Alecto's Ophelia

2010 - Coming Home

The last 90 minutes of 2009 frizzled out while I was sleeping. When my contacts are fogged enough I'm stabbing myself with a needle every third stitch it's time to go to bed. I left the girls in front of the television, gathered up my animals, peeled the contacts off my eyeballs (and I do hope I'm going to find them in solution) and went to bed. I wish I'd brushed my teeth. Sometime in the night a small tribe of Pygmies set up camp and decided to have a rain dance on my tongue. It was dry, dry, dry in there. This morning I staggered to the bathroom,spit them unceremoniously into the sink and proceeded to beat the hell out of my mouth until I looked into the mirror and noticed I was just South of rabid. That's usually a good indicator.

The alarm on the iPod went off at 7:30 like it does every weekday morning. I was dreaming it was something else until I woke up enough to turn it off and then climb back into bed warning the dog that it was technically still the middle of the night. Somewhere. I haven't bothered to turn that alarm off because it makes a good 15 minute warning before Little Girl needs to head out to the bus stop (which is the end of the driveway) and on weekends it doesn't go off at all although Simon will generally put his great slobbery face right up against mine (or the back of my head if I'm lucky) and breathe heavily while moaning pathetically about the fact that he's not going to be able to keep his legs crossed forever. Simon has no trouble getting my attention in the morning. He is 79 inches long snout to tail tip, 31 inches at the whithers and his head is massive. Someday I'll figure out how to weigh it. Maybe I can slide the flat digital kitchen scale under his head while he's sleeping. Remind me to try that. The drop from the top of my mattress to the floor is 36 inches and while that's five inches above his whithers we must consider the length between whithers and snout. Unless I'm sleeping in the middle of the bed there's really no escape and if I don't want St. Bernard slobber ON my sheets I need to respond fairly quickly even if it means telling him to lay the hell back down and go to sleep. If his need is not immanent he will. He's a good boy. 

Little Girl let him out this morning. I was out cold. I have no recollection of the door opening and closing again after my baby boy lumbered across the threshold, made an abrupt 90 degree right turn and galloped down the hall coming to his usual skidding stop at the top of the stairs. When he's got his bearings he tip toes down the six carpeted stairs and stands patiently at the front door followed shortly by the manic Rat Terrier. The only time the Rat Terrier is not manic is when he's overslept and slinks up the stairs from the lower level hoping I won't notice but knowing perfectly well he's been caught sleeping on the couch again. Sometimes he hides until I'm back upstairs. He's sly and has great bladder control.

I nuked a cup of yesterday's coffee and here I sit thinking about what to write while my fingers typed out three paragraphs (which I just read) while I wasn't looking. I was thinking about resolutions.

I have no resolutions. I don't do resolutions. The only time I made a resolution was in the first few minutes of the last year of the twentieth century and that was more of an invocation to the fertility gods (it worked too, I delivered Little Girl on December 11, 2000).

I have nothing to invoke this year except maybe patience, perseverance and the strength to let be the things I have no right to control. I know perfectly well what those are too I just have a really hard time not panicking and grasping a float that has no intention of being grasped. The float does like to be grasped at though. I think it makes him feel wanted and needed. I think that's poison for me.However, invoking a negative does not create a positive. So here they are, my resolutions in spite of not doing resolutions (because God forbid I don't keep them):

1. Bake more bread. We lost that in 2009.
2. Order the seeds and actually start the seedlings.
3. Repair the fence and till the garden hopefully one week after the last hard freeze (sometime in March most years).
4. Compost. Everything that ought to be composted. Lost that in 2009 too.
5. Put the seedlings in just after Mother's Day and protect the tomato plants with plastic bottle hot houses. Pay attention to the weather and don't boil them.
6. This year pull UP all the volunteers from last year. That was fun but unproductive.
7. Cultivate early and often.
8. Order more broiler chicks. Maybe even eggs if I can work out an incubator and commit to turning them every day.
9. Get back on the elliptical in the morning at least until the heavier garden work is in full swing. Bikram is not enough.
10. Walk away from 2009 and don't look back. I can't imagine turning into a pillar of salt particularly pleasant.

