RIVKA GALCHEN - HOW I BECAME A VET

When I say “vet,” I do not mean veteran. A veteran is someone formerly in contact with death on a regular basis. A veterinarian is someone currently in contact with death on a regular basis. A part of me is moved to specify that not all veterans have been in contact with death, nor are all veterinarians so on a regular basis. But I’m older now. I know that many people experience such clarifications as weird. Weirdness does, though, generate uncommon strengths. Such was my experience with the suicide dogs, who, like most of us, were not what they seemed.

Joy is an ethical obligation. I was raised to believe this. I have not abandoned the proposition. Joy is the proper response to the gift of life that God or something has bestowed upon all of us day after day after day, and then at some point for no more days. Sorrow is an obligation, too, and a wonder and a necessity—but sorrow is joy’s servant. My father is an Anabaptist. When I was in middle school, I researched the Anabaptists. That one made one’s own path to God made sense to me, and that baptism followed rather than formed a spiritual relationship—sure. But too much of what I read made me think that this was a path through a five-hundredyear-old landscape that had since vanished. I came to the conclusion that my father had made an error. It was the wrong time period to be an Anabaptist, I told him. The sect didn’t make sense anymore, I said; it was like pursuing dodo birds, however glorious. He said he’d keep what I’d said in mind. I believe he did keep it in mind. Though I don’t recall many further conversations about it. My father, now seventy, was recently diagnosed with chronic leukemia. The diagnosis has altered his personality in no perceptible way.

My father raised me, all by himself, with great dignity. He was and is a practical man. He taught me how to put my hair in a tidy ponytail, he took me to buy tampons when that was required, and he let me work with him on his small goat farm. We had dogs all my childhood, sometimes two, occasionally three. Famously, dogs have a natural gift for the ethical obligation of joy. Our dogs, my dad said, were great role models. He was correct. It is very difficult, and also not engaging, to speak in detail about dogs I have loved who are no longer with us. I will not do so. I see enough death in my job.