Endings and Beginnings

It's Midnight and I can hear the fireworks going off.  Lars, surprisingly, is sleeping in the blue chair to my right, the one that sits by the south facing windows, his head and shoulder resting comfortably against the sage green throw pillow.  I'm sitting on the sofa with my laptop resting on my thighs.  When I look at Larry he is surrounded by an aura of such serenity and peace that it takes my breath away.  Such innocence and vulnerability.
Larry is a leaner, always has been.  I have a picture of him sleeping with his brother and sister when he was a kitten, maybe two months old.  His brother, mostly white with just a touch of gray at his forehead, is stretched out length ways on their parents sofa.  Sylvia is curled up in the corner, her feet and nose nestled into the back of her brothers hind legs.  Lars is curled up at the other end, his face tucked under his brother's chin, his arms and feet stretched along his brothers face, his right shoulder resting against his brothers chest.  Larry is the same way with me.  He has to be leaning on me if he can.  Whenever we snuggle he rests against some part of me; sleeping against my ankle, my thigh, or nestled in the the crook of my left arm, his arms stretched across my chest.  Whenever we lay on the floor together he leans his shoulder against my forearm resting his chin on the back of my hand.  The intimacies of moments much like now as I sit here looking at him.
I had such moments with Crook.  And with Sylvia before him.  I cherished those moments as much as I these now.  They are what feed my soul.  I cherish those shared intimacies I have with my friends and family too.  The quiet lunches and dinners.  The raucous parties of Lotteria or Poker with my friends dogs, Coco and Maggie May, running around and through our legs chasing each other and barking as they play with such wild abandon.   I cherish the Opera and the Symphony, phone calls with friends over my morning coffee, and the ones I use to have with my Dad.  Of me leaning on them, resting my spirit, being held or holding them as we engage.  I had that with my Dad, of me leaning on him or him on me, sharing our fears and joys or just aimlessly chatting about nothing for an hour.  I miss my Three PM calls with my Dad.  Even now I still have my eye on the dashboard clock whenever I am running errands, timing them so  I would get home before Three.  Then I remember Dad is gone just as my morning cuddles by the south facing window are with Crook.  Of us resting in the sun on those summer days, falling asleep albeit briefly.  Endings can be so brutal when we lose someone so quickly.  I was in shock for days, weeks, after losing Sylvia.  During her last morning she was chasing her brother around the living room only to be dead seven hours later, wrapped in a towel, laying on the examination table in that cold lifeless room.  So it seems with my Dad.  Living a vibrant and full life one day, gone three weeks later.
This year has been one of many endings; losing Dad and Crook only months apart, the changes to my health which ended the relative settledness of my physical landscape; of completing the fourth revision of my novel I Am an Old Soul, a deeply personal project of nine years.  In many ways I suppose I have been naive about some things.  I thought that if I continued to manage Crook's diabetes, something that I was told I was doing well, he would be with me until he was Twenty.  I thought during my calls to my Dad that he would always just be there with me, his timeless energy living on.  When I shared with him in April the changing landscape of my health he said, "you're not planning on leaving me are you?"  Neither of us could have known that it would be he that was to leave, in just four short months.  Being naive I guess is not an altogether bad thing.  Naivete can have its merits as well as its downside.  One brings with it a relative serenity of being rooted in the present while the other neither warns us nor prepares us for what is to come.  New Years Eve seems to bring us endings, the ending of another calendar year, the deaths of friends and love ones, of celebrating what has been while singing Auld Lang Syne, exchanging hugs at the stroke of Midnight.  We had a New Years Eve ritual in our house when I was young.  Dad always went to De Rango's in West Racine for pizza just before Midnight.  Then about two minutes til he would arrive home with two steaming thin crust pizzas, one cheese, one cheese and sausage, a style that I have yet to experience anywhere else.   While he was gone Mom would set out the root beers in iced glasses and my brother and I would get exited about the prospect of having pizza so late.  Then at the stroke of midnight Dad would flip open the lids and we would dig in.
