Garden Woes/Whoas Revisited

This isn't the first time I've had to face the woes of what I call natural gardening. As I was going back through my blog to see if I'd posted about this before, I was totally surprised to find that three years ago (almost to the day) I'd already written a post with the exact same title I had come up with for this one! But after skimming the previous entry, I can happily say that I have a somewhat different take on it this time. 

Natural gardening means three main things for me: 1) I don't use serious toxic chemicals to either kill or enhance plant health, in part because 2) I'm attempting to provide habitat and food for beneficial insects and birds, but 3) I won't spend a lot of time and effort in general on babying plants to keep them thriving or even alive. Natural gardening means trying to establish an appealing and useful habitat, but only if it can adapt enough to take care of itself. I try to find the right place for each plant, and will try moving them if they don't seem happy. I only make an effort to water plants their first year (or after moving them) and then they are on their own. I occasionally try to build up my crappy soil with a little bit of compost, fish fertilizer, or other forms of organic fertilizer, but I don't do it regularly. Three years ago I had just started using Neem, and I still do. But I don't apply it regularly, and I'm not sure it even works against any of the problem bugs. 

Part of the bug problem is that I don't even know which bugs are responsible. Not that knowing would help, I suppose; I'm still not going to start using serious pesticides. But I'm awfully tempted by this point in the year, because apparently this is when diggers and bugs start significantly threatening my plants. Certain plants have been victim to leaf biters all summer: the calendulas I started from seed, most of the dahlias I started from seed, a number of my QIS Orange gomphrenas, and my second try at physostegia plants are all virtually non-existent now thanks to leaf munchers.  But suddenly all kinds of other plants are being chomped to within an inch of their lives.

The disappointment of going through all the work and expense of starting those seeds or buying those plants only to have them destroyed prompts me to pull the reins on myself a bit. (Whoa!) For a start, maybe I should stop trying to grow plants that haven't been successful after multiple attempts. 

I've tried three different kinds of geraniums (real geraniums, not annual pelargoniums). I planted a Dragon Heart geranium in 2011, but it completely disappeared within a few weeks. I planted a Samobor geranium last year, and it was doing very nicely this spring until something devoured it in a few days. It has poked up a few tiny leaves since then which have also disappeared within a few days. This year I planted two Biokovos, and they have managed to hang on until this week. Suddenly all the leaves have disappeared, tiny forlorn stems sticking up with just a few itty bitty shreds left on one of them. 

Or what about plants that haven't completely failed but aren't doing well, even after being moved? I see tall, thick stands of bee balm in other people's yards, but for the last two years my two pathetic Jacob Clines have only put up a few meager stems with a few tiny leaves. The leaves get nibbled a bit, but not enough to be the real cause of their failure to thrive. I planted some species variety from seeds years ago, and they're doing pretty well. Have I not found the right spot for the Jacob Clines? Do they just need longer to get themselves established? Is it some other aspect of that cultivar that makes them unsuitable for my garden? Do I try moving them again or do I give up?

But how do you know which species or cultivars to give up on? I've tried four different kinds of coreopsis with varying results. My three surviving Jethro Tull coreopsis, which I originally planted in 2011, have been going pretty well for 4 years. They've never gotten as big as the original plants that I divided them from, but they do all right for themselves and I like the way they grow where they are now. In 2013 I got an unidentified cultivar (possibly Route 66) as a rogue cohabitant in one of the Jacob Cline plants which I picked up at a local nursery. (I love "bonus" plants!) I slapped it into a spot on one of my front slopes, crossed my fingers, and figured if it died at least I wasn't losing a carefully chosen plant that I'd paid for. It has quickly established itself and is putting on a lovely, healthy show for the second year in a row. It has turned out to be a really great plant so far, and its red-spotted centers go great with the red daylilies in front of it (which I hadn't even planned when I stuck it there)! My Creme Brulee coreopsis were planted in 2012 and did okay for the first two years. Last year, though, the leaves ended up being devoured and it produced far fewer flowers than the year before. This year it was also quickly stripped of leaves and short on flowers. I had chosen Creme Brulee because it sounded like a better alternative to the Moonbeam cultivar I'd been wanting for awhile, but after last year's disappointment I decided that this year I would go ahead and get myself some Moonbeams. So far so good on those. But I'm keeping my fingers double crossed that these don't go the way of the Creme Brulees. 

