The shape of grief
How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.— Marilyn Hassett (as Jill Kinmont) in The Other Side of the Mountain (1975) (paraphrased)
September 18th, 2024. I wake up to find Percy — our 22 year-old, flamepoint siamese cat — had vomited on the floor. It's not an uncommon occurrence, as he often gets sick. I clean it up, scoop out his litter box, and head in to work. My usual routine. The day passes by, and my partner is sending me photos and updates of Percy. He was laying on our bed for most of the day. He likes it there, as its quiet and he has his own special blanket to lay on (one of many throughout the apartment). We didn't really think much of it because he often has bouts of sickness, especially given he's nearly 23 years old, diabetic, and has IBS and early stage kidney disease.
When I get home, I find my partner and Percy on the couch, Percy laying on another of his blankets. She lets me know he has barely ate or drank, and that she had to bring him out to the couch. We still don't think too much about this, because that's usually how he his at peak sickness. That changes though, when he finally decides to get up. He's old and fragile, so we help him down from the couch and he stumbles a bit as he walks. He gets so far, and decides to just plop down on the floor. It's pretty normal for him to choose the floor, as it can get warm and the floor is nice and cool, but his stumbling isn't.
Worried that he's having another hypoglycemic event, which he's had before, we grab a small amount of maple syrup and rub it on his gums (little did we know, his blood glucose levels were actually quite high). He manages to stumble a bit towards our other couch, where he likes to lay. He struggles though, so instead of having him attempt to walk up his stairs, I help him up to his bed. I give him a massage and scratches. He rewards me with some purring. "A positive sign", we both thought, since that's the first time he purred all day!
A bit more time passes and he decides to move again. We help him down and his balance is even worse. It's at that point we make the call to bring him to the emergency vet, fortunately one being available to us. It's 12:15am. We get him into his carrier, and he's not happy about it. We get there and they take him. After running some blood tests, the vet comes to us with the bad news: he appears to be experiencing kidney failure. His bladder is empty, creatinine and blood urea nitrogen (BUN) levels are high. They give us the option to keep him in for observation, giving him fluids, and will have a specialist come in the next day. They warn us it's a costly endeavour with a low likelihood of success, but we can afford it and want to give him the best chance we can.
Before we leave, they give us the opportunity to see him. He's a bit drugged up, which I'm sure helped him stay comfortable throughout all the blood tests. We pet him a bunch, until he let's us know he's had enough. Not knowing how things are going to go, we make sure we say our goodbyes. We were hopeful. We put in our deposit, and they let us know they'll call us in the morning after doing another round of blood tests.
It's 4:15am when we leave the vet.
Incredibly tired, I only just catch my phone ringing at 9:26am. It's the pet hospital. Hoping to hear about him being on the up and up, we get the bad news that his numbers are even worse. They're not confident he'll even be able to make it to the afternoon, when the specialist could get there and potentially diagnose what was preventing him from properly taking the fluids. We make the hardest decision anyone can make for their pet and authorize humane euthanasia.
I don't know why, but I felt like sitting down and writing about my grief, in the midst of it. Perhaps this is better suited to "journaling", since my writing is often lacking in eloquence. I don't have a journal though, so here we are.
September 19th, 2024. A difficult day. It was even more of a shock than we expected, as it was so sudden. My partner commented on how good Percy appeared to be doing just the day before. There were no obvious signs of discomfort or sickness — as he usually hides away, doesn't socialize, or doesn't eat or drink much when he's not feeling well. These things never go exactly the way you'd want them to go. Well, I guess ideally they'd never happen at all, but that's not how our reality works.
I had the pleasure of spending the last 8 years with Percy though. My partner spent 16 years with him, adopting him from her college roommate. I may have been his "step dad", but it still hits hard. Spending that much time with anyone, it's hard for it not to. No more being greeted at the door in the morning. No more being annoyed by his water habits. No more laying on our lap as we wind down watching TV in the evening. No more "starting the engine", as we sometimes called it when he'd start immensely purring from scratches and massages. No more of him patiently waiting for his food as we prepared it for him. Well, mostly patient. He'd sometimes come around the corner to check on me if we were taking too long.
I've been fortunate to not yet lose any human that is close to me, but I am reminded of losing my childhood pets. Both Kingsly and Charlie were with me for 16 years, which is no small amount of time. I do feel like the grief immediately after the loss has been different this time, a reminder that our selves are constantly changing as we grow older. Not only do our values and personality change, but our feelings surrounding mortality change as we get closer to our own ends. I've always been comfortable with my mortality, but there's something intangibly different about it now.
Speaking of ends, we all inevitably experience the loss of parents, grandparents, and other extended family, unless our own end comes sooner than expected. I've lost all but one grandparent, but in complete honesty, those losses did not hit me particularly hard. Although I love them all, I'm not particularly close with my grandparents or extended family. The hardest part of those losses have been seeing its impact on my parents.
But we all experience loss in various forms, even if it's not the "big L" loss. We all grieve over the "loss" our favourite season every year. The loss of romantic love. Our favourite mittens. A job. Loss has many dimensions. There's the magnitude of the bond, the permanence of the loss, and the reach. I'm sure there are plenty of other dimensions too, but it's the differences in these dimensions that makes no two losses the same. I think that's the thing that's different about pets: they fill up as much space in our lives as human companions, but they're often our first experience with loss and grief. There's something special and unique about the tacit bonds we form with them, and boy do those bonds run deep.
When it comes to grief itself, I've heard about a feeling of "emptiness" from others that have experienced a loss. There's an obvious physical emptiness. Percy is no longer there to greet us in the morning. He's no longer sleeping peacefully on his bed when we gaze over from the den. Emotionally though, I find it's very much the opposite. It's a fullness, an outpouring of memories and feelings attached to the lost. It even has this strange magnetism, pulling in memories of past grief or thoughts of future grief. It's a little bit of everything, all at once. A profound celebration of life. A deep mourning of death. A poignant reminder of transience. It's probably not the same for everyone. Maybe the depressive moments of grief create a temporary void, a self-defense mechanism to mask the memories and block the pain, which could easily come through as an emptiness. Maybe it's something else. Regardless, we all experience grief in our own way.
These people and pets occupy a space within ourselves, one that grows fuller over time. The greatest sadness, for me at least, is the realization that this space no longer gets to grow. It's forever locked in. It's hard to come to terms with that, and knowing that memories often dim as we age makes it even more difficult. To add to that, I (mostly) lack a visual memory (Aphantasia , in case you've never heard of it). This means I rely heavily on photos for visual reminders, because otherwise there's only a soup of facts in my brain to recall. I also don't have a chatty mind, so I'm mostly existing in the present, physical world. Perhaps that eases the return to normality, but it also comes with its own kind of sadness upon reflection.
That's really it. There's no grand conclusion to any of this, or great insight. Just writing about it and capturing it is helpful. Who knows, maybe it helps someone else reading this and experiencing the same. I'm just grateful for the time I had with Percy, Charlie, and Kingsly. They were all substantial parts of my life, parts that I'm very grateful for and will cherish until my own time comes to an end.