The evening after my Dad passed I was waiting outside De Rango's to meet my maternal aunt and cousins for dinner, sitting on this large rock in the parking lot.  I was talking to my friend Paul, describing where I was and the memories that it held for me.  Riding my bike up to Nelson's Five and Dime down the street from De Rango's, entering through the back to sit at the counter of the fountain while I watched them ladle out that deep green opaque syrup out of a large ceramic lime for my Green River soda.  Memories of when they closed off the street in front for a evening of square dancing called by my Uncle Dan as he stood on a raised wooden stage in the center of the intersection.  Of the North Shore railroad, its station just down the street,  of us watching the daily runs stopping as they moved between Milwaukee and Chicago.  Of my friends and I going to De Rangos for pizza after school.  He said it sounded a lot like Mayberry, that infamous city from the Andy Griffith Show and in many ways I suppose it was; however, in many ways it also wasn't.  Whichever, that life I was remembering in that moment is also long gone.
This New Years also signifies new beginnings for me; the last full year I plan to be working, celebrating my Sixty-Second birthday; I still gasp at the thought of being that old.  The handing over of my novel to an editor, the new life that Larry and I will be creating as we continue to let go of all the structures that defined our lives while Crook was with us.  It will be another year of feeling into the powerlessness around my health issues and what that may or may not bring for me.  This new year also brings with it the beginnings of my second novel, The Gripman's Daughter, a story of little Anna Thoresen and her life here on this property prior to, during, and just after the great quake of Nineteen-O-Six.  She has been waiting for such a long time, revealing bits and pieces of her life to me as I finished the fourth revision of I Am an Old Soul.  I am excited for her, that she is finally finding her voice, and I am excited by the act of writing, an act that is nothing less than profound for me.  To get completely out of the way, letting the characters tell their stories, to be the passive typist as they reveal their intimate joys and struggles.   To be so present as to cede my body to them, trusting them with what is so precious to me.  Writing is such an extraordinarily freeing experience, much like gardening.  To lose myself in the soil, breathing in the sweet damp aroma of loam as I move my fingers through it.
December Thirty-First brings with it the duality of me mourning the losses of this year while looking forward in celebration towards what is coming just around the corner, this duality of spirit, of one foot in the here and and now and one firmly planted just across the new year.  Dare I mention what good this new year could bring for our collective lives too; the possible end of our current flirtations with the dark side, politically speaking; the inherent power of the MeToo movement and the profound cultural changes that I hope it will bring; a reawakening of our responsibilities toward the downtrodden and vulnerable; all of this embedded into the celebratory fireworks, cheers, and hugs we have just exchanged at Midnight.  Here's to an emboldened shift this new year towards what feeds our love, joy, and happiness and away from what triggers our fears, bias, and prejudices.  Happy New Years!!

Death and the Act of Grieving

Grief is defined by Webster's as deep and poignant distress caused by or as if by bereavement.  It is a rather matter of fact statement, dry and to the point, with no hint of what to expect in reality.  Over the years I have bore witness to the act of grieving.  A mother standing on the beach in my birth town, wailing, her arms flailing towards God, pleading with him to save her son as his twelve year old lifeless body was being brought out of the waters of Lake Michigan.  I was not much older than her son at the time.  I stood helpless at the grave of a friend who had lost his life in a horrific car accident after leaving our flat, his twin sister weeping, on her knees, clawing at the casket as it was being lowered into the earth.  I carried my maternal grandfather's casket with five others as a young man praying that I would not trip and fall.  I sat on the edge of my maternal grandmothers bed as she laid dying.  I sat at the bedside of a dear friend as he literally and slowly drown from AIDS related lung ailment until the doctor sedated him so he wouldn't suffer anymore.  And after he took his last labored breath there was a silence in the room that defied reality.  I have lost count of all the funerals and memorial services I have been to since the Nineteen Eighties and before.  When I lost my first two partners to AIDS I was stunned more than anything.  Even though we were no longer together I still wept bitterly.  When I unexpectedly lost my animal companion Sylvia nine years ago I was the one on my knees weeping and wailing, crying out, not my baby girl.  And so it was this time with Crook.  I wept for days before his vet assisted passing knowing that I was about to lose him.  No one ever prepares you for someones death.  No one explains to you what it will feel like when you lose someone so close, when you can't catch your breath, when your body feels as if someone sucker punched you in the gut so many times that your internal organs are little more that mush.  No one prepares you for the act of grieving.  I wasn't prepared for Crook's death.  Nor my father's for that matter.  Both came out of nowhere.  Dad's, three weeks to the day he entered the hospital with pain in his gut.  Crook, albeit his pancreatitis had gone into the chronic stage during the summer and I did have "that" conversation with his vet; however, I had expected him to last for a quite a while longer.  I didn't expect to come home from my father's memorial service to immediately start working on stabilizing Crook's emotional life, one that unbeknownst to me had taken a huge hit while I was gone.  It was the coming and going so many times that triggered it, his family of origin stuff, those things that most rescue animal companions bring to the table.
