When Fate dropped to the ground Maria’s first instinct was to rush over to her, and when she got up, she held her paw and soothed her. I came to see what I could see, and then rushed back to take a photo, I have a powerful compunction to record  things, to be a witness. Sometimes I wonder what the difference is between that and being a ghoul.

When I was a young reporter, I covered the police, and my first editor, a man I loved, told me that the only crime in journalism was to not come back with the story. Don’t ever come back without the story, he told me, just get in your car and drive away. I stole photos off of the mantles of bereaved families, I sad on the road waiting for the police and holding the hands of dying accident victims, asking them how they felt, I called up the parents of war casualties and asked them how they felt about losing a son or daughter.

There is a fine line between reporting and vampirism, I think, and I was never entirely clear about where it was. Looking back, I see these issues were more morally complex than I thought then. But I have never lost that impulse – do not come back without the story.

For someone writing an open blog about his life, this has, I confess, worked for me in a new and different way. This sense of timelessness and urgency is one of the things that has made the blog popular, and saved my writing career when it seemed about to collapse.

I care about my humanity and don’t want to lose it, I love Fate dearly, but when something like this happens, the other part of me – some might call it the ghoul – rises up and I detach myself, even from death and suffering. I saw so many people die in so many different ways, perhaps I did become injured to it.

I love the journalistic impulse, it ties me to the world in a very real way and fuels my writing and energy and curiosity. And sometimes, living with Maria, frees me a bit from the need to be human, she will do that so totally and instinctively, I am sometimes free to watch.

I also realize that this is a defensive posture, the reason perhaps I became a reporter in the first place. It shields me from feeling. It was awful to see Fate struggling, perhaps even dying on the ground in the woods, there was little we could have done about it. Only later, when I got home and started writing, did I feel my heart beating and my fingers trembling a bit.

The feelings are all there, I have learned how to protect myself from them. I never come back without the story.