Grieving for Gink

I'm the kind of person who tries to pre-deal with difficult experiences, as if somehow imagining what you'll do when your spouse dies or your parents die or your pets die will somehow make it easier. My creative abilities only seem to work when my anxieties manage to take over and induce imaginary trauma. It doesn't work: pre-crying doesn't reduce the amount of crying that comes with the actual event. Now that I've lost my boy furbaby, I can verify that for sure.

And, man, is my face sore. My eyes are almost swollen shut. I've been crying on and off for about 9 hours now. I'm glad I had about 5 hours between getting the call from the vet and the appointment. I was able to cycle through crying jags to calm periods that allowed me to still do mundane things like go pick up my prescription refill that I'd called in and fill up the car's gas tank. It also allowed me to just cry whenever I needed to and as much as I needed to.

I'm glad we decided to be with him when they gave him the injection. It was so fast and so peaceful, so there was nothing to cause me any concern, and he got to fall asleep forever with my hand on him. Seeing it happen, so calmly and easily, is a comfort to me.

Now I can really let myself think about the things that kept crossing my mind during the hours I was waiting for the appointment but were making his impending death more painful. I tried to force myself to wait until he was actually gone to let myself grieve for what we've lost.

We're never going to hear the kthunk-kthunk-kthunk of him carrying his wand toys up and down the stairs again. If there were any special toys or things that were his, it was the wands. Should I even keep them? Probably not, but I'll have to wait until it feels right to throw them away. Now I understand how "too soon" feels.

We now have eight food bowls for one cat. How long is it going to be before feeding time stops making my heart ache as I feed just one baby? I don't want to touch his dry food bowl. I don't want to remove it and leave an empty space or to wash away the traces of his face.

I'm never going to see Gink & Gytha together in the two sunroom windows, as they watch the birds or stare out into the night seeing things I can't see. It already seemed weird to see just Gytha up there when Gink was sick. They were not true siblings and were never close. But one of the few things they did "together" was to sit in those open windows for hours sometimes.

He's never going to startle me again as he leaps and scrabbles at the front window, trying to catch dead leaves as they whip around outside.

I've even thought of a few "positive" things about Gink being gone: no more scratching up the door frames, no more having to keep all plastic and tape where he can't get to it, no more pissing on the front porch, half the cat food bill, less cat litter and hair to clean up. But then I find myself thinking, "I'd give anything to keep dealing with those things if I could have him back."

But that's just not the way life works. And I'm sometimes okay with that. Yet, there's this ache in my chest and now that he's really gone I'm getting a queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach thinking about these things. I'm starting to feel the hole in my life, and the hole feels bigger than the cat whose death has created it.

I've dreaded this day. I've found myself trying to plan for it as I laid in bed at night trying to sleep and tearing up instead. I've forced myself not to dwell on it. And that's what I'm going to have to do now. Keep busy, let life keep moving. It was probably the best possible experience we could have had for what it was. And I'm deeply, so deeply, grateful for that. But it still hurts like hell.

Gink would have been 14 next month, and for all but a few months of that time I was his Cat Mommy. I was closely bonded with both of my cat babies --they both usually slept with us, liked laps, followed me around the house when I was home. Gink would always follow me upstairs when I got home from work, jump up on the bed, roll over on his back, and yell at me until I paid attention to him. He was the one who would lay across my back if I was laying on my stomach, or snuggle up under my arm when I was laying on my back. Sometimes he would rub his face on my face. He was Sexy Cat, Ginky Boy, Whiny Butt. There will never be another cat like him, and I will always love him.