Put my bird feeders back up over the weekend. After I’d finished I noticed I seemed more awake, more aware of…everything…than I had in a long time.

I’d stopped feeding a couple winters ago (counting this one) because the mess was getting more annoying than I wanted to deal with. Birds are messy eaters and the shells get tossed every friggin’ where. Plus the additional cost of stocking up on big sacks of seed before winter set it was more one year that I wanted to bear.

But there was more to it, and even back then I knew it in that just-barely-aware space where you put things you flinch away from looking at too closely. Somehow I’d just lost interest. It’s weird, but looking back on it now I think I know why. The front yard was Claudia’s hangout and when she died, counter intuitively, I lost interest in the bird feeders.

I think it was the feeders were something I enjoyed looking out at.  Watching birds at the feeders is one of those little joys I’ve indulged ever since kidhood. I’d have them out on the apartment balconies everywhere mom and I lived. One of the big deals of having a house of my own was I could really indulge it if I had a nice yard and space to put up different kinds of feeders for different kinds of birds. Then it happened and afterward I didn’t much care about the front yard anymore. Or more specifically, looking out the front window.

It’s odd and interesting how emotions can seem to be about one thing when they’re really about something else. I had no noticeable aversion to looking out the front window at the front yard and the street. I did it often if only to check on the weather and my car from time to time. My house being an middle-group rowhouse doesn’t have side windows, so the front, which faces the south, is my main source of sunlight. So it always got its blinds opened first thing in the morning. Had there been  something making me actually flinch away from the window I’d have noticed it and walked it back to the source. But it was only disinterest in feeding the birds starting that winter. That little joy didn’t matter much anymore for some reason. So I took the feeders down. And without the feeders I never bothered looking out that window much, except to check on the weather, and the car. It’s been years since it happened  and  I still sometimes get flashbacks of glancing out that window and seeing Claudia thrashing on the street, and knowing in that instant  she’d been run over.

Last Friday while telecommuting I saw a chickadee hopping around on my Japanese maple looking for the feeders that used to be out there and I thought I should go dig out one of the small sunflower seed feeders. It was a chore because all the feeders were in a storage container under the backyard deck and the outside door to it was still blocked by the huge pile of snow I’d shovelled off the deck. I could get to it from the basement door but I just knew it would be covered in funnel spider condos which I just didn’t want to get near without a lot of de-spider spray. Plus it was blocked off with workshop items like the table saw and ironically, the storage cans where I keep the wild bird seed.

But I got into it anyway and cleared out the spider encampment (I swear this spring I’m hiring an exterminator to de-spider the space under my deck) and worked my way to the container with the bird feeders in it. I ended up taking most of the stuff in it out. As I began setting things back up in the front yard something apparently awakened inside. I found myself trekking to the Wild Birds Unlimited out in Cockeysville and buying some new feeders and mounting poles, and some fresh suet cakes for the woodpeckers. And when I’d finished I looked at my front yard  it seemed with fresh eyes, like as though for the past couple years I’d not really been seeing it right there in front of me.

Figured it might take me months to get my old customers back. They were all there by the end of that day.

I still keep flashing back to the memory of seeing Claudia thrashing on the street after she’d been hit, and bending over her as she died. It’s a horrible memory but it isn’t sticking to me as much now, or coming back as often.   I told some co-workers that BGE was coming to my house today to install the new smart meters and one of them who didn’t know asked if I had a pet and I said that I used to and I guess something in my voice told her to leave it at that. Then I flashed back for a while but it stopped pretty soon after.   It isn’t cutting me up so much now that I don’t see her coming to greet me, tail held high when I come home.   I’ve pretty much stopped calling her name quietly while standing alone out on my porch at night.

So it goes…

Cats are not the most noisy of this good earth’s creatures, and yet it’s amazing how…quiet…my house is now without her.  I’m listening for small things…the sound of her collar tags tinkling, her feet bounding up the stairs, that odd little gravelly voice she had. When she was in the house every now and then I’d hear her little feet, usually going up or down the stairs or hopping off the kitchen counter.  She’d find me either down in the art room working on something or upstairs in the bedroom napping, announce herself in that little voice and then walk over to where I was for some attention. More often than not, it got me away from the computer. I was slowly beginning to rediscover what a life was like away from one.

