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.