This past week was a lesson in and
a reminder of the many faces (and phases) of grief. My father called me
mid-week to tell me that my childhood cat, Rollie, who until very recently was a
vibrant, cheerful, out-going, loving and lovely, HUGE kitty, was truly and rapidly
succumbing to kidney failure. He had barely been able to walk up a few steps to
come inside the night before, and so my deeply upset father felt it was time to
take him to the vet for his final trip. Dad was upset that Rollie, who hated
the vet, had to go there in order to die. He was also disturbed by the taking
of a life, even if in mercy.
I was sad to hear that Rollie was
going away, but frankly, I had been more disturbed by the news of him being
sick not long before. I had seen him and, knowing he was sick, I had petted his
now-bony frame and said goodbye. When Dad told me Rollie would soon be dead, I
felt very little in comparison to the sadness I had already felt regarding his
illness. I didn’t like that he would go to the place he hated in order to die—that
didn’t feel right, but otherwise, I did not feel much remorse.
The next afternoon, my mother
called to tell me that my 99-year-old Great-Grandmother, whom I had not seen in
about 13 years had passed away. She had been declining, but somehow I just
thought she would hang on forever, out of sheer… something. I hadn’t seen her
in 13 years, so she had become something of an abstraction in my head. I don’t
think I really felt much at all. I absorbed the news, accepted, and moved on.
Then, over the weekend, while I was
away working, my wife informed me the sheep she had just bought had escaped,
and our neighbor had had to shoot it because it was so flighty and not trained
to grain. That was a shock, and it pissed me off that yet again we had not done
things right and an animal had escaped and had to die under less-than-ideal
circumstances. I felt like it was my wife’s fault because it would have been
physically impossible for the sheep to have gotten out of the shed without some
human error.
Less than a few hours later,
however, none of the upset about the sheep mattered anymore. My wife texted me
again, this time to say that she could not find our cat, Hamish. He was a huge,
black, hugely fuzzy, and wonderfully un-cat-like, quirky guy. He had been in
her life for years, and come into mine when I met her a few years ago. She
looked everywhere in the house for him. At last, she went outside. Hamish was
not an outdoor cat. Every now and then he would poke around outside, sit on the
porch in the sun, sniff the front garden, and then come in, but there he was.
She found him in the middle of the field, dead, but with no wounds or signs of
trauma. As far as my distraught wife could tell, he had gone outside to die. He
was somewhere between 12 and 16 years old, recently he had been slowing down,
but there were no signs of illness. He had seemed fine.
This loss I felt. It was a shock. I
felt guilt that I had not loved him more, petted him more frequently. I felt
guilt that I had not checked on him the night before I left, before I went to
bed. I felt guilt that I did not say goodbye to him in the morning when I left
for work. It was unusual for me to not do these things, and yet I hadn’t, and
then, just like that, he was gone. It was unbelievable, unacceptable, heart breaking.
And it was made more heart breaking to me because it was the fourth in a string
of recent deaths, and because of how upset my wife was.
Maybe people will be offended that
I’m talking about the death of an elderly woman in the same space as the
accidental death of a sheep, the expected death of one cat, and the unexpected
death of another. But it is all loss. And some loss hits closer to home. It’s
about connections, and circumstances. My great-grandmother’s death was the
least problematic, least fraught of any of these four.
Today, I vacuumed, and I’ve never
felt so resistant to that task (something I actually like to do). I was erasing
Hamish’s life with us with every tuft of fuzz sucked into the vacuum. Call it
silly, but it really got to me. Vacuuming today hammered home that Hamish is
not lurking around some corner. He’s not coming back. He’s NOT coming back. And
neither is Rollie. And Grammy Shaw is dead. And the sheep did not die the right
way. Today, I’m in that phase of grief that shares sadness with confusion and a
sense of the absurd. I want to say, What the heck, Universe!? What is going
ON?! Times like these I feel superstitious. Times like these I feel
like a discussion on Faith with some of my friends.