There’s nothing in the house now but silence.  And…me, lost somewhere inside of it.

In retrospect it’s amazing how quickly the morning routine with Claudia became, well, a routine. Before Claudia it was get up, bathroom, then some undetermined activity, maybe the computer, maybe putting out the trash or filling the dishwasher, brewing some coffee, or maybe making myself some sandwiches for lunch, then out the door to work on workdays, or Whatever if it was the weekend or stay at home vacation.   After Claudia it was always feed the cat, and that was a routine into itself, a pattern I quickly and neatly fell into.

I stopped going downstairs until I was fully dressed.   No more wandering down from the second floor only partially clothed, if at all.   Because if she was out for the night first thing when I got downstairs was open the door and let her in. No point in letting the neighbors see an unclothed Bruce at the door…they probably think I’m weird enough as it is.   She’d be right there at the door talking to me the moment she heard the deadbolt key turn, and as soon as I had the door open just a crack she was inside.   Then there would be a pause with her back to me, waiting for some petting and stroking. Then I got led to the kitchen. In her last couple weeks I was gradually trying to get her used to staying inside overnight.   So then the routine was I had to wait until I was dressed before I even opened the bedroom door because she’d either be there waiting, or at the foot of the stairs.   And once she laid eyes on me the Feed The Cat routine started, and it never varied much.

After the morning greeting she would lead me into the kitchen. I would walk over to the sink and her tail would go up and start vibrating, which is cat love. And I would get one of her stainless steel dishes and hand wash it if it wasn’t already clean (a solitary guy doesn’t fill the dishwasher fast enough to run it every night) and dry it off while she rubbed against my legs. Her food would either be from the can or something from the fridge…perhaps some carved turkey slices I’d bought from Trader Joe’s for both of us.   I’d bring some out and start cutting it up for her bowl and she’d stand up on her hind legs with her front on the counter door and scratch at it…I didn’t mind, she wasn’t hurting it, I keep meaning to get some new cabinetry put in because I really don’t like the fuax country kitchen decor the previous owners installed…and I’d reach down and give the back of her neck a scratch and go back to what I was doing.   Throughout the process she’d talk to me and I’d talk to her…

Good Morning! Hungry are we? Well you’re in luck! I was just about to put some food into one of these little stainless steel dishes and set it on the floor. It’s this little ritual I have. So you came along at Just The Right Moment! All these years I’ve had this tick of putting food into little stainless steel dishes and setting it on the floor and now all that food doesn’t have to go to waste anymore! Like it do you? Swell! This works out pretty well for both of us doesn’t it? I put food in one of these little stainless steel dishes and put it on the floor and you come along and eat it. Come back this afternoon…I might do it again. You never know….

I used to have shameless fun with it…

Hungry are you? Carnivore you say? Say…this might work out for both of us. You see, I have this turkey corpse hidden in the fridge. Trader Joe asked me to get rid of it for him. Here’s my proposition: You could slowly eat it…come back here every now and then and I give you some. Come alone….understand? Deal? We work this right and you get food, and I get rid of a dead body for Trader Joe. You in? Dead bird is just fine with you is it? Exxxxcellent…

Then I’d put it down on the floor for her, give her a few more pets as she dug in…

…and while I was there and she was eating I’d make some food for myself to take in to work, which in the long run was probably better and healthier for me and certainly a lot cheaper.   I’d grind some coffee to take in to work, pack some lunch, and by then we were both ready for our day.   She came to me a determinedly outdoor cat, it was how I came to have her in the first place as Ben, her previous owner, just couldn’t keep her inside.   So for the first months of our friendship, and then the first few weeks of my officially being her owner (or employee more likely), I didn’t bother trying to keep her inside when she wanted out.   I would sling on my backpack, put on a hat, set the alarm and we’d both walk out the door together.   I’d say something like “Watch the mansion dear…” or “Keep an eye on the neighborhood…” and off I’d go.

Most workdays she would be waiting for me when I got home, and if she wasn’t there a call of her name and she always came running.   Always.   And then came the afternoon routine.