Grieving has never been a healthy act of self care for me.  Make no mistake, it has gotten better over the years but it is still not as healthy as I would like.  Grieving has always been a messy and difficult process fraught with my demons speaking their truths, saying things like you're a horrible father, you should have known better, you are the reasons they are suffering, you were the cause of their death.  That was particularly acute with Sylvia and I still believe nine years on that I have some culpability.  It has taken many years though for that to wane, to see past my demons and more to what was fact at the time.  That is why this time with Crook was so intensely hard for me even though I had made so much progress.  This was essentially the first time I had to make the decision to end a life; something I wish upon no one.  To know when is the right time.  How does one know when it is the right time?  Animal companions lack the one thing that us two legged person's have; a voice.  We can say when we are in pain.  We can describe the issue at hand, ask for guidance, listen to advice from professionals.  Crook was not able to speak his truth.  Cats by nature are resilient beings and very adept at hiding their distress; however I knew Crook's body well and I generally knew when he was in pain, at times a lot of pain; but when is it that the line is crossed, the one that they can no longer return over.
In the days since his death I have come to realize just how ordered our daily lives had become around his diabetes, how everything was planned around the timing of his shots, how they occurred, and where in our home they happened.  How the before and after rituals came to be, how foods were introduced and discarded, supplements shifted.  Looking back I have begun to see now that they just started of their own accord, in the moment, as we all struggled to deal with the immediacy of his new diagnosis in December of 2012.  How, out of the chaos, came the rituals that defined our days and nights up to and including the morning of Crook's death.
Lars and I are lost, literally and figuratively.  The structures that were so ingrained into our existence are gone, never to return.  Gone too are almost all of the rituals that Crook brought with him from his family of origin, the ones that he had held dear with his former family; coming under the covers to sleep against the inside of my left leg as my right leg was bent up to create a tent in which he would crawl into.  Of us laying in the sun as I sung to him.  Him meeting me at the door when I cam home from work, of me carrying him around with me as I put my things away.  Him talking during the night.  I swore when I first adopted him from the rescue shelter he was able to speak a few words.  He would say or I thought he would say after eating his dinner, I Love You.  These rituals are only a few of what we had together.  He came to us with so many, all of which he lovingly taught us over the years.  Without them, we are trying to find our way forward, trying to reinvent our daily lives, trying to recapture many of the rituals Lars and I had before Crook came to us.  They were never lost.  They had just palled in comparison to what Crook brought to the table.
Crook had his rituals with Lars too, ones that were unique to them.  Most were endearing to watch, wonderful really, but others not so much.  Crook was traumatized by his time at Animal Care and Control.  He had lost his family of origin who he had been with for the first ten years of his life, a family that he absolutely adored.  He had lost his bonded mate of ten years when Shadow was euthanized a month into their stay at ACC.  After their surrender to ACC and especially after Shadow's death Crook transformed from being a loving, vulnerable, and open human to being untouchable.  Losing Shadow was the last straw it seemed.  As I was attempting to adopt him Crook savagely attacked a worker and was also slated for euthanasia.  Thankfully, they gave him to a rescue group who then contacted me to finalize his adoption.  And when I got him he was still untouchable.  However, it only took three weeks for him to start becoming his loving self again albeit as I said before with deep memories of his trauma, trauma that did complicate our lives from time to time, especially as he became more ill.  Still, we are lost without his loving personality, his open and vulnerable eyes.  I know that a few of his rituals will live on with us, the ones that Lars has made his own over the six years Crook was with us.  And in time the pain of his loss will lessen.  However, what I have also learned from death and the act of grieving over my lifetime is that each loss I experience becomes a part of who I am, as embedded into my DNA as the color of my eyes or the amount of hair on my head, or in my case, the lack of it.  Whether I was ever prepared for it or not, grief and loss have become my intimate friends, ones that bring both pain and pleasant memories and it will be both that I will rely on to help me find my and Lars way to whatever new life we are meant to have.