack. On the one paw-hand, the bear: hibernating to await the spring; when nature again bares the great latrine in the woods. On the other hand, is poor humanity. It springs into action more willingly in winter; seemingly increasingly and deliberately starved of care or the fully hibernated thought.

As forebears go, we few named Beardall rarely if ever bare our inner selves. Bearing beards rarely, but even the bare skin still does not reveal the all. The rebarbative itch, or the emboldened confrontation suits some of our all-bearded mood. It is more likely portmantua as the bearded-all than a less likely Portuguese or Spanish start. It is unlikely to be either the island discoverer (Barbados) or otherwise of the Pyrenees bizarre. More likely, it is Anglo-Saxon. King Alfred thought the beard fine indeed, and a wage was cut of any who cut another’s. All were therefore bearded, as to show one could. For if one were still little experienced in life, one might only be a frumberdling (with merest first beard). That is perhaps how we come to bear that Beardall name. Only perhaps though; for sure we came from neither more or Moors, but of those with less. Most all Beardall toiled the ground as surf, not wield a pen or sword.

Beard all or beard none, let us let the bear sleep in a little longer through winter weather. Humanity must now be awake. No matter its prior collective state. No matter whether the individual be late in being awoke, or a woke, or as another folk. Humanity can dream perhaps, but we let mischief loose whilst we nap. To whom do we follow as the bearer of barest necessity? Who will bridge this gap? Do we bear all together or lay bare our daring-do alone? Who is asleep and who is being left out in the cold? Dare we bear to bare these questions together, now that our next winter has arrived? Do we grizzly old bears, care-bears, war bears (pooh bears), black bears, polar bears, gay bears, mummy bears or cubs instead opt to sit this one out at home? Hope springs eternal, perhaps, if we all dare to bear that load.

Source of inspiration: the wise folk of LinkedIn (etymology c/o Nicky Mee) and life’s rich tapestry

The final few months: the fuzzy back-end

As a PhD candidate when will you be finished and how will you know when you can start whatever is next? It is less clearly defined than other types of degree. I am calling this the fuzzy back-end of the PhD

Why is the back-end of the PhD fuzzy? Put simply, you are finished when you get your thesis submitted and successfully pass the viva exam (and make any corrections required of that thesis). Simple. But what day, week or month will that happen for you? My PhD period is set at between 36 and 48 months. My funding runs to month 42 by default -i.e., with expectation that 36 months will likely overrun. This is the fuzzy back-end that I am referring to; all with whom I speak assure me this is the norm.

I flag this simply to make sure anyone reading this early into their own PhD journey can have this lack of clear end-date in mind. You will be planning your PhD end whilst also trying to negotiate or plan what is next. The question to keep in mind is therefore: what flexibility can be introduced into the back-end of the PhD, the front-end of the next career step, or both?

My solution is no more or less unusual than any other, I suspect. I am lucky to be surrounded by good people. That good fortune extended to mean I have work lined up that has deadlines but is also based around a process I can manage, plan, and own. I was therefore able to create a significant window in which I can both focus on the tricky last few months of thesis writing (and rewriting) whilst at the same time ramping up with other work. There are many ways to manage with flexibility in start-dates, end-dates, or accepting a gap between the two. In other words, there is no right or wrong answer here. I merely flag this fuzzy back-end because it seems rarely spoken of.

How will the fuzzy back-end find you?

To be continued…

13th March 2020-2025

Did you know 1.8 million people in the UK are still shielding -i.e., living in lockdown condition {click here}? It was five years ago today that my wife and I closed our doors on the world. A few days after a pandemic was declared, and a week before the whole country was told to get into lockdown mode. That was then, when all was unknown. Yet in the UK we 1.8 million people are still in limbo i.e., in that same state of lockdown.

The plight of these people is pretty dire. By comparison we lonely pair are managing pretty well. Plenty like us are acknowledged as high risk of mental health issues, or financial strain, or both. Our biggest sacrifice is just the one shared with the family we do not get to see. The frustration, five years on, is that the medical solution has been available in other countries for several years. For context, the key issue hampering this category of people is that vaccines will not work, because immuno-suppression drugs are stopping the prompted normal immune system response. The solution to this dampening effect is a prophylactic injection; meaning the antibodies a vaccine prompts the body to create are instead injected straight into the patient. Well over two years ago a prophylactic product called Evusheld was released, today the upgraded version is Sipavibart.