That's it. I'm stopping at ten because I'm an over achiever and usually bite off more than I can chew without choking. Those ten are probably a big mouthful but maybe there should be an 11th:

    11. Give myself permission to fall down and get up again. You know, permission to be a bona fide member of he human race. The expectation of perfection is a horrible conceit.

Happy New Year, peoples. I wish you joy, love, passion, strength and surrender.

Peace out - Alecto

 
Borrowed without permission from an artist who's name I can no longer locate.

On being catless

Catless is just weird, weird, weird. I’ve had a cat since I was four years old. There may have been a month or two after I left home before I got another but I’ve always had at least one. My daughter, all her life.

 

Now. No cats, no cats nowhere. We haven’t even removed the litter box yet even though it’s perfectly clean because before she went there was nothing going in and nothing coming out.

 

We don’t even know where she is. That’s the hard part. No smell, no sign, chance she slipped outside but hard to say. We know we have to tear the house up sooner rather than later but there’s been so much going on we’re in avoidance.

 

We talked about getting another but now is not the time. Daughter just wants to know it will happen before she goes to college. She has one more year of high school, I suspect we’ll have another rescue kitty by then.

 

Just not now. Now we are catless. Lets see how that feels for a bit.

A Love Story - part 4

I'm going to start this with a statement about this blog which is about to turn 2 years old in a couple of days. This space started out as a way for me to journal the things in my life. You know, day to day events that were noteworthy to me. This rapidly turned into a life blog (which it probably was in the first place) and the entries became raw, painful, sometimes joyous but mostly incredibly emotionally honest. And then some rather extreme events occurred (OK, a lot of extreme events occurred but toward the end of 2007 they got REALLY hairy) and the focused turned away from the rawness of how I experience my life to a more prosaic detailing of what I was doing. There is a big difference between discussing the 'being' and documenting the 'doing'.

Well, we just came full circle and we're back to what most people call TMI and I'm not even going to apologize for that, this is my blog and it's for me. So here I am.

And yes, love's got everything to do with it.

I have another blog, some of you know where it is and you are welcome to go there otherwise I'm not going to advertise it because it is a journal, sometimes moment by moment of what I'm experiencing right this second and I've got to write it down somewhere just to keep myself focused and aware.

So the love story today is about emotional exhaustion. I am completely exhausted. I don't eat much, I don't sleep much and I drive my body to the brink in order to feed on those endorphins whenever possible. I swill coffee at an alarming rate and smoke like a chimney (hey, don't judge it, nicotine is a very powerful drug and I have no intention of keeping it) and at night I drink wine in front of my computer writing in my journal and praying for contact. And I do get contact and lately it's been very nice and I am grateful for whatever he can give me. A simple 'I love you' or 'I love you too' is enough to reduce me to tears and they aren't the bad kind.

I also want to talk about the tube and the cheese because of a comment MC left and my response to that comment. Unfortunately somebody took this metaphor and wrote a book called Who Moved My Cheese and the metaphor became trite and useless (and if you found it useful, I apologize but the version of the exercise (and it's an exercise, not a book) is a very powerful experience.

Rats are smarter than people:

The Rat
Imagine there are five tubes and at the end of tube five is a piece of cheese. The rat knows where the cheese is and every day he goes and gets it until one day the cheese isn't there. The rats sniffs around to see if he's missing something and then heads right back out of the tube. He goes into tube 4 and then 3 and then 2 and then 1 and there is the cheese. He eats it and he's happy. Each day the cheese moves and each day the rat goes and finds it wasting no time wondering why is fucking cheese keeps moving.

The Man (apologies to men, this could equally be a woman but that's not how the story was told to me)
Imagine there are five tubes and at the end of tube five is the mans significant other, committed partner, what have you. Each day on the way to tube five, the man has a look down tubes 1 through 4 just to have a look at the view and see if there's anything better down there. This causes conflict in the relationship and trust becomes a problem.

