What Gaia taught me about grief

I've mentioned several times on this blog that emotions and I have not been super pals throughout most of my life. Everyone remembers that great (terrible?) cave and wall metaphor - something which now certainly is reminiscent of the Cask of Amontillado - and I like to think that I was at least somewhat clear in that post. Particularly when talking about the positives and negatives of opening yourself up. Most of the people who have commented on it to me have said how happy they are that, for me, the wall lies in a pile of rubble.

I wish I could share their enthusiasm, but as I also said in that post, it's a double-edged sword at the best of times. I recently ran into a situation where, again, I reacted quite differently than I have in the past. And while I feel like a large part of that is the different factors involved in this scenario, I can't deny that the wall-shaped hole in my brain may have something to do with it.

I don't want to spend too much setting the scene. At my step-mother's house there are many cats. Or at least there used to be; it seems like that number is shrinking almost daily now. I lived there from summer 2008 to winter of 2013, so a fair amount of time spent in one place. And in that time I got to know all the cats and dogs, like you do. Gaia was one of these: a rescue together with her daughter, Luna, she was a tortoiseshell who was pretty round, kind of like a meatball, and had a real attitude. It used to lead to some stand-offs with her and one of the cats we brought, Ricky, a Scottish Fold who was just super-awesome (and also had a real attitude).

Gaia was nuuuuuuuuts about me. This was often annoying, as cats so frequently are: she would hear my voice in the kitchen and come running, then lay over my feet/in the middle of the kitchen and attack me (playfully, but still) as I tried to walk by; she would follow me around meowing with this urgent cry that made you wanna shake her; she liked to go into the basement (where I spent most of my time) and then refuse to get off the steps, either deciding she wanted to leave immediately or just generally getting in the way of everyone trying to get up and down the stairs all the time. You know - annoying.

But she was also adorable and lovely, and a little nuts (as all torties are). She would lay on my feet, as I already mentioned, and I'd pet her rough and she'd make hilarious noises and rub against my shoes so hard she fell over. She would then attack the shoe, often clinging to it as I tried to walk away so I would be half-dragging her across the floor. Among many other awesome and excellent things she did, but that's the most immediate one. Oh, sometimes after getting her all worked up she would scratch her face/neck and go "mrow-row-row-row-row" VERY loudly. Hilarious.

In the past year or two, however she's been looking worse. She lost a lot of weight, and last year she was in real bad shape - in fact some people already wanted to dismiss her as 'old and dying' and put her to sleep - but through the intercession of my sister she was taken to the vet, they looked her over and helped her out and she was back to her old self. More-or-less, anyway; she never quite regained that lost weight, and Meatball Cat became more of a parody name than a truism.

Fast-forward to this past weekend. I hear from my brother (who is the only sibling at the house right now - my sister is pet-sitting for another family) that she's in bad shape, and will probably be put down soon, so I get ready and I go over there to see her one last time. We spent some time at the pet-sitting house hoping that my sister would get the green-light to come over and leave the pets there for a while, but that never came so my brother and I went home without her.

I can't really describe what it was like. She was in my brother's room; she had crawled under his desk, as cats are wont to do, and was laying there. Stretched out, arms and legs straight out, like she had just fallen over sideways. Her eyes couldn't close, and there was a large amount of liquid issuing from the one, which didn't stop while I was there. She couldn't move or focus the eyeballs themselves. There was a dish of water next to her which she had not touched because she couldn't. I put some water on a finger and tried to get her to drink at least a little, but to no avail. Her breathing was shallow and labored.

But she was still alive, and as I spoke to her and pet her and tried to reassure her however I could over the next two hours and change, I would see glimmers that she was at least somewhat conscious of what was going on. Her face would twitch, the muscles around her eyes moving slightly. Sometimes her paws would twitch. They were cold, so I asked my brother to provide a shirt to throw on over her. It was a small gesture but at least it made me feel like I could do something.

Now, this isn't a post about anger. Anger comes much easier to me than grief, and I right now recalling events I'm feeling a pretty even mixture of both. I learned that she had been virtually unable to walk since Friday - this was on a Sunday evening, I should mention - and that no effort - none, zip, nothing - had been made to get her to a vet. Nothing. So she had laid there, slowly starving and/or thirsting to death, if whatever had happened to her brain wouldn't kill her first, for literally days, with those who could have done something waved it away with, frankly, ridiculous and self-deluding assurances.

