I don't want to be here. I don't want to be facing a blank page, trying to figure out what is left to be said about Cricket. I don't want to have another dead cat in my freezer, waiting for me to dig another grave beside my garage. I don't want to be crying like a child every few minutes, until my eyes burn and my head hurts. I don't want to have to spend the next two to three weeks cleaning my house, to remove all traces of her illness, where she pooped on the floor for months, and it seeped between floor boards and tiles before I could find it and scrub it with gallons of sanitizers and miles of paper towels. I don't want to feel relief that that part is over, and I can stop having to clean up poop two and three times a day, sometimes more. I don't want to go through all the stages of grief, until I arrive at the acceptance that she is no longer hurting, no longer scared. And above all, I don't want to have to go through this alone again.
I've told the story of my beautiful calico before, very recently. She and her sister were abandoned outside, on the doorstep of the shelter, on a cool, early April morning. Someone left the whole litter in a paper grocery bag, and the shelter split the litter between two nursing mothers. When my girls and I arrived a week or two later, we claimed the two of them, eventually reuniting them. I believe names should have meaning, and I gave them names that showed that they survived a huge obstacle and thrived. Even before they were old enough to come home with us, they were named Georgia Pacific and Stone Container, in reference to the paper bag that transported them to the shelter. Nicknames quickly replaced their official names, but we still sometimes called my girl Georgia. People say that calicos are one person cats, and Cricket was entirely my cat. I never doubted for a moment that I was her favorite mama, of the three that she had by the time she became mine. The smug look on her face that she threw at the girls, whenever she sat on my lap, changed our entire lexicon. From the moment I put voice to her expression, the word "poopyhead" became the most uttered word in our house. (The original statement was "I'm in mommy's lap and you're not because you are poopyheads.")
The last several months have been difficult. I knew Torden was running out of time, even before we moved out here. He was a very old cat and had gotten frail and stiff. He'd already beat the odds by fifteen years. But if anyone had told me even six months ago that I would lose Cricket so soon, I wouldn't have believed it. This blindsided me. I really didn't recognize what was happening to her until it was way too late, and I'm going to spend the rest of my life wondering whether I could have changed the outcome. At this point, I would have had to have read the signs more than a year ago, because she was sick for far longer than I knew. She had already become thin, or at least completely ceased being chubby, by the time my man left in April of last year. I just interpreted that as her becoming a senior, and not needing to carry so much weight. I was so blind.
I have a lot of grieving to do. I am so ready for this annus horribilus to end.
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