The plight of these people is also totally of the UK Government’s own making. Specific to the UK, two key factors continue to be against us. Firstly, these injections are prohibitively expensive. It costs £6,000 a go every six months. Secondly, as the virus mutates, the approved drugs can become out-of-date, and the UK is very slow to respond. Compared to the rest of Europe and North America, the UK approvals lack urgency. Access to these drugs is also much more limited. HM Government hides behind The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), who take far longer to do their checks than elsewhere {example here}. As campaign groups confirm, this delay is what happened to Evusheld – “Evusheld was assessed by NICE in January 2023, but by the time the lengthy process concluded, it was deemed ineffective against the current COVID-19 variants” {explained here}. Despite both issues, prophylactics are now a permanent marvel of medical progress set free upon the world, and our best hope here in the UK.

At the level of the individual, I am confident this will be our last anniversary. I will be paying taxes again soon, having kept busy whilst stuck at home by doing a full time PhD. These drugs will mean I can plan to escape back into the workplace and, if I must, I will find means to be paying outrageous private medical bills as I go. I can also then work at repaying debts to my family and society. That is fine for my wife and I. Others may not be so lucky for so-long-as HM Government keeps pretending they are not home.

…to be continued

Over four years in lockdown and it is just life now…

Being married to someone terminally ill is still better than mere memory of that person in the past tense. This blog celebrates the success of the last four years – namely being in that first category, not the second.

Today my wife and I enter the fifth year of being in lockdown together. Our shared mitigation of a threat to the current living state of a marriage -i.e., the sharing of a burden which has helped prevent all being a past tense. My “terminally ill” wife and I are long-past being angry or despairing of the purgatory we were placed into four years ago. Living life in lockdown is a privilege of circumstance. A privilege of being able to choose. We have so far managed to remain out of reach of the ebb and flow of poor decision-making by others. Politics and policy most of all. We were privileged in having means to take our life in our own hands; financial, situational, and dispositional privilege which with no small adjustment has become manageable in the long-term. A privilege also of being able to be watching medical breakthrough, not being the physical interface with that unknown. We are privileged to have had individual freedom of choice, and means to make do. In sum of all that, it is just life now.

The point of this post is a nod to the passing of another milestone, as we both now move into yet another lockdown year. This post is positively reflective. The terminology is precise, “it is – just – life – now. “Life” can be considered here by whatever measure, but it is still better than the alternative. It is life in the “now”, meaning time yet to come. Now is the present – i.e., a gift – offering a sense of a future time to prepare for future possibility. It is “just” life now. Although, how “just” that life is, is very much a subjective, situational, and perspective-laden debate. “Just” as in a psychological belief in a just world is perhaps also comparative. We have less cause for more justice, than many we see within the TV window to the world. A window offering many examples of injustices others are having to reconcile more than we two.

Until the day comes that antibodies can be injected directly into the immuno-suppressed bloodstream of my wife, we remain locked away. The one-fifth (21% to be exact) of her remaining lung capacity is protected best this way. She is at the highest risk – clinically severely vulnerable – of terminal end should she come into contact with the virus responsible for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) -i.e., the SARS-associated coronavirus. As of 13th March, we are now into the fifth year of that lockdown state. The state of “living” but behind a front door. With luck, medical possibility will turn to reality of the promised intravenous antibody breakthrough very soon – that medical advancement could be as early as late 2024. However, we have been at that hopeful promise before. With realism born of experience, a change of government and not just a medical approval necessarily a second factor of changed circumstance to bring such pharmaceutical option to British shores and knocking at our door. In the meantime, we remain hidden. It is just life now. And in the now that is just fine for my wife and I to be.

…to be continued

My soul is in a hurry (by Mario de Andrade)

Occasionally, LinkedIn feeds my soul. I thank a new LinkedIn contact Stan Holden (and the free-writing of Anthony Hopkins) for a piece of a jigsaw missing from my reading list – namely “My soul is in a hurry” by Mario de Andrade. LinkedIn feeding my soul simply by being connected to people better (or at least differently) read to myself.

I was going to simply copy and paste the poem here. However, there seem to be many translations and free write alternatives to the stanzas of the Brazilian Portuguese original. It seems the done thing is to free-write it, so this is as I received it.

-//-

I have less to live than lived. Much as the few cherries left in the bowl tend to be savoured, so will those few years I have left be tasted all the more. I therefore give less time to constraints as dictated by other peoples' laws; those changing in name but still harbouring a foolishness of youth or claims of a better yesterday. Less time to spend in the company of ego or manipulation. Less tolerance to the suffering of envy, and the false framing by those merely usurping one power to claim the same as their own. All such headlines land unread. My soul is in a hurry, with fewer cherries left to pick from in the bowl. 

The humour in humanity now interests me. To laugh at one's own mistakes most of all. Show me that face, and I will show you success - those who embrace facing up to ones responsibility. Show me those people and you show me the dignity of life lived to uphold truth, justice, and the rights of all - and what else is life for? Henceforth, I surround myself in the company of those with hearts big enough for others. Those brave enough to take their fates, whilst lifting themselves and their fellowship to the heightened softness of their own soul. 

