Holding it Against Your Bones
Yesterday, I held my long-cherished cat Fletch as she died. She was a big girl, like a gravity blanket, and she felt warm and soft and present for many minutes after she left.
“Is she really dead? She doesn’t feel dead,” I kept asking my husband.
“Yes, honey, she’s gone.”
While Fletch and I had been close since the afternoon we adopted her 13 years ago, we became inseparable during COVID. She was always draped across my lap, pinning me down when I recorded podcasts or worked on the couch. It was a type of codependency, surely; I hated to leave her, and after her sister Dot died in February, I tried not to: Fletch was distraught after Dot passed from cancer, constantly meowing and searching, unless I was in the room. I think her sister’s death broke her heart.
I noticed Fletch’s labored breathing on Monday morning and immediately took her to the emergency vet; while the prognosis for heart failure is actually pretty decent for cats, she was diagnosed with HCM when she was four. Nine years ago, she was only supposed to live for a few more months. I knew, despite flutterings of hope, that it was probably time. While I waited for the vet to give me an update, a friend called to tell me his cherished dog had passed; another friend texted that his first love had suffered a stroke and died. These were smoke signals to me to prepare for the worst—I knew death was in the air.
It’s funny, because a week ago, my husband went to Petco for litter and started texting me pictures of two sisters up for adoption there via a local shelter. Months ago, after Dot died, Rob had warned me that after Fletch, we were going on a pet hiatus—no more cats—and so I took his enthusiasm as an opportunity. Four hours later, we had two kittens. Fletch watched them from my lap, largely unfussed though not enthused. When her breathing turned labored I worried the presence of the kittens had offended her into dying by protest; now, I see that she was simply passing the baton, ensuring she could go without leaving us abandoned and alone. I think she set Rob up for his fateful trip to Petco.
I am very sad. I recognize I’m writing about a cat, when many are staring down the holidays without their parents, their siblings, their lovers, their friends, or most inconceivably of all, their children. The holidays are hard; or more precisely, they’re life: Joyous with jagged edges, some days darker than others.
My friend Jennifer sent me this poem yesterday:
In Blackwater Woods by Mary Oliver
Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,
the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders
of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is
nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
She followed it with this message: “I wish I had a magic wand that kept everything you love right in your lap forever.”
I wish she had a magic wand, too, and I wish I had a magic wand for all of you. But as Mary Oliver reminds us, death is the counter-polarity of life. Death gives context and contour to love—we would never give up the latter out of fear of the former. I’m missing several beings this holiday season. I’m lonely for their company and yet so grateful to have loved them, and held them to my bones, for as long as I did.