Sunday, December 30, 2007

paws

Pet Bereavement websites---Bobby the ferret, Merl cat, Davey dog--pictures and remembrances. The sites I've read all advise that the bereaved shouldn't mitigate their grief based on the differing reactions they get from people. "Some people won't understand the special intimacy you shared with your pet--the unconditional love your pet gave you. Your pet may have been like a child to you." I mistakenly thought I was too cool for that not so long ago, but now the site of a little furry mite tugs at my heart. Not rats, mind you. Yuck.

Listening to NPR all day today as Poopy pads across my mind, not like a wraith, but a very strong memory, or maybe a vision, a familiar orange reflection. There was a doctor on who was a pioneer in alternative healing modalities and the treatment of the whole person and not just their physical maladies. She said that those "on the edge of life" could become healers, teachers of what it is to live a full life. I realize that feeling grief is fundamentally different than depression, which is kind of an absence of feeling, or just a prevailing despair, where as grief is more a deep well of emotion, and fear, and anger, and howling--but feeling to every nerve end. There is something quite pure about it. It has a realism where depression just has masks. I feel very clear in my grieving. I know why it's happening, I know that it has to run it's course, I know that it will ebb and flow, I know that I have to be gentle with it.

So the little box came--some sort of cherry-colored wood with a little lock and key--two keys--now who would I give a key to? I can't believe that Poopy is in there. I don't have any regrets about how she died other than the fact that I wasn't there, but the fundamental question is where did "she" go? Whatever she is now? I have such a strong sense of her, so I know that that essence is still here, wherever "here" is. I have a vague belief in the spiritual, other lives, other selves, and I know she's not in the little cherry-colored box--though I like to pet it--the wood is very smooth--and I have the sense of another place. I've had this sense before--people have come to me, especially Inez, best friend of my grandmother, who approaches me in dreams just as I saw her once in the Kmart parking lot. She tells me things, helpful things, in her no-nonsense, way, with her familiar nasal voice---vivid visions. Nothing frightening to me. Maybe the key is in the listening. Maybe I'm straining with all my strength to hear Poopy, to see her, since it's so hard to take in that she ain't here anymore.

But it's more poetic, don't you think, more spiritually comforting to believe that she's walking with me now, her right paw flexed as she waits for me to catch up, "C'mon, woman," she seems to be saying.

My hilarious Momm said that she doesn't want any urns with "cremains" around because she'd be too curious, wanting to open them up to see the contents. Unto dust, eh? I have no such compunction.

One day I'll pick up her toys, and her waterfall water bowl, and her food bowl and her brush and all the cans of cat food, and her toothbrush and her blanket and her heating pad, and her glamour-puss kitty carrier, and her high blood pressure pills, and her catnip and her scratch pad and her litter box, and her nail clippers, and the beige jacket she liked to lie on, and the stash of q-tips she collected in the moving box she liked to hide in, and the moving box, and I'll throw them away. I'll keep one of the fake mice, one of the ones that still has ears and a tail, to keep with the cherry-colored box. I'll ask some of my friends to come by and do a ritual, a little remembering.
but not today or tomorrow or
this week or
next.

Sunday, December 23, 2007

sun

Spoke with a duck today. We were sharing the pool. He was eider and grape, with a curly feather on his hind end. I was Boston winter white, in a cheap blue bathing suit that bunches around the bum. He was surprised that I was in the water as most of the other spa denizens lay shivering in the mid-Winter desert sunshine, but the water was heated and I'd sat in the sun's heat, reading Newsweek which is enough to raise a penguin's temperature, all that pandering and balderdash. "Are you Poopy?" I asked him. He deigned to answer, which would be just like Poopy, but he did shake his wing at me before settling on the rough, red paving stones next to the pool steps. Perhaps a "friend of Poopy".

He watched me inch my way into the deeper water, waist, breasts, neck, and, finally, the plunge and the glory of weightlessness, that faint memory of returning to the womb. I swam toward the pounding waterfall, drizzly drops pelting my face. My avian friend quacked, just once. A duck of few words. 

This morning I sat on the balcony of our room, and a tiny, fat bird flew from the nearest palm tree to the balcony's railing, holding a juicy berry in it's beak. "Are you Poopy?" I asked him, and he gulped his berry down, just like Poopy would attack a mound of Fancy Feast Seafood delight.  He regarded me with his tiny beady eye, cocking his head this way and that.

Perhaps Poopy is now everywhere, in every creature, on every breeze  (though hopefully not with post-Fancy Feast Seafood delight breath).  Poopy as a state of mind.

There is wonder in the rawness of loss. This is hope in despair. 
Just remind me of this later, when everything is more real, and the world isn't filled with talking ducks and sunshine.

