A Day Without Art

I can scarcely believe that today is the one month anniversary of Larry's passing.  Later on I will be taking down the purple fabric that I had draped across all of my art work the day Larry died.  The act of draping my art has been a mourning ritual that I have engaged in for nearly thirty years.  The origins of it are not familial but one that was started by the gay artist group Visual AIDS in Nineteen Eighty-Nine.  I had many gay friends who were artists at that time.  I met most of them during my college days, others I met in the neighborhood.  The Day Without Art project was created as a mourning ritual to honor those artists who had passed from AIDS.  Soon after it was expanded to also honor those artists who were living with the virus.  I began covering my art in honor of my artist friends who died.  As time went on it morphed into a way for me to honor those of my immediate family who had passed from this earth.  Sitting here as I write I can hardly believe that today is the day when I be uncovering my art.  I am thankful that the deep and grievous weeping has for the most part stopped.  The pain has not.  If anything it has deepened the further away from Larry I am.  When his dementia diagnosis came in some months ago I knew my time with him would be finite and I did wonder what my life would be like without him.  I thought about what it would be like not seeing his nesting spot on the bed, his fort in the living room, him not curled up sleeping on the perch in the closet.  What it would be like not to cuddle with him on the floor.  I guess in some ways I was naive about the relative nature of my post Larry life.  Maybe it was because I thought I had more time with him, that I could ease into my grief the way I did with Crook before he died.  Maybe it was because I didn't want to let myself go to "that" place again.  The one where I always go when someone I love more than life itself dies.  Sitting here as I write I'm also not surprised that I have been reluctant to work on my trilogy for some of the same reasons.  Jack has just lost his partner Patrick and is reeling within his grief at the sudden and tragic nature of his lover's death.  Last year I did try writing his truth but I found that I had just glazed over the surface.  I think it amounted to all of about three paragraphs.  Down deep though I knew that at the time I would one day return and walk beside him as we both navigated the depths of his grief, the depths of which I already find myself in.  What do they say about storytelling, write about what you know?
Two years ago I asked a writer friend of mine to do a manuscript read for me.  He had extensive training in the field encompassing both teaching and writing and I valued his input.  He was one of a few that I had asked for guidance.  After he had finished his critique we met for coffee at a cafe in the lower Haight.  The first thing he said when he walked in was, "I can't help but call you Jack.".   I suppose there's a lot of Jack in me and vice versa.  This is why I have been reluctant to bear witness to his grief.  I know that what is his pain will be mine and mine, his.
Writing can be cathartic; however, in the past few days I have been struggling with how one shares his innermost grief, the grief that only he and God bear witness to?  That was one of the beautiful parts of my life with Larry.  He bore witness to the laughter, the joy, the contentment, and the pain.  He was there for the deep sadness, the grievous weeping after Silvia, my dad, and Crook died; he was there for it all.  All the while being present in his body in the way only animal companions can be.  There's something to be said about the unvarnished ability to be free of ones baggage, to be in that perpetual state of grace that animal companions can be when their lives have been untouched by personal trauma.
Lately, I have again been questioning everything about my life.  How did I come to be where I find myself.  Why has life happened in the way it did.  Why seemingly insignificant decisions can grow into life shattering moments later on.  How the effects of trauma talking to trauma can make my life so unmanageable, information that I have readily shared with a few of my sponsees.  Many years ago I had made a conscious decision not to share the totality of my trauma history with many of my close friends. Only a chosen few know.  I made that decision knowing that my history is not for the faint of heart.  My childhood trauma was deeply insane at the best of times, and at it's worst, unimaginable.  To carry that reality in my conscious memory has been challenging.  Carrying it along with my grief......   I'll be frank in this moment about something that only my sponsor knows.  During the first week after Larry's death I thought about suicide.  I guess I'm much like my mother in that way.  After my eldest sibling Muriel passed away at five years old my mother ingested rat poison.  When that did not work she fled across several state lines to her oldest sister in Topeka refusing to come back.  After three weeks of pleading my father had to drive many hundreds of miles to get her and drag her back because she still had my one and half year old brother to care for.  My sponsor calls my thoughts of suicide trauma talking to trauma.  Nothing like having my own words reflected back.  I suppose in reality it is trauma talking to trauma.  The trauma of my multiple layers of deep grief speaking to and with the deep shame of my childhood history.  A lethal combination if there ever was one.  I told him laughingly but also seriously that at least I'm not drinking, drugging, or fucking my way out of myself.  Not that I haven't thought about it.  I have.  Thankfully the diversion from my grief has taken a decidedly more productive avenue of late as I have been doing the repair work around the house that needs to be done.  A much better way of coping wouldn't you say?
