Trying to write about grief | Losing my little cat

I’ve been trying to write about grief. Trying to get the words out so that maybe the emotions would lessen, or I would understand them.

But, I’ve found, that grief - like love - has many facets to it. 

And, it feels like I’m viewing this time of my life through a kaleidoscope, fractured and unable to see the whole as reality. Only bits in abstract. Maybe this is my brain’s way of self-preservation so that I’m not lost in the swirling eddies of these emotions. Or maybe it just is what it is for now. A way for me to process loss. 

I’ve had loss before, but losing my Dad this year felt like a different definition of loss. A sentiment I’ve heard echoed from others who have hit this life milestone. 

When my Dad died, I expected the familiar panic of what I thought was loss - but was actually a feeling stemming from perceived abandonment triggers. The echoing of “Please don’t leave me” reverberating in my head and into my nervous system. You see, when I was little, as early as I can remember, I was acutely aware of how important it was that I say goodbye to my Dad as he left for work. Because, my little brain thought over and over, what if he didn’t make it back home? 

I don’t know where this fear came from, only that my earliest memories were of waving at the window long after he had driven away. To make sure he had seen me. 

As a teenager, the lengths of time without him were longer, as he worked in New York during the week, and we lived in central CT. So he would leave Monday morning and be back Tuesday night, leaving Wednesday morning and then back Friday night. Saturday and Sunday nights he drove to western Mass to do weather for the local news channel there. I remember feeling that I could breathe Friday nights, when he was home the longest. But, I was simultaneously in that period of life when I was “supposed” to be out causing trouble with my friends, but all I wanted to do was be home and take deep breaths without the weight of fear sitting heavy on my chest. A weight I knew would return on Monday morning. 

College was the opposite. Now I couldn’t breathe when he was in CT and I was in New York, attending the college he worked at and I matriculated. I was distracted, rightly, by life at college and standing up on my own. Some would say I even over-extended to prove that I was worth the title of being his daughter on his turf. He was also spending more time on the New York side, finally buying a house in advance of my parent’s marriage inevitable demise. 

I stayed in the dorms the time I was there, except on September 11, 2001, which was the autumn of my senior year. I was able to get to my Dad in his office after the towers fell, so many of my classmates and his colleagues personally affected. I could only breathe because I could leave the dorms and go back to his house for those first, very confusing days. I thought, as I graduated a few months later, that I would have that same option after college - to live with him on Long Island and work in NYC, but he was adamant that I only had the summer to regroup (and he made it clear that was a concession) and then I was on my own - or I could move home with my mother. 

So, on the day I started my first job (in a Broadway theater, a dream come true!) I also moved into my first apartment - on Long Island with some students from my Dad’s radio station. Started the transition away from my Dad, but with training wheels. A transition that would bring me to Boston for a job, even farther away, a few years later, 20 years before he passed.  

So I had two decades to absorb the transition away from my Dad. Admittedly, a lot was transferred to my husband. Evoking the same internal feelings of abandonment years later when he, the man I married, would get up and get on a train to Boston, an hour each way from our house, leaving me on no sleep with a sick infant and a fledgling business to run. 

But even that, I had the last few years to work out and recognize those patterns (documented here ad nauseam 😂), and to work to learn to pull that sense of safety into myself. That a person leaving - both temporary and/or permanent - had to be ok. 

So I could teach my son differently than I had learned, and so that NO ONE PERSON could even take that sense of safety away from me again. For I was determined that my sense of safety would live in me. 

That I would choose solitude over betraying myself so that someone I thought I needed wouldn’t leave. 

Because I had learned we all need, we all deserve, autonomy. 

And I had learned I was no longer a helpless toddler waving goodbye to my father as I watched him drive away, desperately wishing he would stay. 

