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.