But like I said, that's not what this entry is about. I don't mean to offend anyone; that's my interpretation of events, which I feel strongly about and which I believe is justified, but that's another post for another time. See how easy it was for me to distract myself from writing about grief - I don't want to deny I was tearing up while writing those paragraphs describing her last day, because I was - by focusing on anger?

The grief is what hit me the hardest at the time. I couldn't even summon the fire to be angry during those two hours, while I was watching her lay there, so far removed from the animal I once knew. I want to put it out there that I have felt grief. Good God have I felt grief. Our family hasn't been the luckiest in the past few years, and I can't deny that I felt grief when Ricky, our excellent cat we'd had for about 13 years, wandered down to the basement one day, laid down under a desk, made a sickening meowing noise, and then went limp. I was petting him and trying to coax him, but it wasn't working; I then took my dead cat and laid him in a box, to be buried the next morning. Or when I learned our other amazing cat (received all the way back in 2000/2001), Leo, who was Ricky's half-brother (but a straight-eared fold), developed serious issues with his breathing. My brother's girlfriend was handling it at the time, and towards the end it was truly horrendeous - his sinuses had partially collapsed and he just.... I mean I can't imagine. I can't imagine how hard it was for her. Mallory, if you're reading this, I... I mean I thanked you at the time, but I don't think I understood fully. Because it is awful.

Or when our other cats died. Or when we showed up, literally penniless, at a house in New York, rented for the next month, which was coated in mold and was essentially unlivable; a house where we spent the next month, what items we could fit in all thrown into the living room, where we all slept on mattresses and tried to stay out of the other rooms (which always gave me a headache if I spent too long there). Or when we came back from the beach one day in Ocean City to learn that our mother had died in New York. Or at the wake. Or other, also-very-bad things which I probably shouldn't share in a public blog.

The point is, I've felt grief before this. But it had always been like pulling off a band-aid: a quick sting which fades. Some stings take longer to fade than others, it's true, but all fade. That's life, and while I'm not quite sure if Time heals all wounds, it can at least reduce them to festering scabs which sometimes burst open again during heavy exertion or changes in barometric pressure.

But a big part of those moments of grief is that the causes were instant. When Ricky died, he seemed fine, came downstairs, and died. Instant. When we learned our mother had died, it had already been several hours. Instant. When other relatives have died, or pets, or any other horrible thing has happened to us, it's either been at a distance or instant. Or, in the case of the Mold House, as we call it, a long (and difficult) present that we hope will get better.

But with Gaia it was different. I had never sat by and watched something suffer before, with no possibility of recovery. I know that humans are the only animal cursed with their own mortality, but something in the animal mind tells it when it's about to die; elephants have graveyards, gulls have the sea, and cats - well, cats are known for crawling under hard-to-reach places to die, so no one can see them. They don't like revealing weakness, which is maybe another reason why I get along with them so well.

What happens when that instinct goes off, and leads an animal to choose its final place... and then it doesn't quite happen? What if instead of an instant death they suffer slowly, locked in a state between both life and death? In that moment when the instinct fires off, do they realize what's happening? Do they lay there, feeling their breaths become shorter and shorter, their vitals weakening and shutting down, their body losing its heat? Do they know what's happening?

Maybe they don't; I don't know. But it's given me a lot to think about over the last few days, and it was a whole lot to think about Sunday night. The immensity of what was happening was clear, at least to me, though it seemed like most others were either blind to it or numb to it. Which is how I would have been, before, I think. Trying not to feel anything.

Because it was fucking terrible. I was crying for about two hours straight, and while I am not the most masculine man in the world, I don't like crying and I don't cry easily or often. But for two hours I sat there, blowing my nose as the tears fell, and I really thought about all this stuff. And I even recorded a video; I don't know why, but I just began talking to myself and thought this might be a good opportunity to have for future reference. I'll never let anyone see it, I'm sure; though I speak to a third party, it's waaaay too personal. And cheesy: in that moment I was not my most articulate or witty, I'm sorry to say. But I felt like it was important, because it shows me myself grieving, something I have experienced before, but tightly-reined and as brief as I could make it. It shows my reaction to an ongoing incident, one happening right before me, and though I'm mostly incoherent throughout it, or silent, I guess it doesn't really matter.