You just never know which ones are going to be winners. Sometimes the ones you choose prove to be worth every penny, turning out just like you'd hoped (if not better) and holding their own beautifully no matter what New Hampshire's weather and wildlife put them through. Once I'd found the right spot for my Dark Towers penstemons, they proved themselves gloriously. My Carradonna salvias start being de-leafed by insects this time of year, but they've already finished blooming and it doesn't seem to harm them at all. Sometimes, like the mystery coreopsis, you just luck into great plants. Select Seeds always sends a packet of free seeds with each seed order, and in 2013 they sent me something I wasn't familiar with called Calamintha nepeta 'August Clouds.' I started some seedlings, plopped them in various spots around the yard, and wondered if they would do anything or even survive our winters. By this time that year I had these wonderfully minty fronds of attractive foliage with tiny yet attractive pale purple flowers. And they've just gotten better each year. 

It's disheartening to look around and see spots where nothing I've tried seems to do well or where once-happy plants are suffering. Those are the moments that tempt the ethics of a natural gardener. Maybe if I tried Miracle Gro and endangered the bees with toxic insecticides my plants would look like something out of a gardening magazine. Maybe if I spent all my time and money on mulching and weeding and drip irrigating and building the perfect compost pile my garden would look like everyone else's who can afford professional, conventional landscaping services. But my reason for gardening isn't because I want my yard to look like a magazine landscaper created it. And I don't make my gardening decisions based on what would be the quickest shortcut to impressing other people. I prefer to think of myself as sort of a combination of an amateur environmental scientist and a developing artist who lacks a good sense of artistic vision: I keep experimenting, trying to use what I've learned to make better choices each year and figuring out what looks good by trial and error. There are some dilemmas that never get any easier: should I give up and tear out all the stupid irises that haven't bloomed in years no matter what I try or should I let them have yet another chance to prove themselves until I've run out of room everywhere else? But with every wrong choice, setback, disappointment, or failure, there is not only the chance to learn but the chance to try again. And when you finally get something right, it's amazing how much one success can make up for an awful lot of Not-So-Great Moments in Gardening.

Monsters, Babies, & Stone Courtyards

I had a number of dreams last night, each one brought to an end by my waking up at various wee hours of the morning. I thought they were all interesting until they were completely obliterated by the last one: 

I was in a very large, busy city. Everyone had woken up to discover huge cracks in the streets, and word was spreading like lightning that horrible things were coming out of these gashes in the pavement. I was standing outside looking at one of these cracks when an enormous suckered tentacle came over the top of a multistory building, grabbed some guy and dragged him away. Monsters were breaking out of the earth.

The dangerous cracks and monster sightings seemed to be concentrated in one area of the city, and suddenly there was a mother trying to get her three children out of that area. In a matter of a few minutes I went from being this mother, to being an observing bystander of this group, to being one of the children. We were trying to cross a street when my memory starts getting wonky. 

I think maybe we saw and/or talked to some guy who had some idea how to find out what was going on. He believed the answer was in a huge building which everyone thought was a museum, and he was going to try to get inside. Which he managed to do, and then realized he needed to get out before he got caught. He did manage to get out and was running away from the building, I think, when he was grabbed by a pterodactyl-like creature and I don't know what happened to him after that.

The next thing I remember was "me" being inside the building, sneaking around trying to figure out what was going on here. There were rooms full of babies and other things, including candy, something makes me want to say. My brain keeps saying babies and candy, so I'm going to assume there is a reason and that candy was involved. There were people taking care of the babies and working on other projects. Some of these workers were people who had been snatched by the monsters, although many of the people who had been taken had been turned into the babies. Somehow I knew that a small number of the missing had been killed. Monsters gotta eat, I guess. But I had discovered that it was all a giant operation run by some Great Leader, and that this Great Leader was reincarnated or simply replaced by a new Chosen One periodically.

I say it was "me" in the building partly because I was sometimes seeing this as the main character and sometimes observing it like the audience watching a movie, and partly because even when I was experiencing it firsthand I wasn't Angela Morgan, Laconia resident and YBP Profiler. The person I was supposed to be had been a cute young barmaid in a strange little Italian restaurant/tavern. The tavern area was like a cave with stone walls, a stone roof, and a number of huge curving entrances that led into various cobblestone streets. It was a bustling place with lots of people passing through and lots of regulars sitting around at tall tables visiting. One of these regulars was a young writer or artist or something who was in love with this waitress. Everyone knew except her. 

