David Joseph’s writing has been published in The London Magazine, Wall Street Journal, LA Times, Doubletake Magazine, and Rattle. A recipient of the John Henry Hobart Fellowship for Ethics and Social Justice, he spent the past two decades as an educator and nonprofit executive in Los Angeles. He is a graduate of Hobart College and the University of Southern California’s Graduate Writing Program. He has taught at Pepperdine University and at Harvard, where he was awarded a Derek Bok Award for Distinction in Teaching. He currently lives in San Roque, Spain with his wife Karen and their sons Jackson and Cassius.
Signs
Looking back, there were signs, signs that things might take a turn. But they were so hard to see, particularly since we were only twenty years old, in college, and experiencing the highs and lows of young adulthood as we moved towards an uncertain future alongside an army of peers.
Still, there was something a little different about him. He was darker than the rest of us. He had seen more, lived more, and this made him somehow harder, more cynical, then we seemed to be. If I really think about it, he talked like a man closer to the end even though we were only at the beginning. It was as if he had already lost, as if he understood in a different way than we did that everyone loses eventually, that no one gets out alive after all.
He didn’t carry so much a burden as a sense of downbeat enlightenment that had been born through the loss of something that had already been taken from him. This came through in moments of negativity, not so much despondency as much as a bleak reminder of reality, the stark reality, of all our existences. And while we carried ourselves within the beautiful delusion of invincible youth, he carried himself with the inevitability of death, eventual death, that awaited each of us sooner or later.
Not surprisingly, he was a young man of science. He would never be a man of faith, not after watching the last breath snuffed out of his dad, not after being there so young, not after standing completely powerless in the room and witnessing the evaporation of life. He could invest his time in numbers and calculations, concrete data, equations and solutions, but he’d never again believe in anything that couldn’t be proven demonstrably.
I was just the opposite. I tried to find meaning in words and art and philosophy, all the things you couldn’t ever quite answer definitively. I was drawn to the beauty of the subjective, the mystery of the unknown, and the delight in ruminating about things that could never be solved, only felt or perceived. I was a dreamer, and I chose dreams over despair not so much out of faith as out of hope. He didn’t have that luxury anymore.
When he got a dog, he went to the pound. He picked the dog at the front of the line, the first on death row, and he brought him home to our house. When I asked him why he saved this dog from his death when it was inevitable just as ours was, he remarked that dogs weren’t aware of their mortality, that this unwanted dog had no idea of what was in store for him in the coming hours. The dog still had his innocence, true innocence, and that was worth protecting.
Soon after the dog came home with him, the training began. Bloodhounds aren’t easy to train, but the dog had some shepard in him too along with whatever other breeds were mixed in his blood. It wasn’t easy, but he trained that dog to protect him and he did. In return, the dog became the recipient of all his affection. He poured his love into that dog. At the end of every day, after long hours inside the science laboratories, there was the dog, waiting patiently for him to come home. He couldn’t give that dog enough, and he took pride in the simplicity of the dog’s needs, the buoyancy of his spirit, and the depth of his loyalty. Although he had saved the dog, it was the dog who seemed to rescue him from the darkness.
But sometimes the pull of gravity is too strong. Sometimes inevitability has its own timetable. And sometimes we simply don’t get the opportunity to obtain all the answers, no matter how hard we try.
When they found him, he was living in California, wearing shorts as he always liked to on warm days, along with a white t-shirt. His hair was still young enough to remain dark, and the curls of his youth were still there on the day of his death. He had performed the act sitting down. He hadn’t dressed like an officer or laid out clothes and belongings perfectly on his bed. He had simply been defeated in a war of attrition. He hadn’t so much given up as given in, to forces stronger than he could keep at bay. His dog had alerted the neighbors the moment it happened, and the dog was whimpering at his side when the authorities arrived on the scene.
I always bristled when people told me what he did was so selfish. Of course, I understood where they were coming from, but he wasn’t selfish. He wasn’t driven by personal motivations. He always put others before himself, and he put that dog before himself. Always. Although this was one of those moments I would never fully understand, and one I would never be able to make peace with, I could rest assured that it wasn’t done out of selfishness. Quite the opposite I am certain, as he left a carefully written note specifying only that his dog was to go to his sister’s family. He was always considerate, and even right up to the end there was consideration.
Perhaps he felt that humans were already beyond repair, that our fate was sealed, and that there was nothing left to say. But there was consideration for his dog, the dog he had rescued, who remained beautifully unaware of his own mortality, even though he had now tasted loss, real loss, for the first time.