I have come to understand that grieving can be such a treacherous journey for me.  And I do my best to bear witness to the authenticity of my journey while taking ownership of it and the emotions that it entails but it can be such a convoluted mess at times.  I guess that is what grief is at its core.  Messy, convoluted, weepy, and full of unexpected emotional sink holes. 

Dead Man Walking

It is surreal, this path I am walking.  I feel as if I have slipped down the rabbit hole into an alternate reality, a reality where all the colors are so vibrant they seem to be lit from within by flames, flames that simultaneously both consume in death while facilitating rebirth.  Juxtaposition in this realm are many dilapidated stone houses, miles from each other, each of which is covered by ancient weathered vines that have over a millennia adhered themselves to the rotting structures.  Most of their windows are broken and as the winds move through the tattered cloth coverings billow into spider web covered interiors filled with the discarded belongings of people who have disappeared during another age.  As I navigate the convoluted paths of this reality, the ones that snake from one house to another through forests that are thick and overgrown I know what my task will be.  When I arrive I am to search for my truth, for Home, knowing full well that I will find neither.  And as I leave the realization once again becomes clear, that no matter how hard I search I will never find my way back home.  With each step I take towards the next house I can feel the increasing weight of it all as it sets itself upon my shoulders like a stone yoke.  This is the nature of my grief.  Millennia old, aged by time and circumstance, multiplied by death upon death as the vines of which have become one, entangled within my soul.  I thought, maybe in truth, more likely within denial, that I was building a new relationship to my grief.  Nothing like the death of one's child to clear the senses.
I have said that I have walked this earth before.  Many times as far as I can tell.  New York City was one, Budapest another, London, Moscow, maybe Vienna.   I tested this once in the mid Nineties when I met my friend Diane in New York City.  It was my second trip there and we had just finished a wonderful meal on the Lower East Side.  As we walked out of the restaurant I said, "Let me show you where our subway stop is."  I had told Diane about my history so she readily agreed as she had grown up in New York City and knew it well.  As we walked snaking our way northwest I went directly to the subway stop some seven blocks away, the one that would take us back up to the Upper West Side where our hotel room was located.  I had felt the same sense of deja vu when I was in London and Budapest.  When I went back to New York City just after my father died three years ago I had that same feeling again.  I had been sick while I was there and was grateful for a night out.  I walked a few blocks over to a cinema to watch a movie with Judy Dench.  On the way back to my hotel I knew that I had walked that street many many times before.  Closely on its heels came the familiar refrain, that I will be forever destined to wander this earth without ever being able to go back from once I came.  I wept when I got back to my room, as much as for losing my father as it was for the pervasive feeling of Other that has dogged me for the whole of my life.  I suppose I am much like my paternal grandfather's sister Hazel.  Hers was much like the life I have had.  She communicated with the dead as I have.  She had experiences that could not be explained; except by her.  Once, she had had a "Visitor" who came to her when her first husband was at work one day.  The visitor taught her how to play the piano, the one that had sat in the parlor collecting dust for years. When her husband came home there she sat playing like she had been a accomplished pianist for the whole of her life.  Dumbfounded, he asked for an explanation and she told him what had happened.  He was so unsettled that soon after he filed for divorce.