No more. It’s amazing how lost I feel now. Aimless. My life here at Casa del Garrett has simply reverted back to what it has always been for the first eleven years since I’ve lived here, and I don’t know how to do that anymore. It isn’t intuitive. I’m just doing what I think my mornings were always like. But I don’t know anymore what they’re supposed to be like.

Everyone, almost without exception, tells me I should get another cat when the time is right.   I am almost inclined to agree, maybe.   But any cat I bring into my life again will have to be a strictly indoor cat because I am not carrying another much loved pet back to the front porch with a broken body. So what kind of life can I offer an indoor cat?   Well, I have a house of my own, and it has three levels and lots of space to run around and find places to lounge in.   But it gets little direct sunlight into it because of the Japanese maples out front, and the aluminum awnings a previous owner put over the windows.   I could put some places up by all the windows for it (her…it would probably be another her) to lounge on and watch the world outside go by. But I would hate to think I was keeping it (her) imprisoned. There’s a reason you can’t keep a cat confined indoors once it’s had the taste of the outdoors.   A life confined indoors would disturb me.   But I can’t be picking up another broken body off the street.

The worst of it though is…it’s just me living there.   I go to work.   I go here and there when I’m not at work.   For a walk when I need it.   In my car when I need that.   Cat’s don’t do cars very well.   Neither do most motels.   The cat would be by itself a lot, and taken care of by a stranger who comes by just long enough to feed it (her) and clean the litter box when I’ve gone on vacation somewhere.   It just wouldn’t be fair.   I take your love and affection and then I leave you alone whenever it’s something I need to do.

It isn’t that another cat wouldn’t be good for me.   Claudia’s love convinced me I need companionship more than I’d thought. I’ve been searching for my other half since I was a teenager in first love, and telling myself that I’d rather be alone then fake it with Mr. For Tonight or Mr. Good Enough.   But alone is more damaging than I’d really realized.   It isn’t that another cat wouldn’t be good for me.   It’s would I and my life be good for a cat.   At least Claudia had the world outside the house too.

It’s been over a day since I’ve had a crying jag.  Still occasionally flashing back to when I saw she’d been hit, but it isn’t preoccupying me anymore and I can deflect those remembrances toward other happier memories of her more easily now.  Walking through my day is a bit less of a pantomime.  I still keep calling to her though, every now and then.

Happy 60th Birthday Bruce…

I can’t help myself…I keep calling her name when I come back to the house, like I used to, along with some of the other patter I made for her as I walked with her up the steps, or greeted her when she came to me…but more softly so the neighbors won’t hear me doing it.  I guess that not wanting the neighbors to hear is some sort of evidence that I haven’t lost my mind completely, but at some point I will probably stop it altogether because it is a bit, nuts.

Sometimes even the most rational of people can find themselves wishing ghosts were a real thing, find themselves hoping to see a certain one.

She’s gone…I know she’s gone.   But some reflex keeps me looking for her at the door whenever I open it first thing in the morning.   She’d hear the key in the deadbolt turn and hop off the bed I put out for her, or the chair or the side table if that’s where she happened to be, and was right there against the lower left corner of the door where it opened, telling me it was time for breakfast.   I used to peek out the front window to see where she was stationed in the morning…she would always be either watching the street or one of the neighbors…and gently turn the key to see if I could get it unlocked before she knew it.   I never did.   The instant it made the slightest noise her head would turn and the game was up.

She’s not there at the door now, she’ll never be there again, but some reflex keeps expecting to see her initially and I glance there.   And then it figures it out.

First day home from work in what seems like ages, but was actually more like four months, that a little gray dear isn’t waiting for me.   If I took the car in to work, even if I didn’t see her bounding toward it while I was parking, I eventually came to know she’d be there, sitting on the sidewalk when I walked around the car.   There you are… But occasionally she wasn’t there, and then I’d call to her as I walked toward the steps to the porch.   Clauuudia…Clauuudia… For some reason I got a kick out of pronouncing her name that way.   And I’d see her come running, sometimes from the front yard of one of the the houses across the street, sometimes from a neighbor’s porch.   She’d stop a couple feet from me, tail held high, and talk to me, and I’d walk over and pet her and stroke her and complain that her tail had a few specs of dirt in it again and try to get some of it out, and we’d both walk up the front steps to the porch. She was always there when I came home. Always. Waiting for me. Happy to see me.

