★Kingdom★Burning★Down★

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My parents got kittens~! :D :D :D :D :D :D We…

Lady I am so happy to see this post. I lost my 22 year old cat today. lovely to see it get better for someone.

I feel your pain very keenly, my friend, and I am so sorry. Very few people understand that this loss is exactly like losing a family member, especially when they’ve been with you so long. Few of us get to this point of having a pet longer than we’ve had many people. My brother and I grew up with Zoe and we and my mom and step-dad were absolutely devastated when we lost her. My mother climbed into my bed in the middle of the night when it happened and we just cried on each other for nearly an hour. A lot of work was missed. No one slept. I sobbed for days.

I’m not a religious person, so that kind of ‘better place’ stuff does not comfort me. What happened to me, though, was this:

I asked if we could disrupt my mom’s garden to bury Zoe under the cat mint bush that we planted for her. She spent every summer just rolling in that bush until it was flat. No one raised any objections to her being there. We wanted to always know where she was, and for that place to be tended to.

At first, I thought upturning the bush and putting her under it had killed it, it just started looking so ratty. Day after day, I sat there and thought black thoughts that the beautiful gesture I’d imagined would cause a death in attempting to mourn another one. It rained for a solid two weeks after she died. It’s the rainiest summer I can remember. It was miserable. I looked for her everywhere and, at the same time, I couldn’t keep myself from staring in horror at the scraggly bush.

And then the weather shifted, or my mood shifted, or, as is so often the case, both did, and it hit me with a sudden jolt that “Zoe” means “life”.

I saw her in every cat gif on tumblr, and even as I cried while doing so, I reblogged them with ‘Zoe means life’ in the tags. I’m crying thinking of her now, and I cried when these two kittens stopped and waited for me on the stairs in the same places she did. But I felt so overwhelmed by the sentiment that she was life, and that what I loved and what was beautiful in her was in everything. Zoe is with me everywhere, even as I weep for her absence. I do many things now and think I can do them with her in mind.

It’s maybe a very specific kind of comfort, and maybe I wouldn’t have arrived at it if Zoe had been called anything else, and thus maybe it would mean nothing to anyone else, but after a brief period of only pain, I found a kind of joy in knowing that I’d been so close to her particular life to feel that pain. And then just seeing life helped me get through. I thought seeing cats would cause me misery, but it was really a sort of painful joy. I still plan to paint her someday soon, because I think that’s the best way for me to express all this.

There is something after today, I promise. The loss is enormous, and it is real, because the life you love is. If anyone tells you otherwise, they are garbage.

Meanwhile, the rest of that summer, Zoe’s cat mint plant grew bigger and wilder and more out of control than it ever had before, and it flourished into the autumn well after it should have died.

Zoe means life.

My sympathies. Be well and be kind to yourself while you cope.