Just sitting there and being sad is one of the hardest things I've ever had to do. I really, really, really really really wanted to leave, go distract myself with something, stop thinking about it. Because that would have been easy, at least for me; I've gotten extremely good at compartmentalizing and dissembling. And it's gotten easier the further it's gotten from Sunday, too. I try to think about it at least once or twice a day, just to keep it in my mind, but it is of course a sad memory and my unconscious tries to not dwell on it. Soon, I'm sure, I won't think about it much unless reminded of it by some outside factor.

But I didn't leave, and that's the point. I didn't distract myself, because I wanted to spend the time with her, and be with her. And I don't even know if she knew I was there, or if she felt anything at all. I hope she did, but in the end it doesn't really matter, because I was mostly there for Me. I felt like she deserved, what, at least two hours of my time, after all the years I spent with her. I watched over her because I actually hated the thought of leaving her alone, which I told to my brother (who wasn't sure if he could sleep in a room with a dying cat - and I totally understand that). He eventually decided to stay, otherwise I would have volunteered to sleep there that night. The thought of her in that condition, in a dark room, alone, slowly dying... I hated it. I hated it. I'm not being overly-dramatic; it was anathema to me. I was not going to let that happen, even if she didn't know I was there, even if she was feeling no pain and wasn't aware of anything around her. Couldn't do it. Wouldn't do it.

The next morning she was taken to the vet and put to sleep. My brother said she had begun twitching more violently, so it's for the best. And he not only slept in the room, but slept next to her on the floor, the whole night. Which... I mean, I know it's pathetic, but I'm crying a bit about right now. Lame, lame, I know. But for some reason that meant - and still means - so much to me.

So that's where I am with grief, now. I let it in; or at least, there was no barrier there to keep it out. And it was about as horrible as I expected, and since very few people enjoy feeling grief and sadness, on some level I wish that the wall was still up, that I could have been affected in the moment and quickly scrubbed it from the emotional receptors of my mind instead of tearing up at just the thought of it half a week later. But I'm also happy, because that wouldn't have been fair to Gaia, or my relationship with her, or how much happiness she brought me during a pretty miserable period of my life. Or even the annoyances when I'd trip over her in the dark and she'd meow in reproach at me and I'd shout back "what do you expect you're laying in the middle of the kitchen in the dark!"

As much as I wish it, life can't be just about the good times. Scratch that, because good times for me are in extremely short supply - it can't even be just about the non-terrible times. A lot of it is about the terrible times, the awful experiences, the waist-high lake of excrement I wade through to get to the opposite bank, though the bank keeps getting further and further away, and the lake gets deeper and deeper, and there's something in here with me, and now that I think about it I'm not sure that even is another bank, it could just be an optical illusion of the boiling sunlight reflecting off of the shit that is my life.

And now that I've engaged in my self-inflicted misery, it's time to watch a video or play a game or talk to someone, anything to get my mind off of things. Just because my life is an ocean of loss and pain, and I'm fully committed to acknowledging that, it doesn't mean I can't have a daydream of thunderstorms and northern lights and crisp mountain air, does it?

The Little Man (or Woman)

I've been feeling better lately. Mentally, I mean. And physically, too, I guess, since I'm just getting over another Illness (always the same thing for the same duration). Mentally is the most important, though, and without going into much detail about it I'll just say that my head hasn't really been screwed on straight for the past two weeks or so.

Which is fine; we all have little breaks like that. Things can send us into a loop of regret, confusion, and self-flagellation. But what I found is it also leads to a lot of introspection, and self-evaluation, and if you can control that - and medication helps, absolutely - then you may come out of it a more balanced, mentally sound individual. I like to think that's what happened to me.

Of course that might be the crazy talking, though I haven't yet taken to peeling shrimp in my bathtub to prepare for the promised dolphin plague. And it may be short-lived; it's hard to know. I would like to send out a beam of good-vibes to my friends and family, most of whom have been very supportive during this ordeal. No, I don't really believe in beams or good-vibes or whatever battiness really positive people say, but hey, it's a way to express yourself when you can't think of anything else to say. So, again, thanks.

