My Haunted Scarecrow Halfway House

My sister’s dog passed away unexpectedly back in February. While I know it’s not my grief or loss to contend with, it’s been hard not to draw perspective from it even if it is secondhand. It’s also become one of several recent events or encounters that have made me reflect on my own capacity for attachment, which I’m starting to recognize is quite impoverished.

My sister called me the day her 2.5-year-old blue heeler, Ranger, passed and a few things were immediately obvious to me. In talking to my sister so soon after it happened, I noticed that I felt pretty well-equipped to be a sounding board for somebody going through a traumatic experience. It’s something I’ve been wising up on in recent years to work through my own shit. If I was vaguely aware it would eventually make me better prepared to support others, I hadn’t really been tested in that exact way yet.

I’ve had my fair share of codependent friendships (that I’ve since disinvested in) where, as the “responsible” one, I’ve had to take care of or clean up after somebody who isn’t taking care of themself. But that all feels a bit different from being consciously called upon in somebody’s time of crisis. I’ve not historically been the person somebody confides in the day the awful thing happens, and for the most part, that’s been for the best.

While the last two years or so of my adult life have been marked by recovery and relative stability in my mood and circumstances, that’s a pretty new development. When I think about what characterized everything prior—pre-adult years included—Kaveh Akbar’s phrase “lurching from crisis to crisis” comes to mind. As good as I was at tidying up other people’s messes, I was never in any state to truly support anybody else, even if I had possessed the emotional bandwidth for it.

My first quarter-century of life spent lurching from crisis to crisis, slowly but surely en route to an early preventable death, is exactly why I’ve worked to get a pretty solid grasp of navigating trauma—specifically validating and integrating the most upsetting events and experiences. From that standpoint, I felt pretty in my element when my sister called on a Sunday evening with the news about Ranger. The clarity I felt in the moment was a surprise to me. I knew the type of emotional first aid to perform to, at a minimum, ground the conversation in space and time and encourage my sister not to dissociate so her long-term healing can be solid. I knew right away, however, that I was entirely out of my depth with the grief and loss dimension of this whole episode.

I’ve checked in with my sister about once or twice a week since she lost Ranger. I don’t think she has expected me to be much of a resource on grief in any of those conversations, but I was still transparent with her about that early on because it felt like an area where she could use some support. I tried to be careful not to give advice through any of this, but I did ask my sister if she planned to ask her therapist to hold space to discuss grief at her next appointment. Just putting that out there seems to have been fruitful.

When they started discussing Ranger’s death, my sister’s therapist gave her a mantra for when she starts to go into an emotional tailspin. It goes something like, “What happened to Ranger is unbelievable, and he can’t be here anymore.” In a subtle way, I think the first part is pretty wise in that it speaks to my sister’s predilection for survivor’s guilt in all this.

Not very many days prior, my sister had her fourth knee surgery of her adult life (the previous three owing to her past life as a college athlete). She and her partner live in a dry cabin in Fairbanks, so I think for at least a few days after her surgery, she was posting up at a friend’s house with some more creature comforts like indoor plumbing. Ranger had been outside playing with her friends’ pups and it sounds like my sister crutched out to the porch to check on the dogs since two were barking in an unusual way. She spotted Ranger laying about 150 feet away from the house and he wasn’t responding to her calls.

Her limited mobility prevented her from being able to haul to Ranger herself immediately and she said his body was quickly cooling down and his tongue and gums were already getting pallid by the time she could lay down in the snow and try to administer CPR. Ranger was well on his way out by the time they were able to get him to the emergency vet and rigor mortis had already taken effect by the time my sister’s partner could meet her there. They gave his body to the university in Fairbanks for an autopsy, and the reports from that have been inconclusive so far. What the folks performing the autopsy have observed thus far has raised more questions than answers as to the cause of death. He wasn’t maimed and he was young and healthy when he died. What happened to him really is unbelievable. It’s the type of loss that nobody should have to anticipate or prepare for. It’s the type of loss I can’t empathize with because I can barely apprehend it. I have no experience with such a personal loss.

