The Value of Witness
Recently I decided to stop using the iOS Notes app to record things I might want to access in the future, due to learning that (1) notes are not automatically backed up to iCloud; you have to go into iCloud and turn on “Notes,” and then go into Notes and make sure everything you want backed up is in the iCloud folder, otherwise it’s just on the iPad/iPhone and if you need to recover it, you better have made a full backup (which I rarely do anymore), and (2) it is a pain in the butt to export your Notes to anything. You can ask Apple for a download of all your Notes (if they are being backed up to iCloud) and this gives you a giant folder with a subfolder for each note and the contents of the note in a text file in that folder. So anyway I did all that and was moving the notes I really wanted to keep over into Scrivener, which backs up automatically with Dropbox and exports happily in any number of ways. And it turned out that some of those notes were about Kobalt, and with this particular anniversary coming up, I was in a mood to look through them anyway.
The one that hit me the hardest was a note where I’d collected some of the things people said to me and us about him in the weeks after he passed. Things like “Never doubt the love he had for all three of you,” and “He couldn’t have asked for a better family.” They may not seem like much, writing them out here, but they meant a lot to us then and mean a lot to us now. Because as much as our relationships mean to us, we are social animals and it’s important to have those relationships recognized by our community. Having anything recognized by our friends makes it seem more real–this is (at least one reason) why we creators love for other people to see our creations.
There are too many Kobalt stories and pictures for me to write them all down and share them all, and I wouldn’t want to. We’ve shared the best ones, or at least the ones we thought people would most relate to, and the point of that was not the individual stories themselves. The point was to share enough of them that our friends would get a sense of the bond behind the stories, the feelings that grew out of hundreds of these little interactions multiplied and reinforced over months and years. Here’s an example: Kobalt, like many GSDs, had a strong sense of pack. He learned quickly that there were three of us humans in his pack, and we became not only his packmates but also his responsibility. When he sat on the sofa, he would sometimes doze, but if any of us came downstairs or went upstairs (the stairs are behind the sofa), he would lift his head and crane his neck so he could see us. It was an adorable pose, a moment of connection when he would look at us and we’d look back and we both said, I see you there. I have multiple pictures of this pose. But the single incident in the picture is just one time that happened out of hundreds; this behavior is just one of many that told us how he thought about us as his pack and felt he had to look out for us. Telling you that lets you imagine the scope of the experience–not feel it, really, unless perhaps you’ve had a dog of your own and then it might pull on that memory, and you think, yes, the pack dog, I know that feeling.
But the point of this is that you don’t have to feel it to understand us. You just have to know that we feel it. That’s why we told dog stories when he was alive, to tell you about the funny/cute/gross thing he did but also to share the love we had so you would know what we were feeling. That’s why we told stories about him after he passed, so that our friends could know what we loved about him and so they could help us remember him.
We do this all over our lives. We hold the important moments of our lives in our community so that people can share in them. Weddings are ceremonies that take a private relationship and declare it publicly. As part of the wedding ceremony, couples will often choose stories about their relationship to give their friends and family a sense of who they are to each other, so that the community can help support and reinforce that relationship. I asked the first friend of mine who got married whether marriage made her feel different about her relationship, and she said, “No. But it does change how people treat you as a couple.” That’s part of what these community ceremonies are for: to make your relationship feel more real, more supported, by sharing it with the people you care about.
The three of us got a wonderful dog nine and a half years ago, and that would have been enough. But I’m so grateful for the friends and family who met him, who got to see what a good dog he was, who got to see what he meant to us, and we to him. When we lost him, many of those friends and family (and others who knew him–his favorite kennel sent us a lovely card) reached out and told us, We see you, we see your love, it was real.
Two years on, I still hold those words close to my heart. Thank you.
