A few nights ago, I had to put my 15-year-old cat to sleep. It feels like being punched in the stomach, on top of everything else I’ve been trying to heal from.
I really fucking miss that little guy, of course. But the tears I’ve been shedding the last few days have been about so much more than that… Because fifteen years is a lot to process. I mean, that cat was with me for longer than any of the relationships I’ve been in over the course of my life. And so much has happened in a decade and a half. So much has changed. I’m wondering if I would have even believed it back then, just after my divorce––how it was all going to go for me. How I would fight to build a life for myself, just to see it crumble down around me and disappear. How I would have to fucking claw my way out of despair. Alone.
Because as I wrote in my “get me through december” video post––now I truly am all the fuck alone out here.
But I’m okay. I have stopped trying to bargain with the universe, and I’ve pretty much come to accept that this—the profound loss, grief, and heartbreak—is the psych med withdrawal journey. And that’s what this throwback Jo Dee Messina ballad was about for me earlier this week.
‘Cause tomorrow’s another day
And I’m thirsty anyway
So bring on the rain…
Having big feelings again, after being emotionally numbed out on psych meds for more than three decades, is really fucking hard. But this is how I’m doing the work, y’all. There’s some serious emotion going on in this video––you can see my eyes are looking puffy and red, the rawness of recent loss all over my face. I’m pitchy in spots, and my voice breaks. But I wanted to post this video anyway. As is often the case, it was my only take.
Just a reminder: these videos are not supposed to be about great singing. They’re about the giant emotions I need to feel in my body, which is easier for me to do through the music and lyrics that move me. My first #countryroadkaraoke post explains it a bit more.
My poor kitty went downhill pretty quickly at the end. He was diabetic and had developed some allergies that were getting impossible to manage and impacting his quality of life. The day he died, he had all but stopped eating and drinking and was starting to have trouble walking. By the time I got him to the emergency vet, I was pretty sure it was diabetic ketoacidosis (and it was, complicated by some undiagnosed condition––the vet thought it could have been the start of kidney failure). He didn’t suffer long, thankfully. I sat with him and stroked his head and back as he went to sleep for the last time. He was purring faintly until the end.
I gotta say––losing a pet is really devastating to go through alone. I don’t know how I did it. I don’t know how I’m doing any of this.
I keep thinking I see him out of the corner of my eye. I’ll hear a noise that sounds like him jumping down off the window seat where he would sleep most of the day and night. Whenever I come back inside from errands, I instinctively scan the room to make sure he’s not going to get out the door. In the first few seconds after I wake up in the morning, I forget he’s not going to jump up on the bed to ask for his breakfast.
I’ve gradually been picking up his things around the apartment, emotional tasks that I can only do in small spurts before the tears overwhelm me. I try to just let myself cry and feel the wave of sadness crashing over me. I threw out his old toys and the meds he was on, cleaned out the closet where his litter box was, and found a place to donate his unopened food. I washed his food and water bowls, the cat carrier, and the little fleece blanket he had been sleeping on. I decided to store those items away, in anticipation of a time when my living situation is stable enough to get another cat.
The first box I picked up for this purpose, however, happened to be the same large Chewy box into which my person had recently stuffed some miscellaneous items I had left at their place months ago, and shipped to me. I was not expecting this at all, because after things blew up a few weeks ago (see my “white liar” post), I had asked a mutual friend of ours to instruct them not to send any of it––I believe I said something like, donate, sell, trash, have a fucking bonfire, I really don’t care––I just don’t want any of it back. I was afraid that more reminders of what had happened with my person might destabilize me again.
But for whatever reason, three weeks later, my person apparently decided to pack it all up in that Chewy box and send it to me anyway. And as you might expect, opening it was intensely painful. Inside it were a few vintage objets d’art, a crocheted throw blanket I had made years ago from yarn scraps, my old toaster oven (which I had jokingly accused them of “holding hostage”), the goddamn taupe-colored sheet set I wrote about in “the sheets that heard it all” and really never wanted to see again, along with some other crap they knew they could have just thrown away. There was no note inside.
I guess it was their final fuck you, their last twist of the knife. And perhaps most fittingly, the giant box of stuff I didn’t want back wasn’t even delivered to my door––the UPS driver just dumped the box in the snow halfway down my long (unplowed) driveway. I don’t even know how long it had been sitting there before I saw it.
In any case, I decided it was the perfect box for my cat’s old things: my box of grief.
‘Cause tomorrow’s another day
And I am not afraid
So bring on the rain...
The next time I open that box, I will have a new cat in my life. There will be joy and love and snuggles and kisses. I’ll be speaking in the silly voice I use when I talk to cats. Maybe I’ll have a place to live that’s mine again. Maybe I’ll be done with tapering off the rest of the meds. Maybe I’ll have friends I don’t have to edit myself for, a community I feel like I actually belong to, a way to support myself financially when the money from selling my house runs out, a clear purpose for still being here. Maybe I’ll have someone in my life who loves the person I am becoming, who chooses me again and again, just as fiercely and unconditionally as I love and choose them.
Maybe by then I won’t be thinking about how the cat I just lost settled down on my person’s lap one night as we were snuggling on the couch. (He usually wouldn’t let other people even touch him, besides my son and me, but my person is a cat whisperer.) Maybe I will have long since deleted the photo I took to document that rare occasion, and I will finally be over my person.
Yep… One day I’ll be breaking down that fucking Chewy box without a second thought and putting it out for recycling.
Because one day, I won’t need a box for all this grief anymore.