I couldn’t help myself…I’m still a bit out of my mind. I called to her as I walked up the steps.   Clauuudia…Clauuudia… But more softly than usual so my neighbors wouldn’t hear and call for the padded wagon.   At least I don’t have to worry about me putting food out for her in the kitchen too, because I gave what I had left that she will never need now to Ben for her brother.

After work I went to Valley View to look for a cat statue for the front yard rock garden I’m going to make for her.   It’ll have to be a rock garden because that spot, where she loved to lounge, gets almost total shade from the Japanese maples in the front yard and I can never get anything to grow there.   I’m going to scatter some of her ashes there when I get them from the pet cemetery, and make a spot for her memory.   Valley View had one decent cat garden statue…it had the right pose and the right attitude to put someone in mind of her, but it had some angel wings on it and that was a bit much. A visitor should know her little spirit had wings without needing to actually see them.   That’ll be the art I put into it.

So I go to bed now, and it’s all as it was before Claudia came into my life.  I have nothing to worry about before hitting the sack.  No one to check on and see if maybe she wants to spend the night inside for a change.  No one to open the door for and look to see if she wants to come in for a snack before her nightly duties, whatever they were.  No one to check on before bed.  I have no one to look after now.  I don’t have to turn the nightlights I bought for the basement now, so she can find her way to the litter box in the basement bathroom if she needs to.  She only used it once but it reassured me she knew where it was and I could leave her inside for an extended period without worrying she’d leave a deposit somewhere else.  I don’t have to clean her food dishes, or make sure she had some dry food out.  I don’t have to check the water fountain.  I can just hit the sack and not a care in the world when I do.  Freedom is such an empty thing.  Like my house is again.  Like I am.  Like I’ve always been except for a few weeks this summer when I was loved by a little thing who didn’t have to notice me at all but she did out of everyone else here on the block.

This afternoon was better than this morning.   This morning I was still flashing back to the moment I discovered Claudia had been hit. Yesterday it was happening to me constantly.   Now its much less often, and when it happens it isn’t as excruciatingly painful.   I’m still grieving badly over losing her, but it’s not overwhelming me so often.   Perhaps tonight I’ll actually be able to rest in bed without repeatedly flashing back to it.

Over the past couple days I’ve watched the few small drops of blood on my front porch slowly fading away.   They fell from her as I carried her away from the street and to my house.   When I cradled her up off the street I could feel that her body was all broken up inside.   I remember I kept trying to be careful so as to not to hurt her more, as if it would have made any difference at that point, but I was out of my mind.   I’m still not altogether right.

On the front porch was a little pet bed I’d bought for her, not knowing if she’d like it but figuring I could try something else if she didn’t.   She had a spot on the front porch she liked and so I put the bed there and the next time I looked out she was fast asleep in it.

She loved that thing.   I eventually bought another one just like it for the living room, and of course she seldom used that one, preferring instead a spot on the floor just in front of the sofa.

So I took her broken body over to the little bed she loved and laid her down in it.   Then I went inside and got a cloth and covered her with it, and that was how I eventually delivered her to the pet cemetery for cremation, bed and all.   When I came back home I noticed the blood on the porch and I couldn’t bear to clean it up because it felt like erasing her and I wasn’t ready to start picking up all her things inside the house and putting them away, let alone tend to the damage outside.   Some neighbors kindly washed off the street for me.

A few more days and those little spots on the porch floor will probably be gone.   Maybe by then the worst of this will have passed too.

Going though my photo archives trying to size up what I have of Claudia.   Given that she’d only appeared on my front porch back in April and I only had her officially for five weeks, I didn’t expect to find much.   But there’s quite a bit there, because almost as soon as she started making herself at home here at Casa del Garrett, I started snapping off shots with the iPhone because it was handy.   The tragedy of getting yourself too involved in photography as an artistic pursuit is everything you do with your cameras becomes a part of that and just documenting your day to day life falls through the cracks.   She was this amazing new thing that came into my life…completely unexpected…and eventually I did start focusing the good cameras on her.   But in the randomness of it all I am so grateful now for that cell phone camera: it was always on my hip.

