I feel selfish for grieving like this.
I’m crying more than I did when I lost my grandma. I’m crying more than I did when my heart broke for the very first time. My own lungs are trying to suffocate me. My heart is beating out of rhythm and I can feel it throbbing in my fucking ears. I hate it. I miss you. I’ve loved you so much for so long.
I met you when I was nine, and I hated you.
I wanted a kitten, and you were three- and you wanted nothing to do with me. You spent a week behind the microwave before even humoring the idea of introducing yourself. But I learned quickly that you smelled like brown sugar and had caramel colored belly fur. You did summersaults in clean laundry, and ran around the house after you pooped. You brought us real joy.
In fifteen years, you lived in three states. You always found your way to my pillow. You found me when I didn’t want to be seen. You saw what I didn’t want anyone else to see, whether it was tears or shame or the cereal bowls I would push under my bed. You purred in my lap and slept in my arms. You taught me about peace. You were my angel. You are my angel.
Watching you deteriorate has been excruciating.
It hurts to see who you were six months ago. Should I have loved you better? Probably.
Would I spend my time differently, more intentionally, had I known? Yeah, absolutely.
Are those opportunities gone? Yes they are.
And there’s a humbling and excruciating lesson in this truth.
Life ends, and we have no say in it.
We live so often in autopilot. We cope, we detach, we distance. Life manages to get in the way of what life is supposed to be about. Loving intentionally, being present in each moment. We get caught up in what we’re told is important, and de-prioritize life’s true priorities.
Thursday was when I saw it, and it knocked the wind out of me.
You were standing on the bathroom sink shouting. As you’ve gone deaf, your meow has changed so much. I picked you up, and you were so light. When did you lose all of this weight? We knew you had cancer, but we were told we had eight months. We knew we’d lose you, but we had time. We thought we had time.
You stood in the doorway of my bedroom, and you looked at me. I knew what you wanted, and I wasn’t having it. I told you I wasn’t having this conversation, but you insisted because you knew. You jumped on my bed, and laid down right in the sunspot. It was your sunspot. I wept into your fur and you purred and I looked at you. I mean like I really looked at you, and realized I hadn’t seen you in a while. Your paws were matted, your cheeks were hollow. I saw you and I knew that you were dying. That was the day we all knew you were dying.
In that moment in the sunspot on my bed, I felt it. I felt what He wanted me to feel.
Acceptance.
God didn’t just show up in that moment, He created that moment.
He put the pieces together perfectly to teach me what I think is the most important lesson I’ve learned in my adult life- that grief is absolutely inevitable, but peace comes with perspective.
There is no fixing this. There’s a point that you realize that you shouldn’t pray for divine intervention, because the inevitable will always be the inevitable.
There’s no curing cancer in an eighteen year old cat who’s lived a beautiful and purposeful life.
How could I ask Jesus to heal him? So I could have another year? Two years? Charlotte, you can’t run from suffering. You can’t run from the inevitable.
God created this tragically beautiful moment for me.
I wept into your fur, and all I could smell was brown sugar. I felt peace piercing through grief.
The truth is that no matter what, the pain will be overwhelming.
The truth is that no matter what, grieving will be a process.
The truth is that no matter what, you just can’t fucking fight it.
So take a deep breath, and be present in this moment, your last moment.
The moment you’ll keep forever. The brown sugar and the sunspot and the kisses goodbye.
He gave this to me. My God gave this to me. This perfect gift, this perfect moment.
Suffering is inevitable. Grief is consuming. It suffocates you and threatens to blow out your eardrums. Losing you is the hardest thing I’ve done in my life, and how dare I try to discredit my suffering by devaluing the love I have for you. By writing you off as “just a cat” and not as the consistent loving anchor I’ve had for a decade and a half.
Thank You, Jesus.
This lesson is the hardest and most humbling.
You gave me a precious gift. You let me say goodbye before it was too late. You know my sentimental heart, and how I attach to moments. You created it, and met us there, and wept with me.
My cat was my best friend. He was my baby bear, my first companion, and the only one who never got mad at me. Acceptance and understanding are necessary. I anchor myself to these truths while I walk through this. Because I am being refined by this suffering I am humbled. I can see all of these beautiful and powerful things and know them to be true, but it does not hush the ferocity of grief. The ache is consuming, but necessary. There is no light without the dark, and I am grateful for a God that walks through the dark with me.
Ziggy taught me a lot about love. He was in more of my life than he wasn’t, and he was family. Losing him has shown me what it looks like to grieve as an adult. I’ll spend a lifetime grateful for the time you shared with me, and I’ll thank my God every day for giving you to us, and then taking your suffering away. I love you, baby bear. I hope I get to see you again someday.
Can You hear me? 