Loss

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.