Of course I broker my own path! I decide to broker a path with the wisdom of a past; both the breaks and that broken path. The wisdom of age, wise enough to savour the flavour of those last cherries more than those already had. A clarity and intensity of flavour with which to go forth with a more resonate sense of my finitude, my place, and life's totality. My first life spent often thinking upon my second, my second now understood as merely the more dignified continuation of what has come before. [My soul now in a hurry, for a little more].

-//-

A free write – based upon the wisdom of Mario de Andrade, and the many voices who have since found their own version of standing so firmly upon their place.

LinkedIn post {here}

One of many sources of poem extracts available {here}

Reflecting for one last time with my feline friend

Happy birthday, me – although this is a sad end to 2023 for both my wife and I. Having just had to say farewell to our cat, Milo. A traumatic end to last week. A sad beginning to this. This writing has been a companion of sorts – a way of unpacking and processing that.

Day 1 (the next day). Just feeling the grief is hard. But that is what I’m trying to do. Milo, playing another game with me, but this one is mine to experience without him. Because he is now gone, and now only part of what has past. Which means I now experience only tears where once was joy.

Whatever life he had before we met him, is just a guess. It must have been a kind life, at least in part. He came into our lives with clear understanding of using litter trays, and seems to have had familiarity and prior learnt fondness of being fed whilst a guardian stayed close by. I think probably someone elderly, or infirm, and unable to offer him much play. Perhaps he outlasted them, and then had to find his own way. Eventually, that was our beginning; sadly, for my wife and I, also how his story ends.

However, something or someone was also something of a tragedy in his past. He was terrified of strangers, and of people generally — and most especially of children. We helped him deal with that. Helped him by not having to deal with that. Circumstances and nature playing its part in setting that scene. For example, Milo pretty much represents the Covid-19 era we have endured. Our shared journey starts that same summer, and Covid-19 arrived soon after to signal what became an ongoing isolation from the world of others which continues to this day.

These years of isolation have been easier because of him. He certainly relished having us always with him, too. However, nature does gift moments so unpredictably, and nature’s role here is now a rawness upon my mind. Nature sowing seeds that made his shyness the first glimpse one sees of him. The belly-walking black ball of fur, skulking into more darkness as extra camouflage. Nature might just have configured his genes that way. Natural events may have also interrupted his routine in the past, by taking away his stability. Perhaps, he too experienced grief at some time. All we know for sure is that he was in need of a quite place, and we were in need of him. Then Covid-19 arrived, and it was just us three.

In the beginning of our story together, we too were those strangers to him. We, meaning we two, my beautiful wife and I. Nature having something to say about her condition too. Playing it’s cruel games once more. But those made for the conditions he was so very welcome to be a part of. We were compelled to self-isolate — and still do. Not that he knew that from the start. We were strangers to him, and his skulking was therefore my first proper experience of his demeanour. From the rescue centre to the house he was quiet as could be. As I opened the door to his cat-box he just melting out and slipped quietly under a chest of drawers. He was home, and for several months he decided that was to be his safe space.

Now, just a few years on, he has left. And we two are now together, dealing with the reality of him being gone. First Covid-19, and since so much more news worthy and tragic death in peace and in war. Yet, here am I finding the most inferences of nature winning always, eventually, by the death of a feline friend in here – not all that death out there. How depressingly real that reminder is, pointing more vividly than ever to the certainty of more death to come.

Just feeling the grief is hard. But that is what we are both trying to do, my wife and I. In our own ways, but as best we can. Our individual space is perhaps one of the most endearing factors of our natural fit together. And we have been together for thirty years, so we know that our shared strength of individual but indivisible togetherness remains strong. That was what Milo encountered, and it quickly became an enduring feature for all three of us, too. I, in one room at my desk. Another life being lived in another room — the living room — which I visit when I am living, but not working (in my solitary way). Milo free to wander one room to the next.

It was often observed that he seem to know which of us perhaps needed his attentions most. From now onward however, neither of us will hear his quiet arrival to play that role. And only tears arrive freely now, as I think on that.

My means to grieve today was perhaps also prepared from that first arrival in the summer of 2019. Milo’s need, and my need seemed already intertwined. Milo was a birthday gift for my wife. Or, more correctly, the change of mind I was enduring included the gift of being more amenability to rescuing a cat. I had only ever known dogs. It would later be clear that Milo was as loyal as any dog, just as much as he was the independent cat that arrived. At the beginning however, his arrival coincided with my overwhelming exogenous depression – which had all but consumed me. I had further to fall yet, but so too was he yet to emerge from his hiding hole. Early on, our bonds were just beginning to be built, one careful moment at a time. Outside that room of careful bonding however, I was yet to conclude my mental health demolitions elsewhere. Only later could I begin the stronger build – from which that intense negativity was clearing – leaving space for future revealing to be made.