Friday, December 21, 2007

Poopy died today

of course I can't believe she's gone
maybe if I had seen her enormous spirit rise from her tiny body
maybe if I'd been able to bury my face in her soft, warm fur once more
maybe if I'd seen her in the incubator, trying to breathe and waiting for my plane to land
or maybe it's just the normal shock when someone you love leaves this particular stage for another

So surreal
here in the land of the desert moon
flat vistas and clear sunlight
I think of how she'd think of all this sand as a giant litter box
I think of our last day together when she lay at my side, pressing her cold nose to my forehead and smelling my hair
I think of how she settled herself on my thigh as I slept, stretching out to her full length which could seem so long, her purr a little motor of contentment
I think of how she chased her little fake mouse down the stairs just this past Wednesday
How she mewed and stamped her front paws for her supper
how she settled herself across my laptop keyboard, never mind what I was doing
pet me
love me
stroke me
tickle me
scratch my chin, damnit
how a little being 1/40th my size
could fill my heart and always will reside there.


All the sadness could drive you mad.

but then...there's the Happy Acres Pet Cemetery

for some reason, speaking with the Happy Acres representative, her voice soft and respectful about the disposition of the "cremains"...seemed comical...maybe the surreal became absurd
I pictured her little orange body laid out in a tiny coffin with tufted satin inside the lid, perhaps a picture of the blessed virgin embossed on the material
Her little paws pressed together
And a barrel-chested preacher who never knew her intoning her feline virtues...
"She was a faithful cat. A loving cat. The kind of pet that everyone wishes for but few are fortunate enough to encounter..."
My friends file past, paying their respects, and wondering if I've finally lost my cookies having a full blown funeral for a cat.
Instead
I will receive a small wooden box with a lock and a tiny key
via UPS Ground.

Sunday, December 9, 2007

Roll on, church

"The conservative Diocese of San Joaquin (CA) voted Saturday to split from the liberal-leaning Episcopal Church, becoming the first full diocese to secede from the denomination in the debate over the Bible and homosexuality." - CNN

Do you ever feel like the world is spinning backward--evolution, the progress of human thought and achievement seems to not only to have stopped, but to have regressed--and a church body, supposedly a symbol of "good" and "love" can vote such a pronouncement--can say, effectively, that a group of people are "wrong" because of who they are. I realize the naivete of this statement--history is stuffed with such pronouncements, so many behaviors based on hate, fear, but how can we credit it? This God that so many sects and factions claim to know, claim to represent, profess to know the meaning of, who is supposed to be about love, has compelled a group of Episcopalians in the San Joaquin valley to denounce a group of people because of their sexual preference. In 2007. Just the sheer inhumanity of it, the blatant UNLOVE this kind of action belies, screams of the demonic, the evil, the discord and woe that sparks war, poverty, famine, and that dearth of spirit that keeps us apart as people, as cultures, as nations--the evil these very San Joaquin Episcopalians claim to fight against.

I think I'm finally understanding now why some members of the choral community to which I belong have had such visceral reactions to one of the venues in which we sing where a church also has services, a church aligned with groups that abhor homosexuality, that publish doctrines of exclusion--I understood the basic argument, that we as a group that believes in inclusion, in fact, a community that comes together exclusively for the love of singing no matter what the singer's belief system, shouldn't perform in a place where this kind of hatred is professed, but I thought that our very presence, like those of the brave Black students who sat at segregated lunch counters in the '50's and '60's would make a difference. The fact that we sing with respect, songs from many cultures, would obliterate, for the brief moments our voices rose high into the rafters, the stink of this kind of evil.

But, damn, I feel the despair. The sapping of energy from having too many fights to fight. The wisdom of choosing battles. The great cry from a suffering world that is too loveless, too afraid, too at odds with its own humanity.

The eternal question.

I read a beautiful article about a famous author who dealt with crippling depression for the last half of his life. He, of course, wrote some of his best work during this time and this idea has spurred me on to write more even in the black pit I now find myself, struggling with the notion that depression is a biological disease and not a character flaw, a chemical imbalance and not the result of not "applying" myself enough in therapy, or of eating too much sugar, or of not having a significant other. To tease out these distinctions is, I think, essential to healing, and of course very very very difficult.

Someone sent me a book by an author who thinks that all disease is brought on by inner turmoil and can, therefore, be cured by resolving that turmoil. Before I was sick, I leaned toward this notion, but now I think there are some diseases that happen through a cascade of factors now of which have anything to do with anything currently measurable, and certainly can't be attributed to personal problems or failures. Depression, though often brought on by circumstances, is, at its root, a brain malfunction. What's really interesting is that I have been able to impact my brain chemistry, not just with medication, but with the concious effort to manage negative, habitual thoughts and by building up pleasurable experiences, kind of an engineering of joy, through a lot of practice and skills training.

And so, though I am low today, blue, blue, blue, for many reasons--and though, due to physical illness, I don't have the energy and wherewithal to practice my skills today, I endure. I survive. It ain't pretty, it's very painful, it's quite raw and it IS NO FUN. But it is a progress of its own.