+-----------------------------------------------+ |The views and thoughts below are purely my own.| +-----------------------------------------------+
This post was written 2025-07-30
On Grief
In mid-June this year, we lost Alex.
Or you might say “she was taken from us”. Euphemism de-fangs language, but I want my language to be gentle because this is an unusually painful loss for us. For me.
We instinctively shy away from thinking about, talking about, or looking too directly at death. The abstraction, Death, is comfortable and familiar. The Death who “kindly stopped” for Ms. Dickinson, the inhabitant of Discworld who speaks in small caps, and even the figure at the door of Death and the Miser – all of these Deaths are distant and therefore acceptable to us. But lowercase-D “death” inflicts a wound on the soul.
Grief, the repeated realization that death is real, is not straightforward to understand. First, the habit of only observing death obliquely is destroyed. And then it repeatedly reconstitutes itself and is destroyed, at increasing intervals, until the moments of confrontation grow far enough apart that you can start to forget. And we call that forgetting healing.
Alex is an unusually wonderful cat. “Is” because in my mind she is still very much alive. My office door is closed because if I opened it, she would surely sneak around the back of my desk, jump to the top of the bookcase, and nosh a few leaves from the moneytree plant I’ve been fiercely protecting for the last few weeks.
Except the moneytree isn’t up there anymore. It’s now out front by the window, where it can get more light.
She’s our little 8lb apex predator. We call her “The Minace”, seeing as she’s the sort of cat who will jump up on a table, nudge your water glass with her paw, and stare you straight in the eye. Or kick her big brother, twice her size, out of someone’s lap. When we moved out of Boston, after the furniture was all gone, she lounged in the middle of the living room floor, declaring her ownership over the space. The little lioness was the last one to really leave that apartment.
That was where arugula became one of our go-to salad greens, and therefore where she developed a lifelong habit of stealing arugula out of bowls and off of plates. That might have also been where she decided that her favorite treat is goat cheese. She kept those habits in Baltimore, but also learned to like the leafy bits of romaine.
And Baltimore was where she learned to bite my heels for attention. To chew leaves off of the majesty palm (and puke ‘em up on the rug behind me), even as we moved it to progressively taller and better guarded plant stands. That’s where she’d sneak around the back of the desk, sleep on the windowsill, and I’d work to the tune of gentle whistle-snores. And there was a moneytree there as well, which she killed by eating and slashing at its leaves.
A different moneytree. The same cat. A cat who isn’t here anymore.
After we got home from the vet with a batch of painkillers and steroids, we got a harness and leash. We’d always been afraid to take her outside after moving into the house. She would frequently sneak past us in our various apartments, and we considered ourselves lucky that she hadn’t been interested in sneaking out of the house. As a lifelong indoor cat, we figured she wouldn’t be well equipped, but we knew she’d love it out there. She did.
I treasure the week of time those medicines bought us. She did, indeed, try to sneak under the deck, under the car, into the crawlspace, and through the fence. She established ownership over the deck, the back yard, the driveway, and most of the garage. It was a terrible week, but we spent it well.
But for me she will always be the little kitten who would jump on my back at 2 AM and bite my shoulder. Who would get bored with toys that never seemed alive enough. Who liked to be carried up and down the hall, like a baby held against your shoulder. Who considered it one of life’s great pleasures to smash her face hard into a prickly grooming brush. Who liked to jump in the shower behind you and get sopping wet. The cat who “tricked us” into adopting her by falling asleep in my arms.
I know that she is gone. But in my heart I will never accept it.