The Woman (could be a man too but in my case, it's me)
Imagine there are five tubes and at the end of tube five is a man. Each day on the way to tube five the woman rushes right to the tube and throws her arms around the man, or pisses him off, or asks too much or refuses to be responsible or just doesn't keep up with who and what he is or needs. One day the man walks out of the tube. The woman says, no! you can't do this, this is not what we do in a committed relationship! We stay and we work it out. But no, he says, I must go and he goes saying that he will return in a few short days. The woman waits, the days pass and he does not return. There is very little communication. What she knows comes from a third party. Initially the woman fights it tooth and nail. She cries all day, cannot leave the house, picks up smoking again but what she does do, which is unprecedented for her, is call a friend. After that she calls another friend and then another letting them all into her vulnerability and telling her story from as responsible a place as possible (no victim, it's his fault shit). And then she turns outward and focuses on the man. First up. He is not in tube 5. Letting go of that is so hard she bangs her head (metaphorically) against her own delusions until she realizes he's another tube. He hasn't said he doesn't love her, he hasn't said he won't come home, he's only said he can't come home just yet.

The rat goes tube to tube until he finds the cheese. The woman stews in it feeling abandoned and lost until she realizes he's just in another tube. Now, she can go get him, she can go find him, she can join him in the cube or they can go to a new tube together. What cannot, or should not do, is go back to tube five. That didn't work so well.

And that is the story of the rat, the cheese, the tubes and the people.

And I'm so damn tired I have lost the ability to resist. Can we have a Hallelujah chorus please.

A Love Story - Part 3

Love's got everything to do with it.

I recently made a statement (borrowed shamelessly from Grey's Anatomy) that I lived every day these days at an 8. And that was the truth. What I am discovering is that there are 8s and then there are 8s. The second does not negate the first, it's just of an entire other flavor.

To clarify, my original 8 centered around overwhelm, fear and a probable need to have my freaking meds adjusted as well as some unresolved issues and my stubborn refusal to let anything go until I'd reconciled it to something I could understand and live with. What that really boiled down to was my base line belief that I would be hurt no matter what. I recall telling my husband that the 8 didn't necessarily have a lot to do with him directly, it just was what it was. That's hard to hear if you think you're supposed to do something about it and the truth is nobody can do that nor should they be expected to.

Another flavor of pain at an 8 is the physical kind. Turns out I'm really good at dealing with that. I can sink right into myself and either be with it or ride the waves. I am not a screamer when it comes to physical pain. Unfortunately I tend to seriously under report and that's nearly gotten me dead once or twice.

The third flavor of pain is is the pain of grief. As it turns out, for me at least, this is not a suicidal fear or pain at all. It's purely functional, as in how do I get up, work out (because I think those endorphins are the one thing that kicks me off with a fighting chance), shower, shave (because that's normalcy, right?), dress, apply make up, put in my contacts if I think I can keep the tears to a minimum and my glasses if I believe I cannot.

There are moments when I believe I simply cannot bear it one second longer and will do something rash. Not rash as in hurt myself, that need seems to be gone right out the window (maybe it's self preservation or a final surrender, I'm betting it's surrender and THAT is a very reassuring thought). But rash in terms of causing undo pain or harm to others. Of believing I cannot be functional when in fact I know that is not true. Not for me, it isn't my way.

An event is just that. An event. We make of it what we will. We can choose to be mired or we can choose to let it wash over us leaving us engulphed in the truth of it all. This is not a drowning by any means. It's an acceptance. The more I fight it the worse it gets and the harder it is to move through it.

I think of child birth. I've had three children with large gaps in between (five and nine years). With each labor I learned to let go and wash through the waves sometimes chewing the sheets and sometimes just panting. Sometimes there were tears but never any outright crying and certainly no screaming. At the point of transition when the body called mine becomes something else entirely and I have no control there is only one thing to do - push through it. That's a scary thing because the ring of fire we all hear about is exactly that and the only way through is through.

I think of love that way these days. And by love I don't mean the romantic flowers and puppy dog love. I mean the enduring commitment that has us move mountains. I think that in the letting go of the me creates the space for something infinitely greater and quite honestly, precious beyond belief.

So here is an event. I have it. I am in it and the only way to be is just 'is'.

