grief is a heavy, greedy beast. i feel her in my throat the moment the vet dims the lights in the room. grief sucks up all the hope i’d been clinging to with everything i had for the last two hours. my bones seem a little denser, like they got heavier somehow. i always get a headache after i cry, and i couldn’t stop crying. i was just ache.
the world is quieter as we get in the car with a bright blue towel and no sweet boy wrapped up in it. i hold onto it like he still is. the radio stays off. the trees look duller. everything is suddenly so much… less. like all the world’s saturation went with him.
we sit in the driveway for 3 minutes and wonder what the fuck our other two cats will think. they didn’t even see us leave, it was so fast. they’re just cats, i know, but they’re so smart. how do you communicate to a cat that their lifelong best friend isn’t coming home? will they understand? will they grieve with us? when we finally make it past the front door i fall all the way down the stairs. all we can do is hold them and apologize and gasp for air. i think they know.
the next day Darren accidentally played a video with one of his meaty, signature screams and i smiled for the first time since. it was a small smile, but it was immediately carved from my face and replaced with ugly sobs and… guilt. so much guilt for smiling at all. pictures of us grinning with him felt uncanny the first few times i worked up the nerve to look. i almost resented hearing laughter in old videos. how could anyone be happy at a time like this? don’t they know what’s happened?
it’s late on day two when i hear Joey yowling softly in the kitchen. when i came to find him he was on top of the fridge in Gims’ favourite spot, standing over the flattened cat bed he used to lay on with his big pink belly hanging out. crying. i’ve never seen a cat cry like that before.
Darren and i agreed to never move the cat bed. we didn’t say it but we wouldn’t move any of his other favourite places, either. he had so many, in every room. he loved to sit up high and watch over us.
the Smebbles didn’t get to know him like we did. she was robbed. he wanted to be her friend so badly, he just didn’t know how. it wasn’t his fault. if we’d had more time they could have been besties. i know it. we should have had so much more time.
on day 3 we clean for 12 straight hours and put up christmas decorations in cold silence. i clear all the empty boxes from the storage space under the stairs and leave a soft blanket on a suitcase against the back wall. he loved dark, enclosed spaces. he would have loved it back there. we never let him in because we knew he’d never want to leave. we start keeping the door open, just in case.
i put the blue towel in his favourite window. i clear a corner there for the water bowl we tried to give him before we left, the water still in it. i add the spray bottle because he was the only reason we really needed one anyways. we talk about putting the urn here, the word tastes ugly and bitter and wrong. the sill is overflowing. me, too.
this is unlike anything i have ever experienced. i couldn’t have been prepared, nothing could have eased me into it. grief is a giant calloused hand shoving me hard into a pit i can’t see the bottom of. i don’t know if i’ll ever forgive the universe for this. it was just a fucking wednesday. we celebrated our anniversary the night before, the leftovers were still sitting cold in the microwave when we got back from the animal hospital. this will never make sense to me. greedy greedy greedy.
i know all cats are special. every single cat is special. but some cats are once in a lifetime. he was one of those. we understood each other. he couldn’t hear the rest of the world, but he heard us. no four walls were ever home until he had made it so. no amount of time ever could have been enough.
the holidays play in front of us like a black and white film. there is an absence no one could ever understand, so we don’t try to explain it. we clink our glasses and give a silent nod as the new year drags us into it by our ankles, numb.
Joey would only eat when all three food dishes were full. it takes him over a week to stop protesting his dinner. i sit on the kitchen floor and pick through six month’s worth of dryer lint in hopes i’ll find stray whiskers. i learn quickly that grief makes you do desperate and nonsensical things sometimes.
it is day eleven when the animal hospital calls us to pick him up. the receptionist’s tone shifts from cheery to sorrowful when the computer says why we are here. leaving with him this time is just as cruel as leaving without him last time. grief snaps her teeth twice and leaves us sobbing in the parking lot. she knows she’ll never be hungry again.
we make it through the holidays somehow. we put the urn on the window sill. we add some of his favourite toys.
the sill is overflowing.
me, too.