Even though the first response aspect felt squarely in my wheelhouse, and my sister’s loss has definitely cast a shadow over the past few weeks, the whole scenario has made me conscious of just how emotionally hollow I’ve kind of become. It’s a different kind of hollowness than the one that characterized my final years on the East Coast. That hollowness was marked by cynicism and borderline misanthropy. What I have now lacks the antisocial qualities of before, and although they’re by no means very extreme, I still experience a full-ish range of emotions. And sure, over the three-ish years that I’ve been focused on essentially shoring myself up, that’s been a comfortable state of mind to drift in. But that’s just it: it’s become a drift. There haven’t been any major plot points, if you will, to set me on a different course. It’s all been a benign but heavily solitary endeavor. On those grounds alone, I wouldn’t be so paranoid about my chances of warping into a spiteful, vindictive Underground Man. But I’ve recently started thinking of myself—only somewhat ironically—as a haunted scarecrow in a human suit, and it’s making me question how much of this current hollowness is salvageable and how much is permanent.

My sister’s loss has made me pretty aware that I’ve never experienced loss of a similar magnitude—or maybe anything of a similar magnitude. Some of that is luck and circumstance, yes. I may not have a healthy human attachment to that many people, but of those few, I haven’t lost any at this point—that’s the luck part. On the circumstance side, I grew up pretty isolated from extended family and elders, so I haven’t exactly been primed for loss from a young age through the passing of relatives. Relatives and pets seem to pervade most people’s formative experiences with death and loss. My early life didn’t have much of either, and it makes me feel like I’m going to be an especially late bloomer in this area.

Here’s the thing though, while I’m a little concerned about my mounting resemblance to a haunted scarecrow, I’m not totally convinced that my attachment issues are all bad. For some reason, I have a hard time casting my stunted ability to form the deep bonds that future grief would be predicated on as entirely negative. If it were grounded in some compulsive need to preempt pain and loss, I would feel differently. But I think pain and loss are edifying, so I don’t think that’s what’s going on here. Rather, I think it’s more informed by seeing so many people who derive identity and meaning from their relationships to an unhealthy extreme.

There’s a fine line, I think, between being open to connecting with other beings on a deep level and getting stuck only being able to fathom yourself relative to the needs and desires of others. That’s self-erasure, and I think that’s dangerous because I’m convinced we have the most to offer when we have a healthy sense of our own identity, will, and autonomy as multifaceted individuals. I guess I’ve witnessed enough people succumbing to the self-erasure pitfall that I’ve sworn off dynamics that might land me in the same position. That said, it’s hard to boil down every kind of relationship dynamic I tend to give a wide berth. It’s pretty easy to articulate what’s fundamentally missing from those kinds of relationships though. It’s reciprocity.

Maybe the fact that my circle of ride-or-dies is so small at this point just underscores how rare reciprocity is. But I say that with the important caveat that it doesn’t have to be. This is one of those matters where I think it’s vital to acknowledge the reality as it is whilst also refusing to accept it as necessary, natural, or preordained. Because I think quite the opposite is true in this case. Reciprocity and collaboration is the natural state of beings on this planet. As it relates to our relationships with other beings, the codependent, manipulative, and extractive bullshit is the invasive stuff of imperialists and grifters.

One of the more significant shifts in my own thinking since my East Coast years is that, even if I see myself as unfit for society as it is in the Anthropocene, I don’t see myself as exceptional in that. What’s exceptional is just that I’m aware of it. That was one of my big takeaways from reading Doug Chadwick’s Four Fifths a Grizzly earlier this year. He makes the point that whether you date our beginnings back to the origins of primates (75-85 million years ago) or the earliest hominids (7-8 million years ago), humans have spent somewhere between 99.9% and 99.99% of our evolutionary existence in natural settings.

