I know that the world is burning, that a certain apathy is drying up our impulses, that empathy is melting like the ice cap, that our news will no longer be found on Facebook feeds, that interest rates are still exploding while the fractures benefits rise along with grocery bills. I know that Kundera is dead, taking away at the same time a little of what remained of the collapse of the poetry necessary for our days, that everywhere around, the dialogue continues to crumble, that the thoughts split, harden, always distancing us a little more from this solidarity that we will have to rediscover one day, if we want to face up to what is already so well under way.
I know all that and yet, instead of slipping endlessly on vacation photos strewn between guilt-inducing publications, I take refuge, with an assumed cowardice, on a small, very simple book, which tells the story of love between a human and his dog. Yes. I do that.
And, in doing so, with each page turned, I find a little more of this little hope in the future, of this form of sentimental optimism, completely irrational, even childish, but which I need to restore my taste for humans. . I take you with me for a moment, in a garden, on a balcony or in your bed, that we forget for a short moment everything that burns, that we regain our strength, our noses lost in the fur of these animals that send us back sometimes to what is best in us. We will take up arms soon enough, but perhaps this time with a little more open heart, which, let’s face it, will perhaps become something like an act of resistance in itself.
Its smell after the rain, by Cédric Sapin-Defour, also a mountaineer and contributor to Release, deposits us in this ability to contemplate nature, the world and what it contains for what it is, and not for what it has to bring us. It is one of the strengths of this little book to never slip into anthropomorphism or misanthropy, pitfalls widely borrowed by works focusing on this link that unites humans and animals. We meet there “Ubac” (the name designating the northern slope of a mountain) and the thirteen years of companionship that he will have offered to his human, delivering him at the same time lessons in the ethics of friendship, of the living. and the fragile ecosystem of sentiment.
“Ubac is always with us. He’s there ; obvious and discreet, its presence disappears. This is perhaps what they do best, these animals that populate our days, our homes, our timeline: to stay there, like stubborn presences, offering us this rigorous and permanent presence. It is true that we often go looking for a dog, a cat or even a bird, as we again dare the risk, the big one, that of loving and losing. Because having an animal means preparing to lose, opening up to finitude, knowing that you’re investing at a loss, that you’re not sure of anything except living a love story.
And when Ubac ends up dying, there is this sentence that grabs us and that all those who have returned to a house where there is no longer any hair to pick up will recognize: “There will be the summer of which I will be the abandoned animal. »
It was summer 2020 for me. I barely had any hair regrowth, a subcutaneous catheter still installed. They had just removed what was left of a tumor which, according to the beautiful expression of my oncologist-poet, “was in the process of giving up”. I regained my footing, in what will forever remain something like my afterlife. I was sitting on the porch at the front of my house, in that particular state of presence that characterizes the “aftershocks” of existence. Dutch, the dog of my last ten years, this charming mix of cocker spaniel and golden retriever, unique and so endearing companion and working partner, stood behind me, being nothing but himself, right there , again, to support the blow, with us.
I remember looking at him differently that day, noticing that he had grown old, the hairs on his face having turned white, my illness having affected him perhaps, too, to be unlimited empathy. I got up and let him run a little bit freely on the ground. Then there had been the cat across the street, the hound reflex, the car, the last yelp that had concluded the little tragedy of my loss.
Lying on his right side, Dutch had been flattered until the gaze fixed. I had cried in the middle of the road, my nose in his red hair, in front of a silent, supportive and united neighborhood. I had already cried for all that he would take with him: ten years of maternity, of clinic, all these returns home, these walks in the forest, these microdramas of daily life, these words collected on the couches, the pains of my son’s school, then this disease which had almost mowed me down, while he was leaving for real.
I remember thanking him for dying in my place, for teaching my children about mourning, for preparing them, for allowing them to really understand that “when you’re dead, you’re dead”. We patted his ultra-soft ears one last time, put flowers and candles around him, and mourned all we had held back over the past few months, which had crossed over our heads with cancer and the pandemic.
I remain convinced that the generosity of animals goes so far as to combine their disappearance with key moments in our lives, whatever the rational data that lead our world say, by constantly evacuating the idea of the meaning that we need to give to the mystery of chances, trials and injustices. By dying that summer, Dutch had offered us more of his great capacity to love, allowing us to tame death, to alphabetize a little of this indigestible matter which cluttered our family psyche.
We mourned for a whole year. Then, like an audacity to dare life again, there was Stella, the little German shepherd, who entered our lives without us really planning it.
“A porosity to happiness or something like that. Otherwise who can explain the unexpected? ” – extract of Its smell after the rain.
Clinical psychologist, Nathalie Plaat is an author and teacher at the University of Sherbrooke.