I lost my first cat three months ago. It was a short but expensive and arduous process of googling everything possible (I'm an excellent googler) related to her illness/es, authorizing baffling tests and surgeries and medications, and the highs and lows of believing she would ultimately recover until the moment I woke up and discovered her body stiff next to me in the bed. She was a pet but she was my first real up close, personally responsible experience with death, and it was traumatic.
Grief is such an apt word for the feeling; it literally sounds how it feels. We buried her in my parents' backyard on Long Island and put a little wooden handwritten marker over it. The feeling of loss, emptiness and regret the last time I looked at her before closing the box still pops up in my head every now and then. In the supermarket I dread the pet aisle. It's been three months and we've left all of her cat towers and food bowls exactly where they always had been. Her medication is in the back of the cabinet, but I know it's there. I think of it less often now but I don't forget.
Guilt is a major factor, and self-recrimination. How I would have done things differently. I try not to dwell but it's impossible. I can't look at photos of the last trip we took before she got sick because they make me feel so selfish and irresponsible, because if I hadn't taken that trip, she would still be alive. I genuinely miss her, her posture, her chirps when I came home, her sighs.
The grief and sense of loss were also accompanied by a grim reminder of our own mortality. I feel much more aware of the fact that I am just an animal, and it's funny how you forget – all your trivial anxieties and ambitions and fears pale in the sense of scale of how many animals since the beginning of time have lived and died. I've always been fascinated by history, and now every time I see something from the past all I can think is that the person who wrote or painted or built this is dead. I'll be dead. Everyone I know will die and the earth will keep churning along and creating new animals and people who will also forget that they will die...until they do, or someone they love does. There's something that feels so unfair and uncompromising about this, but also in a small way, like a kind of cosmic justice. I don't think I'm morbidly depressed but I can see the appeal in existentialism. It does take a lot of the self-imposed pressure a person could feel when they consider that they are basically a genetic lottery of competitive, life producing cells. We're all a bunch of statistics, similar to the story of how predator birds will have two babies knowing one will have to die because they can only care for one, but that the odds for survival are increased with two. Many of us will have to be thrown away before our time. If you don't reproduce, are you a waste?
On the bright side, it's encouraged me to see a doctor and get on blood pressure medication.