Try that sometime. I am.

A Love Story - part 1

And yes, love's got everything to do with it.

Once upon a time a hard assed warrior of the female persuasion put on the facsimile of a dress, slung her broad sword over her shoulder, disguised her beaver skin medicine bag as some sort of purse like thing and went looking for love. Love, it turned out, was everywhere. However, there is a shortage of love appropriate for a hard assed warrior no matter what those boys might tell ya. It’s the truth.

 

To make a very long and mostly painful story short, the hard ass warrior chewed her way through one control freak prince and one emotionally underdeveloped frog who ended up so aghast at the entire thing he found himself just as well away from it all (hopped back in the pond and bloody well stayed there too). Not that there wasn’t pain, mind you, there were buckets of it all around.

And then one day this hard assed warrior happened to be doing battle along side a warrior of the male persuasion and realized she loved him. Hard. You know the way you do when it’s more than just the breath knocked from your middle; there’s some central core that says YES well beyond the confines of lust. She sat on this for quite awhile, just kind of having it. In the mean time they were close; they fought side by side and had a great deal of mutual respect. The belief of trust was implicit and belief is everything, isn’t it?

 

Eventually she walked right up to the warrior and she told him, in plain sight of anyone caring to listen and said “I am completely smitten with you and I just want you to know that.” He didn’t run screaming. Good sign, she thought, but it didn’t occur to her to do a damn thing about it other than having made the statement.

 

Battles waged, losses occurred both personal and otherwise and the two found themselves in a distant country, out of context but surrounded by the familiar all the same. She declared her love again and this time he returned a similar statement. It was a difficult four days of push me pull me maybe I will oh I can’t oh I can oh I love you want you need you but cannot find my way past all this fear and commitment and the hard assed warrior female never backed down from a fight a day in her life. You see, things need a resolution or she’ll just about lose her mind.

 

She had to settle with no resolution but you see she loved the guy and decided to ride out the storm for better or worse. It was a rough ride. She decided he was worth it. And you know, he is.

 

The long and short of it was the ride got rough and stayed that way for close to two years for one reason or another. And with the possible exception of a few unmentionable moments they crawled inside each other and took root.

 

And here is where we come to the happily ever after part. You know, where all things are conquered and they ride off into the sunset and we never hear jack shit about it again, right? Heh.

 

The truth is (and I just KNOW a good number of you can back me up on this) the commitment to a life partner is exactly that. A commitment. It’s not negotiable. Lots of things are negotiable, but not that. It’s that whole for better or for worse thing that gives us what it takes to pass over those often deadly holes. And as for the female of this story, that was a tough pill to swallow because she gives no quarter, takes no prisoners and puts up with just about nuthin.

 

And because of that she broke the back of the marriage and sits in the wreckage holding her own bleeding heart in her hands. Just kind of looking at it like it might up and say something useful.

 

And it turns out the heart had plenty to say. It said give yourself back to the winds and the water of what is for alway and accept that this is where your marriage is today and that you can bring it back to some other place, if you can bend and wait and not have to fight every battle to the bitter end.

 

And from that place, broad sword slung for other things and medicine bag no longer disguised she moves forward into the light of day.

 

And lastly she might not have Jeffrey but she sure does have Ann. And Momma too.

 

Walking on glass, toe heel, toe, heel all the way across the plains

 

This Christmas my dad showed up with two plastic storage bins from my Aunt Ann with whom I had a conversation some years ago about some family china that I didn't feel I had any right to as the only girl once removed and that surely one of her boys would have gotten married and taken it with him.

Apparently not. Anyway, I think this because my paternal grandmother once compelled me to return an heirloom Christmas ornament to my father because 'our things pass down through the family name' and it didn't much impress her that I'd kept the family name. And that doesn't make a bucket of sense because my Aunt sure didn't keep the family name but I never could keep this stuff straight.

Now the truth of the matter is that I don't think my aunt got her hands on this stuff until her mother was past ninety but I could be wrong about that too (I find myself wrong about many things these days). It is also possible that Grandma Bess finally relented given the circumstances. In any event, here it is.

