My Wobbly Bicycle, 174

I do not understand anything. I do not understand how the mechanics of the body decide at some point to just stop. How what's left is overwhelming emptiness. The spirit, the soul has flown out of it! I do not understand consciousness. I do not understand what happened on Sunday when Wally came out from under the bed at lunchtime, as he does, stretching and looking for companionship, when he lay down on the floor, gasped a few times, and died. I am so ignorant that I live without understanding what it means to live. Where is he? Oh, here is his extravagantly furry body, wrapped in a towel, taken to the vet for cremation, but “he” is not in his body. I get how the combination of the happily upright tail in front of me, plus my feelings, my ideas, my memories, could combine to be called “Wally,” but in my embarrassingly limited mind I cannot understand the spark of consciousness. I cannot fathom how the ashes my sisters and I just scattered off the end of the dock and in the woods along the shore, are related to the person we knew as “Daddy.” Why on earth should all our complicated brain processes feel like anything from the inside? Why aren’t we just brilliant robots? Consciousness doesn’t seem to be physical. It can only be observed from inside. How did it feel to be my father, to be Wally? Was Wally aware he was dying? Did he have anything akin to thoughts? (I want him to be thinking, “Oh how I’ll miss them!”) This hopeless cogitation is what I do because I am full of grief. My thoughts : : how can I understand grief, since I’m part of it myself, not standing outside of it. We watched Wally die. He was completely inside his dying. He wasn’t struggling against it, or making up stories about it (as far as I know). His whole self was part of the process. Process. That’s what I’m thinking. I won’t re-live here, now, memories of Wally. They’re a feedback loop into more crying. Do I cry for Wally? For me? For how I think Jerry is going to miss his comforter, his shadow? For what’s happened to Jerry’s poor body in the last few years? For his daughter, whose cancer has returned? For my father? For both my sisters’ precarious health?It feels as if the tears--and there have been a fair number--are washing out my insides. Like rain in a downspout. Not unpleasant. Natural. At this moment: :  I feel the temporariness of things. I feel our precious state of being.  I think we creatures are kind of like packets of awareness (As in, "Oh look, here I am, I am aware of being alive, being myself!") risen for now from the bubbling vastness of what might be, possibly, inexplicably, a conscious universe. Maybe it is, since we're conscious, and nothing is separate. Oh, don’t mind me. I’m just exercising my brain. I get some pleasure out of that.P.S. If you're also interested in this sort of geeky stuff, have a look here:https://www.iep.utm.edu/hard-con/#H2