My Cat Died and I Felt Profound, Ugly Grief
I keep thinking I hear her coming down the hall, but my tender, feline companion is dead — and she’s never coming back.
The day Lua died, I sat on the couch and purred into our younger cat, Little Buddy, when we heard a noise in the next room. Both of us looked — Lua? We stared at the doorway and habitually waited for her short legs to waddle over to us. It was common for her to kick Buddy off my lap so she could curl up beside me in solitary peace. When she didn’t show up, I pet Little Buddy until he looked at me as if to acknowledge that our time on the couch together had gone on longer than it ever had before. Both of us felt strange about it.
The day before she died, Buddy crawled on top of her as I held her in our bed. He licked her face like it was ice cream. When she was gone, I watched him creep around our bedroom as he smelled for her. He skulked into the corner where she spent the last week and smelled the ground where she laid. Buddy looked at me — What now?
We are grieving, I said to him. It was fine and then it wasn’t and soon it will be fine again.
It is difficult to comprehend the grief one can feel at the hands of loss, especially if you are not a part of the weaving and braiding of what has gone missing. Lua and I spent our entire, conscious lives together. She quickly became the one I’d hug when I got home from school, who’d put a paw on my leg when I’d cry over friendships, late nights, and early mornings. I was 18 when I named her after a Bright Eyes song that made me sad. Fourteen years later, I heard my spouse sing it to her the day before she died. I froze in the hallway of our small apartment as memories from another lifetime flooded into my body — shouting the lyrics at 2am in my kitchen, quietly humming the song to her while I wrote papers, playing it for the people I’d meet who’d never heard the song and who were lucky to have just met my cat.
Lua was a quiet constant during the turbulence of my 20s. I loved her so much, I tattooed her face on my body.
But you’re right — she’s a cat. It is difficult for me to comprehend this sadness.
I think of it like this: take any part of your routine, your calming mechanism(s), how you are reminded that you can choose love and love can choose you — and remove it suddenly. Take it away and know you’re never going to get it back. I know that grief is love with nowhere to go but it’s still hard to lose. It’s hard to lose.
I’ve been thinking about love and what it means to me. Maybe if Lua exemplified my ability to love then I can somehow define it and, therefore, redirect it purposefully. Lua was the first constant in my life that was both stable and kind. In my early 20s, I was unhinged and noncommital. She taught me how to attach, how to care for another being using patient, gentle hands. She was relentlessly loyal. She proved this by pooping on the beds of roommates she disliked. Her intuition was always on point.
Lua lulled me to sleep thousands of nights with the sound of her purrs in waves as we cuddled in my bed, shared a pillow and each other’s company in sleep. Perhaps that is what I will miss the most — the fact that I chose her, and she chose me — this animal, another species.
I am incomprehensibly sad about losing her. I am so sad that I cannot ride the subway without sobbing. My spouse and I took her to an emergency vet a few days before she declined. I carried her in a cat backpack like a mother bears a small child, on the front of my body. My arms wrapped around the bag. I could feel her adjust inside. When I traced the same route a week later to go to the library, my knees buckled as I realized where I was. The lack of Lua, weightlessness in my arms. This emptiness wrapped around me like a cold and I cried. I cried in public. I was so distraught I wasn’t an ounce embarrassed about it.
Over the past fourteen years when I felt sorrow like this, I picked her up and held her, let her purrs melt into me. Now I come home, look for her, remember that she is not here, and nudge myself to go on with the day. I try picking Little Buddy up but he wiggles free and I feel lonely. We are creatures of habit and it is hard to adjust but I know that when a tree falls, it feeds the forest. It feeds the forest.
The night she died we watched Mike Birbiglia’s The New One and I forgot, for a moment, about our loss. I joked to myself about re-writing the poem his wife penned for their newborn: Lua rests her head on the earth of her mother, everything else is outer space.
As we walked home from the vet that morning I said to my spouse, What is strange and profound about all of this is that, behind how stuck I feel in sadness, life just… keeps going. I need to do laundry. I’ve got to work on my book. We need more avocados. All of it will occur and underlining every experience, our little apartment will mourn the loss of one of our pillars. If the fallen tree feeds the forest, then slowly, day by day, our love will transform into new and equally beautiful experiences.
Still, I look for her. I think I hear her. Then I remember that she is not here and she is never coming back.
