On Grief

On a Wednesday in the beginning of November, we found out my cat had cancer. A day later he was dead. He ate little and played even less. His ribs shined through when he was walking and you felt the ridges of his spine when petting him. He was going through torture. I was angry at him for making a mess, telling him to stop and he was just slow blinking at us, trusting while dying inside. Before we took him to the vet, I wanted to keep him. It was akin to murder, taking him there while he knew of nothing. It was "just a cat". But he also was a living being with whom I shared a connection, who comforted me when I was sad and made me laugh. I’m not crying all the time. I’m feeling happy, mostly. It still feels different, like my life split into a before and after.

I’m fine as long as I don't think about it. Let's just forget I've ever had him, let’s avoid every mention of him, and every cat that looks familiar. How I react to this first encounter of death will shape how I’ll react to future instances. So I shouldn’t avoid the fact that he did live once. You might be able to erase the existence of a cat, but not one of a human. And isn’t it a betrayal to have loved somebody and forget them? Grief seems to me the flip side of love. Loving someone means knowing them and that includes remembering. Grief is remembering the absence of that loved one. You don’t process it linearly. You don’t switch into grief mode for a week and then snap out of it. You don’t have a meeting with mourning, it just infiltrates your schedule. I wasn’t in constant despair, bemoaning my loss. Grief’s instead an undercurrent of your life, a certain heaviness, the feeling that you forgot something but don’t know what. The five stages of grief exist, but they’re more five modes of experience than a roadmap with milestones. Maybe you skip one, switch around or rearrange the order.

When I first read that my cat would die, I hit an error message inside my head. My cat can’t die, not yet at least, is this a dream, some kind of joke? A split second later I sobbed. I. do. not. understand. The world was perfect 30 seconds ago and then I check my phone and it just fucking isn’t anymore and maybe it truly is the phones? Surely, stuff like this only happens in the movies. Only over a voiceover, only implied through sadness creeping into faces, the music changing its happy tune while showing clothes in all black. That wasn’t the deal. The deal was that as long as I’m a good person and try my best, something like this wouldn’t happen, forgetting I’d die nonetheless. I called my mom. I cried like I had the hiccups just with tears. When he died, it was better. I accepted it, resigned to fate. But that was mostly because I avoided the loss. I avoided home after, minimising time spent in my room, especially without something to distract me. I gave myself two days to grieve and then I’d get back to being productive and happy.

Two weeks after his death, I was very on and off. I felt great and productive and at the same I either cried or wanted to cry daily. My life was a glimmering movie scene, a page burning at the edges, like I was still okay but heard the faint rhythm of a flat line. I didn’t hit rock bottom, I didn’t have a mental breakdown, I just had a rough patch. Which is okay but sucked. I looked at pictures of him. I cried again. I demanded my cat back knowing he’s only ashes now. My mom said he's in heaven, but if he is, why didn't god just let him disappear? He’s dead, simple as that. You don’t get over a death, you don’t move on, get closure. You become okay with it, hold it gently, let it shape you. You still get sad. You just get better at being happy otherwise. Because emotions aren’t ropes you’re tied to, who drag you along, but instead water flowing through you. You decide whether you hoard them or let them pass.

Dying in the concrete

Death is surprisingly mundane. I only knew the concept in the abstract, so I attached a near-mystical significance to the process. You’d see when the lights go out, pick out the exact moment of change. He first got a shot to calm down and we petted him. He died after the second shot. It looked like falling asleep, his fur was still warm and soft, just his eyes were glazed. You would have thought him alive. You first noticed the stench, five minutes after. He went from conscious being to rotting corpse, smelled like foul meat you‘ve left too long in the fridge. I tried to spend as much time with him as I could and it still didn’t feel enough. Every amount except for every second seemed too little. You assume you and your loved ones will live until 80 when that might not be the case at all. You can live one day and die the next. On Wednesday morning he brushed his head against my legs, wanting to be pet, and the next day he was dead. On Wednesday morning he brushed his head against my legs and I didn't pet him. On Tursday morning I killed him. I didn't pet him.

That sounds stupid and crazy but he sometimes licked our balcony. What if the material of that balcony was asbest? Which causes cancer and he had a tumor? Did I kill my cat? Am I a bad person? What if you unintentionally hurt somebody, really hurt somebody? Can you then be a good person still? What do you do when you can't apologise anymore to the one you hurt? That’s the worst part of him dying. Not knowing if I’m at fault and feeling guilty about focusing so much on how this reflects on my image of a good person. Maybe I am partly guilty, maybe I do share some responsibility for his death and I should have petted him. I don’t know. If I am, moping about that is understandable but not helpful. I’d be a good person who made a mistake once, and now would have to deal with it. I can’t ask for forgiveness. He’s dead. I can’t undo it. He’s dead. I can’t make it up to him. He’s dead. I’m uncertain if redemption exists without forgiveness, maybe some sins go too far, but I can take this as a lesson. It might not be my fault but it is my responsibility. Everything in my life is. Now when my remaining cat, Chaddy, wants to be pet in the morning, I do, no matter how stressful it is. Because being good doesn’t mean being perfect. It means retrying.

Letting Go

Shit stuff happens. I can do everything right and I’m still going to suffer. I can be the healthiest person ever and I'll die, and I have no fucking control over that. We cannot prevent death, we are morally imperfect, and no masters of our time and life. I am not perfect, my life is not perfect and I never will be because of this fundamental lack of control. I thought that if I just avoid wasting my time, I could do everything I want to do. If I cut out social media and binge watching shows, I could suddenly have 8 hours of sleep every night, go to the gym four times a week, go running twice, read a book a week, publish four posts a month, do my voluntary social year, have a perfectly clean room, do activism, spend enough time with friends, family and my cat and maybe relax a bit sometimes. Yeah I’m wrong. I can optimise every second of my day and choose a little sleep deprivation for a couple more hours and a caffeine addiction and I’ll still fail. There will still be a long list of stuff I have to do. Oliver Burkeman truly was right, damn it. You do have to choose and not even between a good and a bad usage of your time but between two perfectly good ones. Prioritising something means devaluing something else. Saying yes to one opportunity means declining others. Opportunity cost does exist that damn bastard. Realising this made someone spending time with me very significant. We're all gonna die. The average life expectancy is already short and that’s not even a given. The fact that somebody spends their limited time with me, gifts it to me, is incredible and something to honour.

What I give my attention to, I make meaningful. I create sacredness via choosing what to spend my time on. Which shows I need to be honest about the gods I worship. If I say family is my number one priority but I always prefer staring at my phone screen to talking to them, I’m lying. My phone is more important to them. You either accept this or change your behaviour. I understand now why many christian preachers also portray non-personal entities and people as idols. Or why the bible says you can't serve two masters at once. Something will always demand more of your attention and be your absolute ruler.

I am loved because people spend time on me. I am alive. I could have had an accident, develop cancer randomly. But I am alive. And I don't want to die yet. We live in this world and we don't know shit, and why were here, and what comes after and if we're alone, and we're animals, primates who build houses and freaking fly. And there are other people, with their own inner world and life and they're so busy too but they still love you and spend time with you even tough you're sometimes a lil piece of shit. Thank you world that we exist, that I exist. Thank you Frippy for having existed. I will cherish the gift of time that you gave me.

Best wishes,

Somebody