My mother once had possession of he soup tureen which is a grand affair with a slot for a very ornate ladle which I returned to my father some twenty odd years ago at somebody's request. He's said I can have that as well.

The thing about the china is it's absolutely not my style in the least. It's fussy, ornate, very old and quite breakable. It cannot go anywhere near a dishwasher, microwave or child under the age of 41. And yet here it is in my household, used immediately to serve Christmas dinner and I am smitten and awed. I wanted it the way I want all things old and family because I'm wired that way. I like to hold the ghosts of my ancestors in my hands and feel what's left they might have to say to me. I just wasn't prepared to instantly love them in a whole other way the moment they came out of their wrappings and into my hands.

They belonged to my Great, Great Grandmother Beyer who came with her husband from Germany penniless sometime before the turn of the century, I believe. My Great Great Grandfather Beyer was a barber with a space at the Waldorf Astoria and my Great Great Grandmother Beyer was a dressmaker. They had one child who was my Grandmother Bess's mother and her name was Lilly and that's about all I've got to say at this writing other than I'm stunned the china made it past Lilly and into Bess's hands in the first place.

So Great Great Grandfather Beyer the Barber had some wealthy clients with some tasty little insider tips and the Beyers lives changed just a bit. And if you think about the probable timing, that would have been a miracle in and of itself. This china would have been purchased after the fact and given the markings on the bottom - Theodore Haviland Limoges France in red with no underscore - these pieces are circa 1903 - 1925. Just before the market crashed.

And here it sits today on my dining room table. A thing to be cherished not for it's inherent value (although apparently I can still buy and sell it and I lean toward the buy, not the sell for heaven's sake) but for the fact of it's continuity. A piece of beauty and grace that is meaningful only in talisman of it's being.

Like I said, I am in awe of it's very presence in my home.

Now all I have to do is manage not to break it which brings us to the segue.

Covered vegetable dish sits on a massive glass table reflecting the dish itself and the contents of the room. Something broke this weekend or broke a year or two years ago or who the hell knows but it broke and I found out for sure last night and I don't know quite how bad but there's a reflection of it in the table. Cletus slept with me last night and I had the good fortune to have a friend, a real honest to god friend to call at six in the morning and say I need you, please come now. OK, I was better than that. I sent the text at 6 and the Facebook message at a more reasonable hour of 9ish and she came right over, adjusted my meds a bit, gave me half a pack of cigs (don't worry, this is absolutely medicinal and no more addictive than the Klonopin I seem to require at the moment and its working which is the good news).

I'm debating sleeping with the dogs tonight. I don't know if that will help or make it worse. I guess I'm just going to deal with it one small moment at a time.

Solstice.

 

I just finished a twelve hour tour of duty in my kitchen which came on top of eight hours yesterday. This is Solstice weekend which means every cookie, tomato sauce, jelly, curd, chocolate and loaf of bread, cooked, baked, canned and packaged for the Solstice occurred in the last 36 hours. I did sleep, I watched a movie too. It was I am Legend and it was good (and I LOVE Omega Man, so there).

In the mean time a Christmas tree was acquired and lights and pretty things were hung and the stockings were located and the menorah and the candles and the latkes, sour cream and apple sauce from the last of the wrapped September apples. The Solstice and Hanukkah coincide this year, which is very, very cool.

Last year we lost Sparky on or about the Solstice and it about blew me apart tonight. I wonder how the hell his family keeps breathing sometimes because half the time I feel like I got the wind knocked right out of me and I really just want to know how long it takes to get over someone?

I make things at Solstice. You can call it whatever holiday you want, it's Solstice timewise. I don't like to buy things unless it's something I know you need and can't buy yourself otherwise I'm going to make something and if you receive something I made it's because I give a rat's ass about you.

That's lost on most people these days. A cookie's a cookie, right?

About ten years ago I made my first batch of 1,000 cookies (or whatever), packaged them up and delivered them in person. They were received or not received as a matter of course until I got to Sparky and you know, Sparky got that half assed batch you give somebody you sort of give a shit about but maybe don't know so well. So anyway, Sparky comes all the way over from building one to building two and tells me this story about making stuff for people and how much it matters and all that and how this stupid box of cookies just about blew him away.