Both of us guardians keeping his bedroom a safe, clean, quiet place. Stiflingly hot, because windows were open, but only just so. Occasionally one or other of us sitting in a corner, just so he knew us both as also living in this one home.

Then one day soon after, I rolled a ball nearby, and the normal watch with enthusiasm was followed by a paw that reached out to grab the passing ping-pong ball. — Oh, what a moment of joy that was! — The same paw was soon then reaching for treats before we left the room. I then started laying upon the floor, looking back at him. Blinking long, as the books told me to. Him looking away, but then beginning to blink back. Oh my, that really touched me, emotionally. So imagine the experience felt, when I left my hand there with the treats, and a paw came out to touch me. Trust breaking through then, tears breaking through now as I joyfully remember that.

One year on — summer 2020 — much had changed. Milo was by now a fully settled member of the house. The house of three. I had formerly taken time out to deal with my fragile mental state. I had all but given up on my work life for a while, and was deep into the dissertation stage of my project management MSc. I was finding my way again, and finding it lead in a surprisingly fitting way of academia and later life learning. We were all three of us finding our shared place. Timing was all perfectly in keeping with the imposition of being necessarily homebound and locked away. If you think on that, when better to have to read, learn new mathematical skills, and write constantly than through a pandemic that insists you stay home?

Laughter from two people witnessing him seem truly free to be. Trust being earned, and success shared, as he mauled the next imaginary plastic or false-feather prey. Those moments I will not expand upon further here, because that experience cannot be explained sufficiently. Pictures offer some clues. Seen and been a part of; as a pair, and as a three. Fond will be those memories. They will, I hope, be the moments I more freely recall eventually.

That three long weeks was a truly horrific, emotionally traumatic time. My mind in overdrive, whilst my means to act were seemingly quite helpless and hapless for a while. “Was he dead or having the time of his life?” my tournament would ask. And “why did he run away, that first day?” — because I had rushed out to rescue him but he just turned and ran the other way. I took that badly. I was just a stranger in that unfamiliar setting of course, and my indoor familiarity we shared was not his reading of me outside. My daemons played merrily on me for that. They are back now for another go. Those earlier skirmishes with old foes a first glimpse at the pain I feel today. I feel remorse, and regret. But to my inner child, I can explain that this is just the broken bond; by situation, time, and pairing suddenly loosing those past binds. Shadowy figures of tournament within. My inner child. Past and present intertwined. It’s still funny how psycho-analytics still finds a way back to me, when most in need.

That grand escape was August 2022. A hot summer and perhaps a good time to spend three weeks hidden in our garden. However, his shyness made him unsuitable for outside. And that fall was his one and only adventure the other side of his beloved windows. We eventually trapped him, with help from the Cat Protection League. He re-entered our house, but initially it was only human feelings of relief, coupled with feline fear. The human trauma was gladly replaced with relief; but for his sake old routines were reinstated and replicated the familiarity of his very first days in that same space.

He was back in his room, and quickly back under his cupboard. But this time not so quietly, because his first instinct was pushing hopelessly at the bedroom door of a room he seemed not to recognise at all. I knew him well enough to stay quite still, let him calm and settle, and then I just left the room with my back facing him. More emotional turmoil for us, but at least he was home.

Three weeks in the wilderness was traumatic for all concerned. His instinct was to hide. Ours to seek. He never ventured far, is my best guess. He knew someone kept coming into the garden with food and treats. A few distant neighbours thought they saw him. But I went to that spot often and I am not convinced it was him. Two weeks past, and a nearer neighbour (a more likely distance away for one who hides rather than runs) sent a photo that confirmed it was indeed him. He was close by after all. But seemingly in no mood to let himself be known to them or me. My food offerings became more focused and directed as a result. He also got to meet the local foxes, cats, and other wildlife who liked those food offerings, too. We had no idea if he was even a participant at those feast. He showed no signs, sent no postcards, or offered any visual clues. But that all changed once I was offered that most welcome neighbourly sighting.

Nearly three weeks had passed by then, but my long and wishful watching at windows as nightfall fell were also now more directed. Immediately rewarding me with a glimpse of his tell-tale black spot on a white socked back leg. Was it him? The next night he appeared again and went to a food bowl. He sat. He looked about. Cleaned a paw. He wander off to the other corner of garden. He listened and looked at the fox run linking our garden to the woods behind. He was satisfied the coast was clear, and went back to the food bowl on the garden path. His instincts were working fine. It was unquestionably him. I had to fight every part of my own instincts though; I refrained from making myself known there and then.

