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. \u00a0If only I could stop reliving that last minute of her life.<\/p>\n
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. \u00a0Like 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.<\/p>\n
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. \u00a0And 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. \u00a0She 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. \u00a0Sometimes 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.<\/p>\n
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. \u00a0But 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.<\/p>\n
I’ve received a lot of love and sympathy from my friends on Facebook, and my neighbors here on Redfern. \u00a0Her previous owner and his roommates left a sympathy card by my door last night with their thoughts inside. \u00a0My brother called me and we talked. \u00a0It’s been a big help. \u00a0But sometimes it feels like my brain wants to leave my head and float away and it scares me. \u00a0This 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. \u00a0I think I can manage it again. \u00a0I 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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. \u00a0If 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[166,167],"class_list":["post-7291","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-claudia","tag-grief"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7291","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7291"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7291\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}