So when the moment came to really say goodbye to my Dad, it felt inevitable. Sudden, but not unexpected. Very similar to my son’s birth, it was painful but peaceful. I found I describe it as quiet - the everyday magic of these most pivotal life moments, the unavoidableness of them, the ability to just be 100% present. I didn’t panic at that moment, I just found gratefulness he wasn’t in pain anymore. 

In the days after, I felt surrounded and supported, so much so that I was ready to lean into the self-imposed seclusion of the next months so that I could rest and experience what life would be like without him slowly, on my own time, and without needing to be as acutely aware of the people-pleasing tendencies I was still learning to unlearn in myself when among other humans. 

But grief is funny, it’s not an emotion that you “get over”. It changes, elongates, and can exacerbate other emotions if you aren’t aware. And I was committed to feeling all of these feelings, a practice I had started a few years before this, and this felt like a real test. I was committed to watching the ebbs and flows of these emotions as an observer before I reacted. Not to assign a story to them or to fight against them. Not to project them onto other people. And it was - it IS - hard. 

So more recently, when my little cat let me know she needed to go as well, something I knew was coming for over a year, but I still didn’t feel ready for - I was surprised to feel panic. The panic of loss I hadn’t felt when my Dad died. 

The tears were the same, falling uncontrolled on their own, both when we had to let my Dad go in January, and now in October as I held my little cat in my arms at the vet in her last moments. 

Except, after the first of the two injections, the one that put her into an anesthetic sleep, I panicked. I didn’t want to be here. I didn’t want to lose this little beacon of love I had consistently looked to for the past 15 years. Please don’t leave me. 

She was my bedmate, except for the years my tiny infant needed my body. She didn’t like it, but she accepted her displacement in those years as a creature who has the biological markers of the ability to give birth, she also expressed how happy she was to be back next to me, my nighttime companion, in the years after. And I gave her the comfort of being just us at night during the last year of her life. All the boys in our house - her brother cat, the dog, my child, my partner - regulated to other rooms, so that she and I could be together and I could give her the extra health care she needed. In sickness and in health. Her dying and me grieving. 

I knew she didn’t want to go either, but her body said it was time. 

The moment I panicked turned out to be the moment her soul left that body that had betrayed her behind. She didn’t need the second injection, she was already gone. And, it was at the precise moment the moon eclipsed the sun in the sky. As a space-loving human, I loved her more for that timing. And yet, I would have given back that story for more time in real life. For more time. 

And now my grief felt compounded, compiled. But I could take the lesson of the death of my little cat into the grief I was processing about my Dad. They both would have chosen more time if they could. As would I. But ultimately the choice was not mine to make. 

We are on this earth in bodies that are truly marvels as to how all parts work together - with a consciousness to boot! - but that “magic” has an expiration - it is finite. And perhaps that is the most magical part of it all. Memento Mori. 

For it requires us, at some point, to let go and accept that to feel pleasure, we must also feel pain. One cannot exist without the other. 

So for now, in this season of my life, I accept where I am. I am here now. I am grieving. 

I find solace in different ways with her brother cat, the dog, my child, my partner, my brother, my mother, but most of all myself. 

I am grateful for my friends who stay, who check in, who respond when I send them memes because I lost the words. Who understand without (outward 😂) judgment when I tell them about the pregnant cat I am hosting because the universe sent her to me, even though I was - I am - exhausted. Who tell me the stories of their lives so I can stay close to them and understand when I don’t have anything witty or insightful to say back but can offer myself as a person who can listen. 

I think of my needs and my boundaries first when I am faced with choices I can control. I know that safety lies in me, and that I will never let another person leaving be a reason to panic. 

I find small reasons to laugh, to experience joy - a beam of sunlight, a perfect stroke of the paintbrush, my son asking me to read his new favorite book, the smell of the ocean.

And I let go of everything else, over and over, inviting grief - in all its forms- to meet me at the dance floor every day, in all its shapes, its kaleidoscope colors, and accept it where it is - where I am - that day, in that moment, over and over and over again. 

Goodnight babygirl. Sleep well. You are so missed.