Three days of that went on. He was getting no bolder in his regular and increasingly predictable appearances. With more time to observe him, he was noticeably thinner. Any illusion that he was wild and happily free evaporated with that reality. A plan was therefore hatched, and the literal trap set. One failed spring of that trap — a foiled attempt of a different beast, or his last win in hide-and-seek — followed by a quick adjustment inside the trap, and he was caught. He was back. Back in his bedroom, not that his immediate panic would have told him that.

The next morning was a moment I will treasure always. I have tears again just thinking of that joy. In the beginning of our time, in his first few early weeks in the bedroom we truly were strangers. I would knock on the door before entering, so as to give him time to hide. I did that familiar thing again. I entered, and all was quiet. Another habit was to then drop to floor on my knees, then either lay flat or just drop my head and look under the bed. The bed was between between the door and his old hidy-hole. Sure enough, he was back in his familiar safe place. Looking out at me, wide eyed and full of fear. “Hello, little man” I said, in my normal way with him. “Hello, it is nice to have you home”.

I was expecting to be doing that for days, maybe weeks. But he heard my voice and his eyes immediately changed. The fear left his face, and he silently mimed a meow. I was thrilled. I had been speaking to bushes for weeks with no idea if he was nearby. He certainly did not recognise the talker-to-bushes as me. However, in familiar settings my voice seemed to have meaning again, and that was almost immediately confirmed.

That was a few week’s worth of grief, but what a day that reunion was. It is hard to know what the last fifteen months would have been, if that was the last I had to write of him — i.e., with nothing to say of any comeback. On the one hand, going missing suggests there is hope. On the other hand, I know my daemons only fill in blanks negatively. I know this for sure, as those first few weeks required me to return to therapy. By then, I was also half-way through a second MSc. This one in psychology. I was accumulating more tools of knowledge, and some of those tools helped deal with things differently.

That first year of my second MSc had been an academic transformation of sorts. Bringing me into 21st Century thinking of cognitive and neuroscience, social psychology, and objective analysis of all that human behaviour is now understood to be. A transformation also, because I had just weeks earlier agreed to stop that MSc. Agreed at the request of the university who had just offered me a fully funded place to start a PhD. I was therefore thinking alternatively to the Jungian psycho-analytic processing that had once saved me. Now there was academic work to be done, and Jung just is not going to sit in journals, not a century on.

Experiences are now part of the grounding by which I have set my PhD. Yet I am perhaps less qualified than most to really, deeply, associate everything experientially. My therapist needed to build some of that skill base almost from scratch. I had plenty to offer in explaining the feelings of other people, but my vocabulary for myself was essentially retarded. Milo, was one contributing factor to help me reframe that. For example, right now, I am experiencing a significant sense of guilt. Guilt because I seem unable to not think of my emotional reactions in cold analytic and attempted abstract terms. But I can now better isolate that feeling of guilt, and experience it. I smile because even now I feel compelled to explain it, rather than live it – just look at the length of this note; it is only 27 hours since my poor little guy was gone. Which I now write, and it makes me sad.

Just feeling the grief is hard. However, writing this all down seems to be helping me to grieve. I am constantly writing in most all of my thinking time these days. My innermost critical flashes of thought — almost always critical of me — more easily intertwined into the fabric of all the rest of my thinking this way. Both of my Angela’s have told me that. My wife, Angela, has always perceptively known my tendencies toward becoming inwardly attentive. Long before I ever had means to identify with that habit. My therapist, Angela, helped me mobilise that process more completely. My two Angels of wisdom, and now Milo is perhaps my third (metaphorically). For he too, taught me much about me. And all such counterparts teach me something unique about me, becoming bonded as a we. Life seems to be granting me more Angels as I age (mostly metaphorically). That too makes me sad. But I can at least now appreciate each of those distinct bonds — being part of a we — more completely.

Milo has been integral to my own rediscovered self. So many others have also played a role. My folks most especially. However, Milo required me to take on a role I have played only infrequently — namely that of the unquestionable authority and being so fully depended upon. I already miss that seemingly newly created bond of responsibility. It seems so unfair to all concerned that we made that work so very well, yet he is gone now with his body failing before it was even ten years old. That too, makes me sad. He was happy, and should have been allowed more time to experience that. We shared in making that possible, and gave him just a few years. I am also angry, helpless, and aware I am without any real power beyond my own autonomy. And it is now raw in my mind that all of my forever relationships —i.e., that are bonded strongly enough to be a first person plural as a “we” — will all end this way. My love, my friendships, my family, and all my places of belonging, finite in the end by that greater reality. Bonded, but physically destined to become no more than another past-tense upon life’s reality of future time.

Seeing Milo’s body disappearing whilst he still lived in it, was so very hard to bare witness to. My repeated attempts to put blame on that come and go, and I find myself returning to think on that repeatedly. Mostly, that is my blame, but it finds other homes too. For example, he was maybe older than we were told. The vet — the one who injected his last thirty seconds — was candid with surprise when piecing together my stilted tear-bound phrasing that claimed he was only about ten.