And that story he told just about blew me away. Most of the time, really, seriously MOST of the time, we have no real idea that we matter. Not a freaking clue.

I haven't missed a Solstice since.

I love you, Sparky and it hurts a lot still. I guess the way it's meant to hurt.

On cats and kittens and other small things

I have had a cat since I was four years old. Always, at least one cat. My first cat was a calico called Duchess and from Duchess I learned where babies come from first hand (in general mammal terms) and how much small things matter and how easy it is to give it all away.

Once when my mother was showing a litter of puppies to a prospective buyer I burst into the house yelling "Mommy! Mommy! Duchess is making babies in the front yard!"

And she was. I don't know what happened to the buyer but my mother was mortified.

Later in the summer when those kittens were old enough to be played with but maybe not quite so old as to leave their mother entirely I put them in my little red wagon and managed to give one of them away. I think what really happened was a neighbor walked by our yard and asked for a kitten and I said yes. When I told my mother she suggested I might find homes for all of them.

I took my little red wagon around the neighborhood and knocked on doors until every last one of those kittens had homes. The enormity of what I'd done didn't land until I went home with the empty red wagon and proudly told my mother what I'd done.

She cried. I did too.

Waiting

I'm sitting on the couch in my living room with a cat carrier to my right, door right up against my right thigh because it's the only thing keeping my cat from completely losing her shit. Yep, here we go about a cat again.

This cat turned four in October and belonged to my husband's brother Frank who died horribly and alone in his bathroom at home just two years and ten months ago. The last time anybody talked to Frank was Valentine's Day, 2006 and if you want to read about it go here because it's a pretty powerful post and everybody's names are used so please tread with care (I won't edit this post for any reason). Anyway, Nomans found Frank on March 4 and it was as awful as you might expect. It took some time to sort everything out but the net result was a disaster of an apartment full of hazmat that needed to be emptied, the kind of hazmat that happens with a particular flavor of mental illness, and two cats needing homes. Two cats that spent at least two weeks locked up with a body. I'll leave you to work that out on your own.

Shortly after the funeral (and as Jews we should have done this immediately but for what should be obvious reasons, could not) my husband had to go to Switzerland for a week and I, suddenly jobless at that point, chose to stay home. Staying home was the wrong thing to do but half way through the week I put my girls in the car and drove nearly three hours South to bring home what amounted to two feral cats, not much past kitten hood.

One cat made it and one cat did not. By 'did not' I mean he failed to assimilate into the household in any way and had to be removed. His litter mate, named Wicious (because she's 'wicious and fawocious') eventually settled in and did just fine.

A few weeks ago, just as we were becoming painfully aware that we really were in the end game with Chuck, Homer the Dog started behaving badly. He pooped in our bathroom, peed on the couch, peed on our bed and it just went on and on. We assumed Homer (we were right about the bathroom) because it was nearly odorless and Simon can't get up on the furniture by himself to save his life (he just eats it instead). We forgave Homer because he's had a lot to deal with (like a sixty pound baby) and crated him to avoid further issue for the time being. And then there was another odorless puddle on the bed and another after that. You see, she tried the foot of the bed and that didn't work. Then she tried my side and I still didn't pay attention. And then she tried Noman's side when she was accidentally locked in our room and then we knew our last kitty was pretty sick.

And then we noticed that she was always hungry but stopped eating after a mouthful or two and walked away crying. And then we could pick her up and hold her like a baby and she didn't purr and she didn't struggle, she just laid there all snugged up and motionless.

I didn't waste time. I called the vet today, gave symptoms and was told to come in. So the appointment is at 3 and I didn't want to risk not being able to locate or catch her (not like she's moving very fast but she is wicious and fawocious and wiley too. And I'm sitting on this couch with the carrier right against my leg and she's gone to sleep. If I get up and moves she cries like the world might end.

I don't know how this is going to turn out but it can't be good. I only know we love this cat and I will gladly pay the price of fear and pain and possible loneliness to have the right to love and be loved back by this cat. (and the dogs are in the kitchen eating the table legs and I'll probably get over it).