My dad came to me many times after he had died, sometimes talking with me, others not.  Our last conversation was him asking me how it felt to not have parents.  I was taken aback by this question at first but then I understood.   My dad knew who I was but had lost the ability to speak to me from the perspective of being my father.  My mom visited me after her death but in a nefarious way.  She, like my paternal aunt Jeanette, turned on the high capacity burner on my stove but without the flame.  Crook came to me too, albeit briefly.  I only caught sight of him once as he made his way over to our favorite spot by the south face living room windows.  That was where we would lay on the floor cuddling as I sang good morning to him.  Larry has been around too. Just after I got home the day he died I had laid down in bed not knowing what else to do.  When I rolled onto my back I felt him jump up, one of his front paws landing on my leg.  Since then I have seen him a number of times.  When he came in from the bedroom I got down onto the floor as I always did greeting him.  When he passed by I felt him brush up against my right forearm.  I saw him going into the bathroom too.  I followed him in turning the bathtub spout on for him to drink from only to begin weeping as I sat on the edge of the tub. 
When I said that all things originated from Larry, that he ordered every facet of our existence together, I never realized how deeply ingrained that was.  Everything around me has his imprint on it and not just the obvious things that I recently alluded to in my previous blog.  Every cupboard, every closet, the cabinet under the bathroom sink; they are all his.  How I partially close the shower curtain, how I stack the prerinsed dishes in the drainer, when and in what order I wash the dishes at the end of the day; they are all his.  How I hang my clothes in both closets, how every closet is organized, where I store my gardening shoes, it even extends to how I shop for fruit and veg.  They are all his. 
I always knew where he was in the house. Whenever I left, came in, or moved about, I instinctively made visual contact and if I did not readily see him I would search for him finding him asleep on the perch in the bedroom closet, or curled up under the bed, or baking in the sauna.  He was my touchstone of unconditional love and seeing him brought me eminence comfort and joy.  Often I would walk over, lean in, and gently kiss him.  In response he would curl his head under, or stretch his legs, his whole body quivering, while settling back into a deep sleep.  Now however, when I turn to look for him he's not here.  When I stop at the door craning my neck back to say I love you as I'm leaving for work I realize he is no longer here.  When I open a closet door, or a drawer, or a cupboard he is there but not here.  As I move about my world all of these actions have become ticking emotional time bombs that can in an instant take me right back down onto my knees.  And as I descend to the floor, my head bowed, my arms wrapped tightly around my chest, tears streaming down my face I utter what have become familiar words in the wake of his death, "I can't do this without you."
I am a dead man walking, my Raison D'etre having been taken from me.  I've noticed that at times I have agonal breathing, that labored way in which a person breaths just before death.  I do not always realize I'm doing it but when I do I accept that that is where I happened to be in the moment.  Just as when my chest closes down because of my contracting muscles are tightening around my lungs, or when I feel the blood draining from my head, or I feel my body being drawn once again into the fetal position, I accept that is where I happen to be, that this is my insurmountable grief speaking its truth.

The Loss of Oneself

Morning are typically hard for me  I find it takes me some time to get my wits about me, to get both eyes open at the same time.  Today is no exception.  As I sit here propped up in bed, my back resting against Larry's pillow I am faced with the reality of what my life will be like now that Larry is gone.  Larry and I had rituals in the morning.  We had rituals about many things.  How we woke up, how we said good morning, how we navigated our day together.  How we ended them.  Bedtime was of particular importance.  Me spooning with him on the floor, then him moving onto the sofa curling up, waiting.  Of me saying "time for bed" as I turned the lights out.  Of me picking him up and carrying him into the bedroom.  And once we were settled in bed, of me saying "lights out".  He had many things he did afterwards too.  Climbing under the covers for a while, then going to eat, followed by climbing onto the bedding box to stare out at the garden, eventually coming back to bed with me.  Even within his dementia he remembered.  Looking around I can see all of his favorite spots, the nest at the end of the bed, the perch in the closet that looked out on the garden.  That was his sister Sylvia's spot before it was his.  What I called the Sauna, the triangular space behind one of the bedroom doors that backed up against the wall where the heat pipe was behind, next to the radiator for the bedroom.  Larry had a particular fondness for the feel of cotton sheets.  He loved to sleep next to me on or against the pillow.  I suppose remembering is my way of diverting my attention from the obvious on this first morning without my boy;  how one navigates the pain of losing ones child.  Of how one defines oneself in the face of intense loss and with the prospect of becoming "Other".   In the old days it seemed defining ourselves was more straightforward.  People chose their marriage or profession as their title.  Mr. and Mrs. X, Doctor and Mrs. Y.   In Italy doctors are afforded the title Il Docttore when being addressed, both in and out of work.  People do it out of respect and to honor their accomplishments.  We have done the same for priests, college professors, and lawyers just naming a few.  Times have changed though.  These days we seemed to have come to the understand that the search for our authenticity is how we define ourselves, especially in the midst of loss.  Or it seems to be that to me within the microcosms of my life as I know it.  Even within the realms of gender we have come to understand that the traditional monikers of male and female no longer apply for some.  That gender fluidity is just that, the vast area that exists between the polar opposites of male and female.
