Cherishing every second

The bittersweetness of the ending

I think he died on a Tuesday. It’s been 18 years and my brain’s collected so much junk I can’t remember any more. It amazing how much of the stuff you swear you’ll never forget gets sanded off with time. We stagger through the anniversaries — their death day. Birthdays. Christmases. The last time you saw their face. The last time you said I love you. The years are reverently marked: the first, the second, the fifth, the tenth. And you think you’ll remember forever, but you just can’t. Some of it has to dissolve to make space for the rest of your life.

On Tuesday my cat almost died, though I didn’t note it was a Tuesday until just now. 

When I got the call to say he’d died, there was a ten minute window out of time and space before my brain comprehended what I’d heard, where I was able to leave the house to buy cigarettes at the corner shop before collapsing in shock back home. It happened again on Tuesday, when I thought she was dying in front of me. I had ten minutes of the most dazzling clarity to google the at-home euthanasia service, tell them what was happening and arrange for a vet to come. I’ve always been weirdly calm in a crisis, my brain finally able to flex its superpower, the ultimate hyperfocus.

His death ripped a hole in my world but our two year love affair hadn’t left me better than it found me. I’ve never gone into the details of the relationship but suffice to say the choices of that 30-year old woman would not be mine today. I don’t feel guilty admitting that, it’s simply the truth you arrive at when you live long enough to view your past self like a daughter. She loved him with her entire needy heart, but I would have said no.

In contrast, these six years with my feline familiar have been the happiest of my life. She turned me into an animal person. She filled the child-shaped hole in my heart. She blessed me with responsibility on the days I wanted none. I didn’t have any say in the matter — she climbed through my bathroom window and claimed her place in my life. 

Relationships with pets are simpler, easier in all the ways you’d expect. You can’t compare a human life to a cat’s and for some the loss of a pet is a sadness they can bear. And I’m not saying I can’t and I won’t, but I intimately know the Great Vanishing that’s coming and I wish it wasn’t her’s.

The last bereavement changed every cell in my body. This time it’s the relationship that’s changed me and left me bigger and softer and more capable of love than I ever thought was possible. 

She’s asleep behind me right now after an uncomfortable day.

I don’t know how long we have, but I’m cherishing every second.

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