So, comparatively speaking, our ancestors have spent almost none of our collective history in the synthetic, man-made conditions most of us are subjected to nowadays. Chadwick says, “…none of our early or more recent human ancestors experienced anything remotely equivalent to the sights, sounds, and demands of the environments most Homo sapiens dwell in today.” And evolutionarily speaking, our DNA hasn’t caught up. As a species, we haven’t yet adapted to life in the environments most of us live in today. We’re categorically unfit for them.

Reading Chadwick’s description of this whole clash between humans and our increasingly synthetic surroundings, it feels like we really ought to be dubious of anybody who doesn’t feel out of their element these days. To me, our incompatibility with the developed world and the lack of reciprocity in most people’s relationships feel related, but probably not in a way that’s immediately obvious to anybody outside of my own peculiar mind palace.

I guess to me, what characterizes the synthetic, developed world is an inanimacy that is necessarily codependent. That is, we living beings have to create it and maintain it, but it’s not really capable of doing likewise for the living world. If anything, we create and maintain those things at our own peril. The relationship is hella one-sided. By contrast, the living world is necessarily collaborative. When intact and functioning, all thriving is mutual, all care is reciprocal, and that feels more like home to me. The handful of close friendships I have with other humans approximate it, but only as much as single-species monoculture can.

Like I said, I don’t know if I’d write off my attachment issues as purely negative. In a way, maybe it’s a reflection of how disaffected and not the least bit tethered I feel toward a conception of society that seems artificial, ephemeral, and largely codependent. And I do know my boundaries and expectations around people and especially friendships are pretty healthy for the most part. But I’m also recognizing some of the design flaws in my exacting standards. For example, measuring everyone you encounter against the standards that apply to only people you trust? As a general posture toward everyone I encounter in the world who’s navigating their own social, emotional, and economic minefields, that’s unwelcoming at best. At worst, it sort of flies in the face of the friendships I currently have because, with the exception of my sibling and my mother, it discounts how my most trusting relationships started out.

None of my current close friendships would exist if I had prematurely written off every person I encountered in my life. Or even if I had initial reservations about some of these people who are now my good friends, I at least had the emotional openness to let them prove me wrong. The point is, being closed off to everyone in our daily lives is a hell of a way to ensure we’ll essentially have no new connections to speak of a year from now, or five, or ten. At minimum, that’s a major design flaw. But while I’m taking the time to critique it, I might as well name that it also feels out of step with my conviction that reciprocity is our natural state even if it’s elusive right now.

If those of us who are doing our level-best to apply and actualize reciprocity in our behaviors, choices, and interactions have no space in our life for new connections, how is this aspirational return to reciprocal form ever going to catch on? For the part of the population that hasn’t been on a steady regimen of Robin Wall Kimmerer reading, where are they going to find a healthy model for reciprocity if we all just proactively ice them out? Now, I’m a believer in carrying capacity, and I extend the principle figuratively to an individual’s spiritual and emotional balance. Far be it from me to suggest that everybody has the emotional wherewithal to foster more deep connections in their lives. I also think it’s wrong to suggest that the onus is on any one individual to have to facilitate that teachable journey for people who might not know what they’re missing. My point is merely that if none of us can be open to new friendships defined by reciprocity, then it’s sort of like no doctor alive is accepting new patients. We’re just leaving a bunch of sick people in limbo. And at that, a limbo none of us humans are built for on the DNA level.

As with anything else, I’m realizing that those of us who are determined to manifest an existence where we can all belong and contribute just have to be discerning about where and when we can show up. And I think this is me coming to grips with the fact that I can afford to show up more. It’s essentially time to emerge from this safe, stable, heavily fortified haunted scarecrow halfway house of an existence that I’ve been able to post up in for the past few years. That time reflecting and rehabilitating has been important. But I guess its success hinges on how well it’s prepared me to reenter the synthetic and hostile developed world and make whatever tiny changes I can to it.