Sitting here in bed, I wonder what my life will now be, how I will define myself as I face the abyss that exists in front of me. 
How does one take in the vastness of losing their existence as one knows it, of losing the sun that both fed and sustained.  Larry was quite literally the center of my life of which all else revolved. He was the core to which all else was ordered.  I may be sounding melodramatic, but I'm not.  There is a very real history to all of this.  It was Larry and his sister Sylvia who fed and sustained me through the darkest days of my early recovery nearly seventeen years ago.  Days during which I thought at any moment I would quite literally die.  It was the touch of their bodies against mine, the sound of their purr, the life I saw in their eyes that provided for me the only link to sanity and the real world I had.  When Sylvia died suddenly eleven years ago it became Larry and I; me trying to support him in his incomprehensible pain of losing the world as he had always known since birth and me of losing her and the understanding of what "Us" had been.  Before her death Sylvia had been the center of our existence.  She was core by which all else was ordered.  Her indomitable spirit, her ability to love and be loved so unconditionally was what had fed and sustained us all; and by the grace of the Universe Larry somehow survived the loss of that and his sister, as I of mine and her.  In the intervening years I adopted Crook and we forged a new definition of "Us" as Larry came out of his shell taking on Sylvia's indomitable spirit and ability to love so freely and completely.  Then three years ago we lost Crook and the unique unfailing love that he had brought into our family.  That is what I am again facing as I sit here, the loss of that indomitable spirit that only an animal companion can bring, that unconditional love.  The loss of my beloved Larry and by extension Crook.   I am also reliving the loss of Sylvia and the loss of the meaning of "Us" as I always do within the confines how my PTSD has changed my physical and emotional body's processes.
I blogged incessantly in the month after Sylvia's death.  Each entry titled only by the date and time in which it had been written.  Those blogs are a chronicle of the immediacy of my grief of that time.  It is still extraordinarily painful for me to read them.  It took me many years before I could comprehend the fullness of that loss.  And now I find myself back from once I came, sitting in the immediacy of my incomprehensible grief just trusting that my next breath will come when it is meant to.  I can't imagine a life without Larry.  What the loss of his loving spirit and by extension of our rituals will mean for me.
His death came as a surprise much like Sylvia's had.  She had been seemingly happy, content with playing and chasing Larry around the house only to be dead eight hours later of heart failure.  For Larry, he had had some ongoing dental issues since January, an abbess then, a small lesion now. one that was to be addressed by surgery yesterday morning.  Nothing seemingly bad or out of the ordinary.  Then the mid morning call came that he had suspected bone cancer, that a small part of his jaw had already been eaten away.  That left little choice in which way to go forward.  Before Crook died I had had a week with him to spend grieving his oncoming death.  With Larry.....
I can't say that I will blog incessantly during the next month as I navigate Larry's loss.  Blogging, like journaling, doesn't hold the same value it once had in my life.  Before, both were written words, a way for me to navigate and understand what was happening in the immediacy of my emotional and physical life during a time when without them I seemed lost.  Now.....   I suppose that is because I seem to have a better grasp of my internal processes or maybe I am just doing what I naturally do in the face of intense emotion; I isolate.  Either way my path will be what it will be as I am reluctantly forced to navigate towards a new definition of self without my precious baby boy.

Life's Rich Tapestry

Back in the day when things in my life were going awry I would jokingly say to myself as I shook my head, life's rich tapestry of bullshit.  It was a way for me to cope I suppose.  Laugh it off, lessen the importance.  Deal with the powerlessness.  I had heard about that word before recovery.  Mostly during my college days in reference to those who were struggling to become free; but I didn't understand it; at least not in its fuller implications as I do now.
