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…]