I launched into this latest exhaust release of heartfelt nonsense saying Ranger’s death was part of a series of events and encounters that have made me reflect long and hard on my emotional status as a haunted scarecrow in a human suit. There were two things that bookended it.

The first was an exchange at my neighborhood grocery on a day the espresso machine at the coffee bar was being serviced. One of the baristas that I have a friendly banter dynamic with joked that they were permanently closing down the coffee operations after they made my dirty chai. I took it at face value and was quickly accepting in a way that made them chuckle. They said something like, “Wow. That was fast.” The insinuation being that I seemed awfully well prepared to move on and would take no time at all to mourn if they had been serious. I’ve thought a lot about that interaction.

On one hand, I think my reflex in that situation belies some of my cynicism about the fragility of local establishments that I love. I think being a child of Montana amidst this intersection of a mass extinction event and the new gilded age will do that to you. All the bars and coffee shops that carry the most sentimental weight for so many people back home seem to get pushed out by wealthy developers over time or spontaneously go up in flames. It’s a sort of nihilistic point of view that I can’t recommend. But on another hand, I think it is a bit of an extension of my acceptance of death and life as two sides of the same coin. I see all life as predicated on death, and I think what comes off as a really unaffected acceptance of loss is really just my understanding of painful loss as natural and predictable. That understanding hasn’t been tested with a particularly intimate and personal loss yet. And I think that really just points back to that haunted scarecrow syndrome where I don’t naturally forge connections in the deep, healthy way that would cause me the kind of grief my sister’s been going through with Ranger.

The other bookend, an exchange that occurred after Ranger’s death, was with my sister and it was about Ranger’s blue heeler stepbrother, Archie, who’s a few years Ranger’s senior. Apparently, finding an afterlife for Ranger’s toys was something of a dilemma despite still having another healthy dog in the cabin. That’s because Archie doesn’t care for stuffies. In my sister’s words, “Archie likes to chew on bones until his gums bleed.”

Now, my sister has shared things about Archie in the past that have made me suspect we’re similarly masochistic, but this bit about why he’d never touch Ranger’s toys felt especially on the nose. Earlier that week, I noticed I had some gum recession and when my dentist had a few minutes to look at it, both he and the hygienist working said it was nothing dire, but it was almost certainly self-inflicted, and they effectively banned me from using toothbrushes with firm bristles. Suffice to say I have a tendency to brush vigorously with firm toothbrushes (sometimes until my gums bleed a little) because I find it satisfying.

Between making our gums bleed, our relationships to punishing physical activity, and our resting state of emotional distance, I can say conclusively that Archie and I are cut from the same cloth. And with all respect to Archie, I find it a bit amusing but I’m not altogether proud of it. I think my self-awareness on this matter is promising. But I can honestly say I don’t want this haunted scarecrow syndrome that’s afflicted both Archie and me to be my endgame.

Archie, for his part, is a dog. His humans will love him unconditionally even if he has all the hallmarks of a budding sadist. Of the characteristics we share, I can learn to accept and befriend those of mine that are truly innate. But I’m not convinced all of them are, and I don’t think I should bank on having unconditional love and support in spite of those qualities. I have to learn to live reciprocally in the world—even the synthetic world that is hostile to the likes of life. I can’t be a squatter in this transitional drift and comfortable masochism forever even if it’s not causing anybody harm.

So how does one go about emerging from the haunted scarecrow halfway house? I’ve yet to find a self-help book on this topic and I suspect there isn’t one. Like everything else there isn’t a manual for, I’m inclined to believe it starts with an act of will and you learn the rest in your particular context as you go. I guess articulating it like this is one way to start the process. This is me launching the cosmic search engine and calling in whatever wisdom it has to share about reentering this modern world that no human has the evolutionary constitution for and exposing myself to devastating loss and all that beautiful shit it’s predicated on.