This evening I watched Falsetto's from Lincoln Center,  It was one of those programs that our local public channel trots out for our viewing pleasure during pledge month; and as always it was interrupted, several times I might add.  (Thank the Goddess for the fast forward on my DVR!) 
I hadn't ever seen Falsetto's in its entirety.  In the past I tended to shy away from watching these types of performances as it hit that touchstone of loss I have deep within me.  Loss is still very real for me.  It has been something I have been struggling with for a long time, that feeling of being in a perpetual state of loss, the one that I can never seem to get out from under it.  My sponsor and I have been working on this issue for a while now and things have been shifting.  Watching Falsetto's though hit a nerve for me.  It brought it all back as if it was happening in real time; losing two former partners, countless friends.  Such senseless loss.  I have sometimes wondered if I process loss within the same neural pathways that I experience my PTSD.  They live on in my memory, my friends, as if they were here sitting next to me as I write.  As I was fast forwarding through the pledge breaks I glanced into the bedroom where on my dresser sits the ashes of both of my animal companions, Larry's sister Sylvia and my rescue boy, Crook.  I found myself crying about that and yearning to pick up my Iphone where I have videos of Crook stored.
They were trying to find truth in Falsetto's.  The truth of ones sexual orientation, of love, of friendship, and of what was taking his lover.  Finding truth is a painstakingly difficult process.  I can attest to that after eighteen years in recovery.  And that was what I am trying to always do; to find truth within my powerlessness.  The truth of why I am who I am.  Why I find myself where I happen to be.  Why I react the way I do.  I have always wanted to know the truth about losing my friends, former partners, all of whom I loved.  What was that thing that was taking them from me at such an astonishing rate?  Living a full and active life one day and dead the next.  My friend Stephen died quickly.  One day he was his partner Neil's caregiver, feeding him, bathing him, while he laid dying, three weeks later...  Mind numbing, even now.
I cried so many times during Falsetto's; in part because I remember what it was like to feel free in love.  To know that you could love and make love with purpose and truth.  Also in part because I knew what was coming, that silent unknown killer; and then when it did, because loss is still so real to me.  No one has ever offered to sit with me explaining why.  I still wonder what was the point of all that senseless death. 
Life's rich tapestry.....
What I have come to realize in a deeper way this evening is that life's rich tapestry is not only a cliche.  I have a tapestry, one that has been woven of each moment of my lives and that when another moment passes, a new thread is added.  Mine is made up of many many threads, some as delicate a fine gold, some of rich cotton, others of wool, and many of things I can not yet identify.  And that is the point, that I may not know ever know what each thread represents.  It is enough that my tapestry exists in and of itself.  I do know a great many of those threads.  They are my friends and loved ones, both living and dead.  There are those experiences that I hold within me, both life affirming and challenging.  My tapestry is an integral part of me, both known and unknown.  It is me.  I know too that at any time I can run my fingertips over the delicate unique designs and touch the one that is Steven's life, and the one that is Bryan's, and Patrick's.  That this one here, the beautifully stitched flower is Gram, and that sky blue one there is Dad; and the bright red cardinal, Mom.  And I know that there will be times when I am taken to the tapestry when I am unwilling.  Powerlessness is a part of my tapestry too, but not a major part any longer.  It has become just another part of a bigger whole.  The one that is all that I have been, Am and will Be.  My journey is that I accept what is.  That I embrace those threads of loss and longing and be thankful that they are an integral part of my life's tapestry.  Life happens on life's terms as they say in meetings.  We can rail against it or accept it.  It is the only life we have, until the next one comes along that this.

