Through the Looking Glass of My Tears

I hope you'll forgive me if I'm a bit maudlin over the next few hours, days, weeks, and who knows how long. It might seem a bit strange that the death of one animal affects me so much. Like anyone, I have many facets and different people know me in different ways but I think most of them would be surprised to find me moved to tears by, well, anything. I'm reserved and not very liable to share my inner thoughts and feelings. It might seem otherwise here but only a fraction of what I think and feel and want to express comes through here because my mind moves faster than even I can type and there's always the backspace key.

But, perhaps I'm overdoing matters by going into mourning for my lost pet. Compared, if such things can be compared, on the scale of human tragedies it doesn't rank. My cat led a full, happy life of care and it ended, if there's any sort of gracious God, without pain and surrounded by those who loved her. That's a kind death and shouldn't be a cause of any more sorrow in the world. But, the truth is, I haven't dealt much with loss before now. I've been lucky, if you want to call it that, in that my loved ones haven't passed. None of them, really.

All of my relations who were alive when I was born are still alive. We lost my mother's father to a heart attack shortly after the day I was born. And while I've always felt somewhat odd, as if my life had somehow been traded for his, I never knew him. And that kind of grief just passes over a newborn. My other grandfather passed some years ago but he and my father were estranged (Just as I'm sure my father and I will be some day) and I can't honestly recall ever meeting him. So I greeting the news of his death the same way I would a neighbor moving. My great-grandmother died in her 90s when I was young and while I did meet her and remember fondly trips to the dusty odor of her small Windsor home and her excitable dog with the diamond collar and my family fondly remembers the nickname of Grandma White that I gave her she was always an old lady. When she was gone I was scarcely able to comprehend what that meant. And that's it, as far as I know. All the people I'm directly related to who've died along the way. But while I was related to them, I was never close to them. Never lived with them, spoke with them. Never loved them.

The last funeral I went to was for a classmate of mine in high school. He'd killed himself. And while I couldn't say we were good friends, it was a small school and everyone knew everyone else. And although I never knew he had troubles before someone walked into our classroom and told us we had the rest of the day off and the priests would be in the chapel if anyone needed to talk their way through their grief. Because one of us hadn't made it to school that day and we'd just found out the reason why. No, we shared classes and perhaps a greeting as we walked past each other in the hallway but, again, I never knew. But his problems struck close to the ones I had myself. If I had but known, if my dead classmate had only talked to me, if we had somehow shared our demons, what might have been? And that shook me because, well, I'd never told anyone but sometimes, some dark and frightening times late at night when my mind just wouldn't stop and the memories would well up and threaten to overflow, I'd had a stray thought about ending it all myself. Nothing serious but the potential was there just waiting for the right set of circumstances to spark into something irrevocable. Sitting in some restaurant or another with my friends afterwards, poking at my brunch cooling in the warm spring air, it struck me that the way things were going they could all be sitting there again after my funeral. And, maybe, they'd all be just as confused about why, when I seemed just fine. It scared me because, I think, I wasn't ready to come to grips with my own mortality. And it drove me away from that despair and into the light of hope, for a while anyway. I resolved that suicide was never going to be my answer, that I was going to try and try harder again if I ever stumbled, to do everything I could to keep my friends from ever having to sit around a table wondering why I was gone.

And while that might have been a good thing or a bad thing, I ran. I ran away from death and grief and confronting them. Because I'd never dealt with it. Not in a mature way, not in an adult way, only ever by running. Never had to wrestle with unexpected loss. Never had to work my way through those feelings to find whatever it is that keeps people going afterwards. And, well, I'm going to be upset and I'm going to be moody because it's something I need to figure out. Because I loved my cat more than, I think, I ever wanted to admit and now she's gone. It's an awful feeling and all the more so because it's one I've never had before. I need to think, I need to understand, I need to explain why this is affecting me so much. And, eventually, I need to get past it. But until then I need to grieve. And I'm going to take as much time to do so as I can.