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.
To: andrew@andrewsullivan.com
Subject: Putting Out Another Cigarette In Matt Shepard’s Body
Okay…I’m done with you. Finally. It looked like you grew a conscience after the Bush years but really you haven’t.
There is nothing mysterious or unexplained or hidden about what happened in Laramie that night. It’s all in the court transcripts and the news record of the days following the murder. This degenerate smear that he was having sex with his killers is appalling, especially considering what is in the fucking court record.
It’s so simple even you could get it. They asked him if he could read their license plate. This is according to their own statements. Why would that be necessary if he already knew them.
Look at it. No…really look at it. But that’s assuming you want to. That’s assuming striking out at the liberal menace isn’t still so much of an obsession with you that you’re perfectly willing to help others smear a murdered gay kid to do it.
Cancel my subscription. Do not automatically renew it or I will go to my credit card company and tell them you did it without my authorization. You have no conscience. You don’t. You cannot be trusted to tell the truth, and I have no use for an untrustworthy source of news Or opinion.
Not necessarily. George says he didn’t have his gun on his person. His (ex) lawyer says he did, but he didn’t pull it out and wave it around. I think there’s room here for another fairly obvious possibility.
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.
Florida can prosecute George Zimmerman even if his wife doesn’t press charge
Sure could. Just like the last time they prosecuted him. I’ll bet he’s quaking in his boots at the prospect. They’re birds of a feather with that resentful angry thug and you don’t seriously want your soul brother going to jail just because he waved a gun at his spouse, or killed an unarmed kid who’d just gone out for some snacks.
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.
Freedom’s Just Another Word For Nothing Left Inside
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…
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.
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.
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