Inevitable

Wild King­dom came on at 5 on Sat­ur­day evenings when I was a kid. Fol­low­ing that was Lawrence Welk. The car­nage on Wild King­dom was not assuaged by the Waltz‘s on LW. At no age did I find LW fun/interesting/funny/worth my time. How­ever, and unfor­tu­nately, the two shows are stuck in my mem­ory like post-it notes that have melted together. I did love WK. Thank you to Mutual of Omaha for intro­duc­ing me to nature‘s way with sex (edited) and vio­lence (unedited, of course).
The mat­ter of fact way that ani­mals kill each other and die is what most indeli­bly tat­tooed my lit­tle brain on those Sat­ur­day after­noons. My dad would be out grilling ham­burg­ers (Happy Birth­day by the way, Les) and I was trans­fixed by Mar­lin Perkins’ voice urg­ing Jim to pet the lion lick­ing her chops on gazelle blood. I digress: it is the hack­neyed joke about Jim and the lions, I know. I couldn‘t resist.
The dying. I have writ­ten here before about humans dying and find­ing unfath­omable dig­nity in that process. I have real­ized that ani­mals and plants and flow­ers too, die, well, nat­u­rally. It is a part of the liv­ing process. The ante­lope would fall and as the cheetah‘s teeth sunk per­fectly into it‘s jugu­lar, the ante­lope stopped its striv­ing. Acqui­es­cence, accep­tance. The final stage of Kubler-Ross instantly. It was shock­ing to me at the time. That is because the story about death I picked up as a kid was much more ornate and fic­tional. Some­how I thought it was attended by trum­pets and angels that every­one could see. I thought that lions and mice really did get along and pulled thorns out of paws. Not so much. The order is quite a bit more fixed and mat­ter of fact. Maybe if I had been to slaugh­ter house and seen how we deal with our food ani­mals I would have seen the human take on matter-of-fact dying.
I appre­ci­ate the Wild King­dom for show­ing the truth about dying. It pre­pared me for what I have been priv­i­leged to expe­ri­ence with many peo­ple in my work as a sur­geon. One moment we are run­ning strong, aware or not of the chee­tah in pur­suit, the next, we are not run­ning. We are falling and return­ing to the dirt, noble in our last breath.