Content warning for discussions of death and illness, human and animal.
I’ve been thinking about grief a lot, possibly to the point of drowning. I say possibly because I feel like I’m still treading, but every once in a while I take what I think is a breath and choke instead.
A couple of years ago I was playing an orchestra concert and got really swept up in the emotion of a Beethoven funeral march. When I got home I set my violin by the door, shed the funerary black of concert dress, threw on a kitty-ear headband, and scrubbed off my makeup. My mother called, and told me that my birth father died. I hadn’t seen the man since 2001 — he called once in 2006, I think — but I still heard a weird hollow ringing in my left ear for about a week afterwards, like something was missing. I had been gently poking at the idea of reconnecting with him, even if distantly, before he died. Apparently he asked about me shortly before he passed.
The cat I’ve had my entire adult life, who sleeps on my face every night, was hospitalized four months later for a urinary blockage, which can be fatal for orange male cats if not treated. This was not the first of such hospitalizations but it was the first time that a vet called me and said that they found something else — early stages of kidney disease. There was nothing to do about it, just bloodwork during annual exams, just waiting for it to show up.
I live a pretty solitary life. I’m lucky to have a lot of friends and a broad net of acquaintances, sure, but only recently have I made friends that are local. I’ve moved around a lot for work, I sacrificed a lot of my personal time and my health to make progress in my career. Through all of that, I have had this cat. And there was a vet with admittedly terrible bedside manner on the other side of the phone reminding me that my new job as caretaker was to hold vigil for the beginning of the end.
The vet also mentioned that my cat was not eating. I’d been separated from the little meatball for two days and I spent the time weeping on and off, haunting my own apartment instead of sleeping, so one can imagine how my frail animal mind began to conjure. Oh, the wicked images!
One can imagine then, how surprised I was to pick up an alert and chunky orange cat, looking rather like he did when I dropped him off save for a shaved patch around his little kitty wrist, where the IV had been. As soon as I got him home and let him out of the carrier, he raced towards his food bowl — the problem had not been lack of appetite due to poor health. No, this little diva simply needed to be fed by Hairless Mother out of his Special Bowl. He spent the next 48 hours on medication, swaddled against my chest. Smell is supposed to be the sense tied closest to memory but I actually can’t tell you what my cat smells like. I can however, feel the phantom of that warmth against my chest.
Six months later, I lost my job in the second big wave of layoffs at XBox. It’s not that I knew it was coming so much as that I refused to rule out the possibility that it would. It might happen, and I held that thought close, and yet it still didn’t prepare me for the meeting, or what happened immediately after.
I loved my team. I loved what I think that job could have been, if we had launched. I knew it was coming only in the sense that I think of everything as a possibility, to the point of growing a distaste for speculation. What will be, will be; one must prepare for the worst and hope for the best. What I am growing surprised by is the way I am discovering the depths of what “the worst” could even be.
I think I would describe my philosophy as horseshoe nihilism: Nothing matters, so no institution is sacred and therefore everything can and will end, but also nothing matters so why wouldn’t something joyful and lucky happen to me? I am an optimist in the sense that I believe that the general arc of history is a pendulum; I am a pessimist in the sense that I am always waiting for some sort of personal karmic snapback if my life is going a little too well. The layoff was one such snapback. I got extremely lucky in getting this once-in-a-lifetime position and made lifelong friends, of course I deserve to get laid off now.
Unfortunately, no amount of lofty philosophizing can prepare one for what we’re seeing now. If anything, grief is a floodlight: It exposes the assumptions we don’t dare to question. In a way, I was lucky enough to be disillusioned by the notion that going to college guarantees one a job, or that getting a job guarantees stability, or even that getting a job in AAA would guarantee me a career. I did, however, foolishly think that there would be some kind of limit to this contraction in the same way that a ribcage gets in the way of a corset.
But things are still getting worse, aren’t they?
I do what I can. I’ve been to trauma therapy, you see, I have the tools! I have my inner monologue leashed, I know how to listen to my “wise voice,” and to avoid reassurance seeking. I have hobbies that keep me grounded in my body, in the moment, I sleep and manage my diet and exercise. I take Magnesium supplements year-round, and Vitamin D in the dark half of the year. I walk my dog three times a day, I read, I do my best to get some sleep, to dress myself even on days I don’t leave the house, for morale, for my health, I am in control.
A couple of nights ago, I felt a lump near my cat’s hip. And then I started to reflect on his recent behavior, things I wrote off as symptoms of the seasons changing: Increased thirst, urination, diarrhea. Both me and his doggy brother had upset stomachs too; I thought nothing of it. I called a couple of friends last night to cry and blame myself because it’s easier to assign blame to my own actions — as I am in control — than to accept that his little body has just entered a new stage of decline. I am writing this during my lunch break, in order to stop watching the clock as I wait for our afternoon vet appointment.
I really love stories, but by their nature they compress time. I watched Creed (2015) recently and Rocky Balboa learns of his cancer diagnosis, denies treatment, argues with Creed, and begins chemotherapy within the span of an hour and change. I wish that after I had felt the lump, my life just cut to whatever will happen in the vet’s office later this afternoon. Instead, time has gone taut and still. My mind is jumping all over — not just to seek places where I could assign responsibility for the ravages of time to myself, but to the future. To all the times I will sit on the couch and feel the absence of his warmth of my chest, or the day the last of his claw marks in my left thigh heal, or when I will have to decide what to do with his remains.
I live a pretty solitary life, you see. I rent an apartment. I move around for work. Where could I lay him to rest without feeling like I abandoned him?
It’s not that I don’t believe that things will get better — I do — it is just the slog of moving through all of this at once. I may have accepted the death of my father but I am now bargaining about the health of my cat and all the while I am so, so angry about my career and economic prospects. The well of my patience runs dry and yet the supply of grief I constantly borrow from future-me seems endless. There is a gravity bomb sitting in the pit of my stomach and on days like this I feel like it is going to pull me and everything around me inwards.
But it won’t.
The funny thing is that I know that someday my mind will compress this period of time the same way I would cut a movie. These strange and dready in-betweens that have to do with my father’s death and the immediate aftermath of my layoff are already truncated in my memory; I remember moments and I remember the feeling, but the thickness of time is gone. Someday some newly-shaped entertainment industry will replace what we’ve lost, I believe this earnestly, and we will talk about this period of time with appropriate gravitas and disbelief. I will likely feel a little embarrassed for having written this, and that’s fine. Everyone around me is sad, and no one can help, so the best I can do right now is yell, “I’m sad!” into the void and hope that maybe it helps me work through the feeling.
For now, I will swaddle my warm cat to my chest, and hope I can bend these slogging seconds to my brief advantage.