Last Days with Chuck

Note - I have been unclear in the following post. Chuck was euthanized on Saturday, December 6, 2008. The original linked post was written in February, 2007. This post was written Tuesday, December 9, 2008. We got an extra 22 months and we're grateful.

We said good-bye to Squeegie like cowards just past Thanksgiving two years ago by having Oldest who hated the cat take her in to be euthanized. He cried anyway and brought her ashes back in a small tin that sits on the very top shelf of the hall closet so that Youngest can ask strangers if they’d like to see that she keeps her cat in the closet.

After Squeegie died I wrote a piece called Last Days with Chuck and when I look at the photograph of her all curled up in the sunlight on the back of the couch I can see the beginnings of what we saw in the end; her wizened little face curling in on itself all the while letting the sacred cat bits fly back to Bast.

It didn’t get bad until early fall. Chuck peed on Little Girl’s bed and we chalked it up to a not quite clean enough litter box and a not quite tidy enough bedroom. Cats are funny that way. We took her off dry food and forced wet in an effort to reduce any urinary tract infections but that just pissed her off because Chuck doesn’t like change of any sort.

And what began as a gentle Pavane toward the

Rainbow

Bridge

escalated rapidly with recriminations, pointed fingers and bad behavior all around; including the cat but we can’t really blame her for that.  Middle Child, who found the kitties in a wood pile when she was just five years old, about lost her mind over this. She did so in the traditional manner where storm clouds gather in corners of rooms and hover like the threat of disaster.

We limped through Thanksgiving in a state of unraveling denial and every day I told myself I would call the vet from work and every day I did not.

And then one day I did. It was a Wednesday and I dialed the number and when a man answered I blurted out all staccato like “I need to make an appointment to put my cat down.” Stop. Breathe. Air. There was some back and forth and an appointment was made for Saturday and the man told me he was sorry and then we hung up and I put my face in my keyboard behind my cubicle wall and cried good and hard as quiet as I could. Then I blew up a couple databases and left for the day crying all the way home until my eyes swelled shut. Aside from mentioning the appointment in passing, I didn’t speak of it after that.

On Saturday morning I got out of bed and dressed with some coffee and a toothbrush. Chuck was in Middle Child’s room and the kitty carrier was on the back porch. I think I started crying when I picked it up. Anyway, into Middle Child’s room I went and stuffed Chuck face and feet first into the last place in the world she ever wanted to go while Middle Child sat in her bed like the world stopped spinning and I’m doing this and eventually we all got into the car and drove the requisite 4.5 miles to the vet in the center of town where we three plus the cat sat on a bench in a quiet room and waited.

Our vet is a good guy. Really. He says things like ‘that dog’s on the right side of the force’ and I know exactly what he means. He talks sense about the whys and hows of animals and the choices we make and that’s about as unexpected as hens teeth around here. He looks at us and says “I understand you’re considering euthanasia.” Just like that. Like we had an out or something but there wasn’t any judgment going on all the same. So we talked a little about what was going on and what we’d done to try to fix or live with it and he agreed it sounded a bit like some neurological magic coming undone only he didn’t say magic, I did. I’m thinking Bast is way behind pulling this kitty home and maybe it’s my fault for wanting to hold on just another day longer.

Anyway, it was time and he explained everything. Cat’s don’t like to have their arms held the way dogs are kind of ok so the cat has a shot that puts her out but her eyes are still open and she’s all floppy like she already died or something but she’s warm and she’s got a heartbeat and he leaves the room again and there we are taking turns holding her when Husband finally finds a box of tissues and half the Atlantic ocean ends up in paper. When the vet comes back he shaves her arm a bit, ties a tourniquet taking care to tell us that it doesn’t hurt and we’ve laid hands on this cat not to heal but to send away and the needle slides in just so and the fluid is dispensed tiny bit by tiny bit (he is so careful, this vet) and her chest stops moving and her heart goes still and Chuck has crossed over the Rainbow Bridge leaving the rest of us behind to remember last days with Chuck.