Aimless Discontent

I've been in recovery for seventeen and a half years and I can say that it is like nothing I ever imaged.  Looking back I'm not sure I ever thought about what it would look like in the first place.  In the early days of therapy and then being in the rooms I just did what I was told.  I showed up each week, occupied my seat, whether that was on my therapists couch or elsewhere.  It wasn't until well into it that things started to change, and not for the better.  No one tells you during those first months that physical and/or emotional sobriety strips away the protective coatings that one has adapted to survive.  Mine where honed when I was a young child; expertly so.  Simply put, during my childhood it was develop the skills or die.  The insanity was that real.  There's a saying in the rooms, one peels away the layers like an onion working towards finding the core, those hidden things that drive us into creating our own adult insanity.  My insanity predisposed me to drink, to muck into other peoples lives, sex addiction, and having an obsession with myself.  There were a lot of layers, still are.  Within my experience of recovery there has never been an end point, just a continual journey towards health and light.  I suspect I will be on this road until I take my last breath and beyond into my next life and the one after that as I laughingly like to say.  My baggage is that potent.
When I was nearing the end of my time in therapy in 2015 I started experiencing feelings of aimless discontent.  I said that to my therapist one day, that I didn't see what good was coming of me occupying my seat each week.  He looked upon that as a good thing.  I did not.  Aimless discontent can be an uncomfortable place to be.  One looks around for inspiration or just for having a purpose to move from one day to the next and finds none.  I didn't realize at the time that in actuality aimless discontent is, as my therapist had said, a good thing.  Within it there is peace.  For too many years I lived with anxiety driven angst that colored every moment of my existence.  That is no longer the case.  Within the discontent there is clarity.  Within it there is love.  Love of oneself; and respect, particularly for the demons that once drove me to near insanity.  I told a friend recently that before recovery and for some time after I was the guy clinging, sometimes just by my fingertips, to the roof rack of an out of control bus careening on and off road.  At any given moment I did not know whether I was going to be thrown or not.  It was that bizarre.  Only I didn't even know the bus existed.  It was, simply put , my everyday reality, one borne out of my childhood experiences and the skill sets that I had honed in order to survive.
You hear in the rooms that we use the steps to re-parent ourselves.  This is true in my case.  I have done this and continue to because in many ways the adults that were charged with my care as a child were children themselves, only ones in adult sized bodies.  This is not to say that all things were insane.  They were not.  We had the essentials, a well kept home, clean clothes, good food.  We had some moral guidance albeit borne out of a fundamentalist background.  The window dressings were all there, the substance was not.  Those things like meaningful expressions of love, emotional support, a sense of real safety, the kind that allows children to explore the world knowing that the adults in the rooms have their back.  That they can take risks, step outside the box, because they have been instilled with an sense of self and genuine authenticity.  It takes real skill to provide a home where these qualities exists, where the child can explore the wonders of the world around them and still feel safe.  This is what the core of my recovery has become as I peel away the layers; providing for my inner children what they never had when we were all young.
Being a man of a certain age also drives my aimless discontent.  I am looking at retiring and what my life will look like.  Work has never been my calling.  I enjoy it.  It can be challenging though, and frustrating, wildly so at times; but for me, work has always been just a means to an end, the vehicle to which I use to fund my real life.  Gardening has always been my calling.  More recently writing too.
I am looking forward to not having the constraints of time spent at work.  There are so many things I would love to do with my friends that I can not due to my work schedule.  Equally though, I would be perfectly content with puttering in the garden each day then relaxing in the evening with a cup of tea and a good book.   Or continuing the process of finishing my novel, well a trilogy as it now exists.  I am an Old Soul, An Old Soul in the City, and Within the Sunrise have been creating themselves within me for ten years and I'm looking forward to the day when they become fully themselves. There are other novels waiting to be written, The Gripman's Daughter and another about Harriet Beecher Stowe's son Freddie who disappeared after coming to San Francisco to escape his battle scarred demons borne of his Civil War experiences.  Retirement is an exciting prospect.
A friend asked me recently if I was happy.  I said no.  I told him I have many joyous moments but I am not happy.  I am content though.  Maybe the aimless discontent is, as I said earlier. me living with the absence of the drama and angst that drove me like a bullwhip for so much of my life.  Maybe aimless discontent is me existing with some degree of a sense of self and authenticity borne of love, peace, and of clarity.  Maybe I will name it Aimless Content instead, a Content that is the result of feeling relatively free of ones demons.  Whatever this is, it is my reality at the moment and I'm grateful for it and for the breath it provides.

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.