Goodbye, Tuesday.
I learned … am learning … a lot about myself this week.
The context: This week, my wife and I had to say goodbye to our cat, Tuesday. Tuesday was this amazing, wonderful, rambunctious, sometimes mean creature that I would protect with everything I had.
That was, until I no longer could. Or… should.
Tuesday’s death hit me very heavily. And this was after I had said my goodbyes to her many, many times.
Tuesday, who thought pretty much anything could be a bed.
Tuesday had lots of medical problems. She was diabetic; she had kidney disease, gastritis, arthritis… I can count three times I literally gave her a private goodbye speech. (I imagine the third time, she probably thought, “You could have just said Ibid.”)
My wife and I had spent time, money and emotions doing everything we could to make sure Tuesday’s life was beautiful and amazing. But… when the doctor told us her kidneys were in such awful shape that it would take extraordinary measures to keep her from an excruciating fate … We knew. We couldn’t, in good conscience, do this any longer.
I thought I was ready. No, I was not.
So when the time finally came, I cried. A lot. Because that special someone who had been part of my life wasn’t there anymore, in physical form.
But about a day after it happened, a thought popped into my head.
“You should get over it. It’s just a cat.”
Where the hell did that come from?
I don’t know when that thought first happened. Was it something someone in my family heard when our dog Dusty died? Or a close relative that wasn’t their parents? Or the cat my wife raised from a kitten?
Did I hear it from a friend who heard that as part of a value system growing up? Maybe it was a boss in the past—God, I had hoped not, but … there were those in my past who may well have said that. I have known people at previous jobs who had little to no regard for my feelings, saw me as a cog in a machine and nothing more. Certainly, this would not surprise me.
At any rate, I thought… no.
Tuesday is not JUST A CAT.
The same way Dusty was not JUST A DOG, or Ringo was not JUST A CAT. Or whatever dog, cat, bird, horse, ferret, rabbit, chicken, pig, iguana, hamster, guinea pig… whatever you had as a pet. When that special animal left you – that wasn’t JUST A PET.
A part of me is missing now. Or not… here. Or has changed. But something is different.
And no, Tuesday was not just a cat.
I am thankful I don’t have a supervisor who considers me a cog in a machine. As soon as she heard things had taken a turn on Monday, when we visited our vet for the last time, my boss said, “Take as much time as you need.”
Thank you for that.
People grieve in different ways. I don’t know how you do it. I don’t know from one moment to the next how I’d do it. I remarked to someone, I didn’t realize how exhausted I’d become.
Sometimes, I’m thoughtful. Sometimes, I prefer to be distracted. Sometimes, like today, I’m manic, and I need to get everything out on paper.
And sometimes, I’ll cry. And it may not be this week.
In 1991, for two weeks, I had taken in a stray kitten. What I should have done was take him to a local vet or animal shelter and let them handle it. But I foolishly tried to save this little creature, who couldn’t have been a month old.
Of course, he died.
Two months ago, the memory of him flooded my brain, and I cried. Absolutely out of nowhere.
So yeah, grief is a strange thing. People don’t really know how it manifests–it was assumed it followed the Kubler-Ross model (the “five stages”), but the stages aren’t linear, it seems. Grief is an emotion, like happiness or anger, but way more complex and not nearly as common.
And like I said, when it’s a pet, it can be WAY more intense. Sometimes more than when a parent dies.
I could write why, but this veterinary ER doctor explains it much better than I ever could. In addition, here are some wise words from ESPN broadcaster Chris Fowler. And some more.
At any rate, I don’t know how to end this. I’m not sure this is even done. I’ll still be grieving. Probably for a very long time. And that’s OK.