In the past two weeks I've really dug down deep to understand what's important to me. Strangely enough, the answer has been people. A surprise to be sure, as I'm not the biggest fan of people in general, and I tend to value my alone time extremely highly. I know how to make friends though - and keep friends, if I may say - and I'd like to think that I'm a pretty good friend in return, outside of my inability to drive and general pathetic state. When I say 'people,' I'm not talking about in general, because - like I said - I think most people are pretty garbage and can't stand to be around many various types of human being. But certain people - and I think they know who they are - I've come to care for deeply, in a variety of different ways.

Let me fill you in on a secret you likely already know: caring about people suuuuuuucks. It sucks! It leads to insecurity and jealousy and fear and embarrassment and weird bizarro-situations where you want to help someone but you can't. Or you want to listen to someone but you won't. Or - God forbid - you want to repay someone for all they've done, but they still won't let you in. These are things that happen with people you care about no matter how long you've cared about them - a week, a month, a year, ten years, your whole life - and every time it happens it makes that little man (or woman) inside squirm and whimper. Perhaps it's just a little whimper, or a small shriek in the darkness, but that darkness is your mind and it is big and cavernous and reverberates. The acoustics there... you don't even know.

I got to a place where I couldn't decide whether I could stand the noise anymore. Because it is easier - it is so much easier - to wall up that part of the cavern. Let the little man (or woman) scream himself hoarse in the black. So that's what I did, because I'm always a fan of the easy way out - even if the easy way out seems hard, because the hard way out is a million times worse. I know others who have made the same choice. I know people who are making that choice every day.

The problem, which is something that age has revealed to me in all of its twisted malformed glory, is that the shrieking doesn't stop. The cries and the throes don't cease, and in that small space they grow larger and larger until they start forming cracks in the wall. So you can build another wall; that's what I did. And another, and another, and another after that. Again, even this rebuilding is far easier than letting it loose, so you keep the little man (or woman), who at this point seems more like a monster than anything else, in its cave. It's a bit of work, but it's doable.

But the more you rebuild the wall, the more space the little monster gets. One day you notice that nice, quiet dark that you've valued for so long - let's say over ten years, why not - is much, much smaller. And it's no longer a comforting darkness, but a frightening one; you become trapped in your own mind; always wary of the next crack in the wall, always counting the remaining space. It can consume you, until you don't have energy left for anything else but repairs and measurements and worry.

And sometimes you decide to let the monster out, and sometimes it forces its way out, spitting on your best intentions to keep it restrained. It was a bit of both for me, this past year, and I can tell you truthfully that the tears in the wall from my side - the side that was just me sitting huddled in the dark - were much less painful than the fractures caused by the monster. Which, if nothing else, I think, is a good thing to learn.

Even now I'm not sure how I feel about the monster getting out. Actually, let me go back to using man (or woman); because when I met that part of myself again, I saw that it was not the monster I feared it was. I hadn't seen it in a very, very long time, and had convinced myself that it really was a monster. Why else would I have walled it up? Why else would it sound so horrible and cause such pain?

The answer is that the little man (or woman) is caring, and vulnerability, and legitimate concern for others. And every time he was hurt, I was hurt, and he and I were one and the same. But if you split him (or her) off and place him alone and wall him up, then he's not you anymore. But you're really not you anymore either. And I know this sounds really cliche and, well, probably stupid, but it's the truth. I was perfectly pleased with who I became - sans little man - and didn't really want him back. Like I said before, I had hit the wall a few times with a hammer, but I never committed to absolute demolition. Because those swings were painful.

So I still am not sure how to feel. It's all a little too new, and I am not a very smart man. The little man - manster? - is free now, and he's making up for lost time. I feel a lot of things that I didn't before. Sometimes I hate him for it, because a lot of what I feel is pain. Other times, though, I think maybe this is a good thing. Maybe it's good to be able to legitimately care, and feel, and not be constantly surrounded 24/7 by a shield of irony and sarcasm and bitterness. Or maybe the little man set free will cause me to fail out of school, or do something incredibly stupid and/or reckless, and regret not binding him tighter.

I really have no idea, and that is the absolute truth. It's not as safe with him running amok in the darkness now. I'm not as safe. But I also have a lot more room to think, and that has to be worth some pain.