This was taken during one of her initial explorations of Casa del Garrett. I don’t think at this point I even knew whose cat she was, just that she was a neighborhood domestic cat who probably belonged to someone else and was constantly, and to my delight, confusing my house for theirs, so I kept letting her in.   Here she’s wandering around in my upstairs bedroom while I sat by the door just watching her explore.   As she came back over to me I reached for the iPhone and turned on the camera app and then with the phone in the left hand I reached around to give her a scratch with the other.   The expression on her face is typical. She was never hesitant or wary around me…never.   And that was the most amazing thing because I was at this point, still a total stranger.   However it is cats size people up, she’d somehow taken my measure that first time she bolted into the house, and proceeded to make herself at home. It was as if she’d known me, somehow, forever.

And I didn’t want a pet, and there she was, and there I was and it made prefect sense and I didn’t want it to. All my cast iron resolution that the last cat I’d had back in the 1980s was it after I came home one day and he was dead…no more pets.   I had a ton of objectively sound reasons why a pet just didn’t fit into my life and that little dickens blew past all of them as fast as she’d bolted into the house that first time I laid eyes on her, when I opened my front door one April morning and she’s there on the front porch sitting quietly looking at me as if to say “Well finally you opened that damn thing.”

At some point I picked up Claudia’s brush and began teasing out what little was left in it of her shed fur.   Something for a keepsake, or perhaps just to keep the madness at bay.   I mourned I had so little to remember her by.   She loved the brush, absolutely loved it.   Claudia was a smokey grey domestic longhair.   Not very long, but you wouldn’t call her a shorthair by any means, and they need regular brushing.   So it became one of our routines in the afternoon after I came home from work, after feeding her and maybe letting her back out a time or two.   She would be lounging in the living room, maybe after I’d given her a treat, or played with her with the dangly fur toy I bought for her, and I would ask “Would you like the brush?”   Not sure if she ever recognized the word ‘brush’, but when she saw it in my hand the purring and rubbing against my legs would start.   I would end up with a well combed cat, and maybe a quarter sized ball of her smokey gray fur after I scraped it off the brush.

This morning it occurred to me that I hadn’t put out the trash in over a week (a solitary man leaves not much trash for the weekly pickup) and I might find one of those little bunches of her fur…so I opened up the trash can and dug through about three or four days of leavings and I found one. Rubbing it between my fingers I was put instantly in mind of how fine and soft her fur was. I need a small glass container for it.

I have a theory about how the grief becomes maddening when it’s the loss of someone who was physically there in your life, living under your roof as a spouse or lover would, or just always close at hand like a dear friend who you saw regularly.   Or a pet…a dearly beloved pet.   It’s this, I’m pretty sure…

Phantom limb

A phantom limb is the sensation that an amputated or missing limb (even an organ, like the appendix) is still attached to the body and is moving appropriately with other body parts. Approximately 60 to 80% of individuals with an amputation experience phantom sensations in their amputated limb, and the majority of the sensations are painful. Phantom sensations may also occur after the removal of body parts other than the limbs, e.g. after amputation of the breast, extraction of a tooth (phantom tooth pain) or removal of an eye (phantom eye syndrome). The missing limb often feels shorter and may feel as if it is in a distorted and painful position. Occasionally, the pain can be made worse by stress, anxiety, and weather changes. Phantom limb pain is usually intermittent. The frequency and intensity of attacks usually declines with time.

Although not all phantom limbs are painful, patients will sometimes feel as if they are gesturing, feel itches, twitch, or even try to pick things up. For example, Ramachandran and Blakeslee describe that some people’s representations of their limbs do not actually match what they should be, for example, one patient reported that her phantom arm was about “6 inches too short”…

Our brains map out our bodies, and when a piece of it goes missing it can take a while for the mapping to match the body once more.   I remember watching a news report about a poor young guy who’d lost an arm and said he could still feel it out there, and it was driving him crazy that the hand was in a fist he couldn’t unclench.