Milo’s physical presence was a withered wretched body of an elderly guy when the vet was introduced to the shell of our cat, for the first and last time. Recent times had stripped him bare of much. Perhaps that “much” included his middle-age, too. But his ravaged teeth were older, she said. His gums drawn right back to the jaw bone, and clearly a long-standing period of disease. We knew him and his teeth only in that way. His stiffness was also jaundice she said — not the arthritis we had assumed. We had noted his stiffness had advanced once back from his window leap. However, the stiffness now was palpable and severe. Slowing any movement, as if the glue that stiffened his joints had also glued him to the table he now lay helplessly upon.

His muscle mass had never really returned after his wilderness either, but so too had that significantly decreased again much more recently. So too had his bone density lightened it seems, and maybe that too for quite a while. In truth, there was almost nothing of him left by the time the vet was invited to see. His liver was evidently distressed. The ulcers in his mouth had also pretty much claimed his throat completely. If he was still here that would have been increasingly distressing for him, and us. His last 48 hours increasingly made that case plain to see. Instead, he is now gone. And we two are sad.

Two days have now passed, and hindsight is once again my inner critical processes at their most cruelly effective best. Milo was quite obviously seeking cold places to cool down, whenever his ulcerated mouth meant he drank less. He had periods of drinking plenty. And then not. A vicious circle involving ulcers, less water, more distress to liver, and increasing chance of more ulcers. This gives plausible new explanation for much. His long periods of wanting to be alone were obviously tooth ache, or bone aches, or severe bouts of ulceration. The blistered paws we saw near the end were clearly not blisters at all. They were the results of fur being ripped off skin by constant cleaning. By teeth when tongue was too ulcerated to be used. The grubby feet he then endured that last week or so, were not cancerous growths, or tumours, or whatever else the internet said. He had just given up cleaning them. But hiding them from us, like he always did. His occasional decision to urinate somewhere else, perhaps because he did not want to stiffly go all the way to a litter tray (clean as the three were, and as closely relocated as the nearest may now been). Worst of all perhaps, his tongue sticking out turns out to have been something other than the endearing feature we had only ever known him by. Was that just ulcerations and aged teeth from the very start. We can put new narrative on all of that with hindsight.

That is the role of hindsight, perhaps. To replay events differently and see if they can be bettered next time. All of the above would have been explained if only we had been regular visitors to the vets. Maybe liver disease, gum disease, or whatever else ailed him, would be known too. Thank you, my inner critics (my daemons), for pointing all that out. Pointing it out ever more often, and increasingly insightfully these past few days. I am grateful for those insights, and that learning.

However, I also know much better these days that such hindsight is just doing it’s thing. Revealing a more objective truth, stripped of all reasoning of action in its time and place. Hindsight that is informed by more facts, less clouded by subjectivity, other possibilities, sentiment, or indeed false hope. For example, without need of reasoning in time and context. With such freedom to add facts there is no need to account for reasoned action of the time. In this case the fragility of the bonds of trust. Those same bonds that would have broken if Milo lived a life of vets and hospitals (stranger danger we knew him too fragile to take to). Bonds of trust from which all such joyful experiences were to depend. I am grateful too, therefore, that my training in self-awareness can now separate that learning possibility; and not be mischievously turned toward the self-loathing it would have otherwise become. I am grateful to all such partial mental processes that make that understanding an emergent possibility. For that at least, I am glad. But still, I am mostly assuredly sad.

Another antidote to the mental insistence of my blame is making thoughts real. Writing them down is now my weapon of choice. However, talking is a close second (but not when tears are getting in the way). I can see now how much of my many strands of life interrelate upon this theme of finitude and death. This has been my pre-occupation since nearly invoking my own. It has troubled my wife and I often since her medical condition is one with which we cope, not hope to cure. This acceptance of a mortal life is not understood, but my research, and my life experiences fit around this narrative. I am not ready to expand that research perspective yet, and it will not be said here perhaps, but I am comforted to think of Milo as so integral a part within that totality. Learning to live with his mortality will take some more tears. In that memory, his role lives on for me. He is gone, and my tears return with those words, but there is also I think a little hint of compassion saved also now for me. It’s okay to be sad.

Coping is better than not coping. That seems close to not being so, when every fibre of my being wants him back. Occasional waves of expectation unfulfilled. Like hunger that sees food on its way in, but then realises it has not made it past the mouth — so the pangs of habits we shared with him and for him are all that now follow me around. Coping with the hunger that stays, after the food was offered but is gone. Coping is better than not coping, I suppose. Milo must have had similar experiences. More often than perhaps I could have known. In the end, so much food offered, so much wanted to be eaten perhaps, so much going only to the crows. “Yes little legs, me too”, I perhaps now understand you differently. I too might have slunk off into a corner, staring at a bowl but deciding against the pain to chew. I might still do that, too – my bowl empty of your presence, and nothing I can do. And if I am angry at anything, it will be my predicament, not you. I guess any pain you dwelt on then, would have likewise just been focused upon you. Your predicament, hidden from us, known only to you. I suppose my guilt for that will continue evaporating upon my cheeks a while. Leaving me just feeling sad.

