When she had first arrived some five years ago, I’d like to think that she wasn’t alone. Zeus and Ana, siblings, had been her guides for those first three years. She had raised them since they were young and watched them grow larger and larger by the day, and when Ana was old enough, her slick black coat and youthful eyes attracted so many males that she ended up suffering from a venereal disease. In her third year Ana died of uterine cancer, with a tumor so large that it corroded her stomach.
The very next day Coco arrived at her doorstep, the smartest and ugliest one of them all. By then she had outgrown her clinic from her downstairs bedroom to a fully stocked four room treatment center. One day when she went to visit a neighbor at his home, she had shut the backdoor gate behind her. Zeus and Coco followed, but went around the gate towards the front entrance. As it turned out, a car had hit both of them. Zeus survived.
When I arrived on the island a little more than one and a half months ago, I met Zeus and Taber—the favorite, a year-old blond with perky ears and a comic, playful demeanor. My favorite was Taber too; he was smart enough to open the screen door at least. But over the past several weeks I grew fonder of Zeus. He was not as intelligent as Taber and not as beautiful as him either, but he was simple and loyal, bold and protective, independent and humble. He had followed me whenever I would go to clinic, and would sprawl out lazily in the inn for days. At nights we would hear him outside, never heeding the yells “shut up, Zeus!” When I would read on the porch hammock, he would come up from under me, scratching his back, waiting for me to give him some attention. Zeus and Taber would always travel together, but they were obviously very different. Taber would always come home at night, for one, and we would find Zeus wandering about at random places, at random hours. Taber loved to shower himself in the sea; Zeus never did. Taber would always respond when called and Zeus, well, he only responded to the broom. I had grown to love Zeus’s mannerisms much more; he was his own and not owned; he was a loyal friend but no servant. He had personality.
So when he was lying on the ground outside the house, motionless, eyes gaping, mouth parched, we were waiting for someone to say exactly what we were thinking. She had finally said it, his companion for five, gruesome years—“he’s dead.” But when she checked his heartbeat, he suddenly gagged, choking for the air that wasn’t coming through. And while I was sitting in the back of the truck, his body wiggling in response to every bump in the road, he looked lively to me, his movements, but his eyes were glazed over like emptiness encapsulated in marble. The doctor pronounced him dead five minutes later.
This was the first time someone even mildly close to me had died. I had seen animals die before, people die before, and dissected people even, but how was that going to prepare me for a death of a friend? I had only known him for less than two months, but as I was burying him, my hands blistering over every swing of the pickaxe, every thrust of the shovel, I wondered how she was. Zeus represented all her work here, her five long years of struggle for the people on the island, and it suit him to be buried next to the site of her new hospital, still in construction. She was burying the past. But the funny thing was, I looked at her face and my own, and our expressions were the same, an emotionless smile, a face neither solemn nor apathetic. This was her third burial; her hundredth death; her thousandth loss. How many more deaths I would see? Deaths of patients? Deaths of friends? Deaths of family?
My first real medical experience, in my opinion, so far removed from physicianship that I almost failed to count this experience as my most important and memorable medical lesson. It seemed like just another day on the island, a surreal, lethargic amble of an existence, made of daily changes so continuous that the weeks meld together into one globular whole, until we have realized our time is over and how much of an impact each moment has been.
And what exactly had I learned? I’m still unsure, but as I stared deep into the dark pools of those empty eyes, I had grown a little older, a little sadder, and much more determined.