Our brains do a lot of post processing of the senses. Graphic artists learn how to use this effect to make you think a bunch of paint smears on a canvas or lines on a piece of paper are vast landscapes or people.   “Suggested mass” I’ve heard it called.   Lead an eye to a bunch of blue and turquoise paint on a canvas, and the brain will conclude its water.   Because you’ve seen water, you know how it looks under the sunlight at the beach or by the lake.   You remember.   The brain has that information stored away somewhere, and it helpfully fills in any missing pieces according to its own, still not well understood algorithms.

I strongly suspect our brains are also busy mapping out the world around us, and the people in it, and when someone goes missing, someone who was very close to us, it takes a while for that mapping to adjust to the new reality and things keep getting randomly filled in where your brain at some deep level still expects them to be.   So the day Claudia died, and I was wandering around the house stunned and finally collapsed on my bed, I heard her collar tags tinkling as she came bounding up my steps to the bedroom and it jolted me back up.   Of course she wasn’t there, and I glanced outside and saw a lady walking her dog and heard its collar tags tinkling and that was what set my brain off.   Oh, here comes Claudia.   But it wasn’t.   So I rested my head back on the pillow and tried to shut everything out for a moment, and I felt her hop onto the bed like she used to.   Yes, yes…you’re still in shock Bruce…it’s to be expected… And then I felt it again and I knew I had to get out of there.

I quickly packed an overnight bag and drove to the beach.   I wanted to sit by the shore for a while, listen to the eternal waves breaking on the shore, and then wander the boardwalk alone, surrounded by bright lights and loudspeakers and dozens of things trying to get my attention all at once, and I could in the noise and happy chaos of it all be constantly distracted enough that I wouldn’t keep reliving her last minute on this good earth, and maybe find a few moments of peace.

[Edited just a tad…]

If only I could stop flashing back to that moment when I looked out the window and saw her thrashing on the street in front of my house.  If only I could stop reliving that last minute of her life.

I’m trying now, whenever the images come rushing back, to deflect them away by thinking instead of the things Claudia did when she was alive.  Like the way she would run down to the car to greet me when I got home from work. It was something the neighbors noticed. She quickly learned to recognize my car and when it pulled up to the curb there she was. It became a routine. She’d greet me at the sidewalk next to the car, tail held high, and I’d take my stuff out of the trunk and walk over to her and stroke her, then tell her she’d gotten dirt in her tail again and I’d try to get it out until she became annoyed (the brush, which she loved, was more successful and getting her tail clean), and then we’d walk together to the front door.

I thought cats didn’t do that. The stereotype is they never come unless it’s hearing the can opener. But she always ran to me whenever I came home, and often in the evenings when I opened the door. It was, I swear, like the opening titles to Lassie. She would just come bounding toward me.  And in the house, in the kitchen as I readied her food dish, she would stroll around my feet, giving me that vibrating tail that is a signal of cat love.  She would put her front paws up on the sink cabinet and claw at the door looking up into my face and I would reach down and give the back of her neck a scratch.  Sometimes she would leap up onto the counter top and drink from the sink faucet…cats prefer running sources of water, she would never drink from the bowl. So I bought her one of those pet water fountains they sell nowadays, and watched as the little noise its pump made, plus her cat curiosity, drew her to it to investigate. She began drinking from it immediately.

All those things she did that I’ll never see again. I only had her officially for a little over a month. It’s like I’m just not allowed to have any relationship of mutual unconditional love and joy in my life. When the images of her in the street and me bending down to her howling myself horse like it was me that got hit come rushing back I try to think of something she always did while she was alive.  But it keeps coming back, that moment I looked out the window and thought for a second she was scratching her back on the concrete like she sometimes did on the sidewalk, and then I realized.

I’ve received a lot of love and sympathy from my friends on Facebook, and my neighbors here on Redfern.  Her previous owner and his roommates left a sympathy card by my door last night with their thoughts inside.  My brother called me and we talked.  It’s been a big help.  But sometimes it feels like my brain wants to leave my head and float away and it scares me.  This happened to me when mom passed away and I got through it by just letting it happen, and going through the motions of my life.  I think I can manage it again.  I can do housework tomorrow, and tidy up the spot in my front yard where she liked to lay, and where I’ll scatter her ashes when I get them back from the pet cemetery.