The emptiness rings loudest at the moments of such daily routine. Milo did love his routines. 9pm was always my time to shine. When I became the only person still up. The time he knew for sure I would be sitting with an empty lap. His play time or, in his premature dotage, his most likely time to want warmth and maybe a few snacks. My podcast listening time. Or reading something hard but interesting. I was predictably available. And he was predictably availed. Even if the whole day was a hiding day (for him or for me), the evening would be the time we would likely be looking for company. The exceptions were when a mouse was risking a dash to a bird-feeder at dusk, and needed to be watched. Or perhaps a moth bouncing along the window, or had willingly come inside to give my boy something to chew. Such sightings required at least an hour of watching intently, swishing his tail, hoping for another glimpse. Now 9pm is the quietest, emptiest, and perhaps the saddest time. Maybe the moths would not agree.

The memory of his last few moments seem important not to repress. I faced it head on, dutifully. His broken body was just so pitiful to see. His fight was gone. Such a vivid final experience together, that will fade only slowly; or perhaps the inner-narrative will just be kinder over time. The imagery (and emotional overload) I am currently forced to watch repeatedly are the moments when the vet left the room to get the paperwork — the death warrant, which I was required to sign — and I was alone with little legs one last time. He was just lay there, on his side. Breathing his last air, shallower even than the shallowness observed in what had been a long long last night. He had tricked me into thinking him dead many times, in what was to eventually become dawn and the darkness of torments in the dead of night. I stroked over his eyebrow, to see if his lid would close. He skin was cold but his eyes at least were still alive. I crouched to his eye-level, so we were looking into one another’s eyes. His eyes so dry over there – a million trust points away perhaps, but inches from my face – my eyes wanting so much to overflow. I was however fighting back my tears, because this eye contact was to calm him, not placate me.

“Are you ready for sleeps, little man?” I asked him softly; the gentle way he knew best. His eyes fixed upon mine, not blinking, and pupils not offering much change. As I stared and blinked long to reassure him, the jaundice was now so severe that the yellow staining of his eyes may have been brown, and merging may have been merging right into the green his irises had once been. The pupils were half-slit, about midway. I really wanted to see signs of recognition, but I also feared his eyes would therein confirm abject terror. Neither was clearly confirmed. “It is time to sleep now little man; time to end this misery”. I stroked his topmost eyebrow and cheek again with my little finger. This all a familiarity of home sleep routine, maybe getting through. His other eye, just clear of the sacrificial plinth on which he lay, blinked lazily and independently of the other, but his eyes never once left mine. Then the door opened, and the vet walked in. He seemed hardly to hear a thing.

Day 3, (06:55) and it’s my birthday today. Fifty-one years is getting to be quite old. I call myself a second-lifer these days. I am long since recovered sufficiently from the darkest days of my depressive state; most especially the day I was seconds from my suicide. I can perhaps say that more confidently this day, than I have ever been able to before. Because today, on my birthday, I am so very depressed. However, it is today normal and understood, and I have compassion enough for myself to say that that feeling such sorrow is very much allowed.

Milo is one of many I must thank for being here, for another birthday. He will not be downstairs when I get up. Which will remain sad for some more mornings yet, of course. Milo now my teacher of mourning differently, too. Unlike him, I have a second life to continue through. A harder half I think. More mourning to do. Or more importantly, more strength to find, and more means to do this hard thing when duty asks that too.

More strength to find because more palliative care is likely needed of me, yet. Leading to more mourning duty to fulfil. Which all makes me sad, too. However, as unwilling as I am, I am learning to understand myself as able to stand up to such duty. I am grateful for that at least. I hope those very few this is written to, are quietly comforted by that, too. I think perhaps, the second half of life is just a build towards accepting such inevitability. When we each experience that inevitability which can be done by nobody but you.

So, I have no intention of being bashful in this part. I have been ready in death more times than a few. My exogenous depression made sure of that. Now however, I’m readying myself to live longer with death. Milo has been a key part in my recovery, and my willingness to reclaim duties in my own time. Whatever duty that too may call me toward, I suspect the second half of life is inevitably filled with more of these days. Days to be strong for others, willingly carrying care burdens as my own. Knowing too, that one day I will be stung once again in being suddenly burden-free and so very sad because that duty is no more.

This is my lesson today, for me. My birthday gift. These lows when dealing with death, which highlight future days to be grateful for time left. Future happy times yet to be had with those we love, and are grateful to have in sharing life’s experience. I will roll over now (07:56). With no one waiting downstairs, and a partner lay peacefully sleeping next to me. I may think on that a moment still. I am both sad and happy; grateful and fearful; but, perhaps harbouring a little less regret. It’s my birthday after all. I will think on this some more, because I want to.

I think myself perhaps ready now to face this day. To pick up my research and know there is no one wanting to play. These will be the last passages in this note. My writing must return to my life away from here. I will however now attempt to link this note with my other handles upon life. For Milo was a presence on that journey, too.

The clarity of my thinking in the last weeks of Milo’s life, were quite extraordinary to me. The build up of stress, concern, false-hope, felt burden, have all seemed to heighten my sense of the real. Just by doing much of what I think I have long feared most, and in doing it almost not thinking on it at all. Yet, at the same time I kept at my research. And my thinking there seemed to suddenly make a little more connected sense. Connecting, circumstantially, to what was happening right here. Milo, as always, was a constant individual part of that, and a partnership of understanding by the bond of trust we shared.

My PhD has demanded much transformation of me. Or perhaps, my PhD is just the latest example of transformation I have consistently seemed to crave throughout my life. However, the philosophical phenomenology that grounds my research, has taxed me for most of 2023. Now, however it rewards me with a new perspective from which this all makes more sense. If I am truly understanding this better, the following will be brief and simply put (ha! says you).

There is something very curiously different about most all of what humans do. We are forever “about” something other than just ourselves. We are each just “going about our business”. That is not to say we are not selfish, quite the opposite. But even in being selfish, that too needs there to be something to be selfish about. That “aboutness” is what phenomenology is itself about. In this sense, we are always thinking forward (even when looking back). Heidegger pointed to that motion as a thrown projection. We seem to always be taking note of our past experience – e.g., our individual experiences, experiences we share, those taught, and our cultural perspectives which become norms of expectation societally engrained. We draw upon that experience — like drawing back an arm with ball in hand in preparation for launching a projectile. Throwing such projection of those past experiences, forwards into future possibilities.

That analogy is borrowed from Heidegger. In this sense — which Heidegger learned from Husserl, Brentano, and before that the Middle Age sages and the Greeks — we are always “about” something other than just the act of thought itself. We throw the projection of our experiences into a future of possibilities to make our actions intended and therefore have reasons, and business to go about.

This is what my writing of my grief helps me unpack. By this personal example, my grief is about Milo. But it is also more than that. My grief is also about my lost bond with another. A bond that I can never have back. In this context, Milo exemplifies a second aspect of phenomenology. An aspect of being human that means we are never just about ourselves, but always being with others. Milo had similar experiences of me perhaps. But bound to routine, security, and history remembered as safety and security. Going forward, my research now focuses much more clearly on that relationship as a range of potential strength of bonds. But only in human to human terms. More recent phenomenology philosophers have come to describe this relating as as being a “we”. In other words finding instances where a first-person singular (as an “I” or “me”) becomes a first-person plural (as a “we”). If this is described, it is the identification of the widest net that can be caste between peoples who are no longer a “you and me”, but are a “we”. This is a bond that is shared, and yet an experience that can only ever be individually known for sure. And yet it also exists only in a space between at least two. These are perhaps the moments which we can most connect with — i.e., what life is most meaningfully about.

A second example is needed to then bring this toward the broader perspective that I want to use to ground my research. This phenomenological view offers a different way to see the phenomenon as the topic of my research. Research which is not philosophical at all, and necessarily set in clearly defined empirical setting. However, these philosophical perspectives afford me a means to think differently about the inter-organisational project arena I seek to understand more. Or more plainly, projects that include many organisations rather than situated within one firm, or one clearly collective single group.

I am already talking of this differently. I presented to a class full of MSc students on Thursday — i.e., in the midst of all my Milo chaos. I felt most clearly, and profoundly, that I was telling them a simple truth. A project is simply one more manifestation of what doing something with intent is about. And when projects involve others, we are compelled to know what that difference is about. In my world of projects, we should be preparing ourselves and our projects to help deal with that difference of perspective. And our projects perhaps fall into conflict over that difference of priority — i.e., what the project is about to others differently. At its simplest, that is what my research is about. With metaphoric comparison, Milo and I were a we, once we found the means to build trust and be benefiting from each other. It is now gone, and I am sad about that loss. My grieving will continue, because I can do nothing to turn that about. Nothing but know this experience better, and throw that experience forward to whatever is next.

My first day at age 51. I think I am now ready to return to my life project. Milo was such an important part of me being able to do that. And I now miss him. I miss him very very much.

Rest in peace, little legs – my friend. We were bonded tight, right to the end.