Now the naive barmaid had gone off to find out what was in the nefarious building and was trapped there. She had been found sneaking around, but was told They weren't going to kill her because she had been chosen to be the next Great Leader. She didn't want to be at first, but she had come to realize that what they were doing was odd and arcane, but not really evil, and that this was her destiny. Once They knew she would come back, they told her she could leave for short periods to return to the streets of the city. They had pointed out to her that the writer/artist had been in love with her, so now she wanted to go back to the Italian tavern to try to find him. 

She/I went running down a hillside behind the building, running through rows of shrubs. As I ran past, the plants stood up in waves; each shrub was actually being held by a person. The shrub people, led by Ed Begley, Jr., were all singing about how the new Great Leader was leaving but would always return to her people. The sloping ground ended abruptly at the edge of a cliff over a river that divided part of the city, and as I ran toward the edge of the cliff some giant bird monster caught me and carried me out over the river where I could look back on the weird plant chorus. 

The bird thing put me down in the city on a street near the restaurant. But, it had been many months since she/I had left, and no one was there except the bartender. He told me the writer/artist had kept coming back to look for her/me, with longer and longer intervals between his searching visits, and then had eventually stopped coming in at all. 

Then it was years later, and the ex-barmaid-now-Great Leader had left her building again because she wanted to see part of her old neighborhood. It was a sort of semi-enclosed courtyard with stone-paved streets surrounded by old stone buildings (noticing a theme here?). When she had lived there it was just an open area where young people used to hang out, sometimes getting into trouble but usually just whiling away their time. Now many of the people who lived in the surrounding buildings spent most evenings there visiting, playing music, and dancing. On this evening a famous musician was going to be there as a special guest. As his entourage was setting up to play, he looked at the now-middle aged ex-barmaid and recognized her as the leader of the group responsible for unleashing monsters on the city and stealing people to turn them into babies. 

Things really start fading at this point. There was something about four tiny dimes revealing something about her role in the group, or revealing the truth about evil, or something. So she had to leave before they decided she was evil and had to be stopped.

Then we were back in the building and I was still the Great Leader, only now I was a guy instead of the ex-barmaid. I think more time had passed. I'm pretty sure he/I was either black or hispanic/latino, and I'm pretty sure I had a mustache. And that's where it all fades away beyond my memory. I know there were a number of other images, events, and conversations that happened throughout the rest of the dream, but they are also lost. I think what I was left remembering vividly was plenty! 

Some Days Are Dark

I didn't think I would write again today, but it turns out I need to. I also need to go to bed, but I sort of don't give a shit at the moment.

I like the word grief. I prefer it to "mourning." Grief sounds more visceral, and that fits better with how I feel.

Grief is strange. I'm finding that going through the motions of just continuing a normal life without Gink is essentially easy. And that makes me sort of mad, because part of me doesn't want a single thing about this to be easy. It also makes me feel a strange sort of guilt, like I should be noticing his absence every time I turn around. But at the same time, I'm not completely mad or strongly guilty because even when I'm not "noticing" his absence I'm feeling it. For the first couple of days the feeling came and went in waves. I really didn't think of him when I was busy, because I wouldn't have been thinking about him if he'd still been here. He would have spent most of that time sitting in the windows or sleeping somewhere while I worked. But today, even though I was busy, I just felt an unhappy undercurrent all day long. Heart starting to race a little, my throat getting tight. That could have been in part because some of what I was doing was either generally related to the cats or more directly related to Gink being gone: changing the set up for the food bowls, finally washing his dry food bowl, taking the litter trash out, removing the protective strips I'd put on the door frames to keep him from destroying them even more than he already had, throwing out old cat supplies and ones they never used.

But, even when I wasn't working on cat-related things my brain seemed stuck on feeling guilty, regretting decisions, and trying to reason with myself.

I should have noticed that he was peeing more than normal for a cat?
    How was I supposed to know that was too much? Was it really?
Now I know why he was peeing outside of the box again.
    But you didn't know that was a bad sign. He'd done it before.
Yeah, but maybe if we'd had blood work done before we could have caught it in time to do something about it.
    We have to have had some blood work done at some point and no one gave you the idea anything serious was going on.
I just checked; we didn't get a full blood test done in January because you didn't want to have to pay for it.
    But the doctor didn't stress that it was important, and the antibiotic shot appeared to have worked. Besides, he was always a cranky boy, and he was getting older. How was I supposed to know what was abnormal until it was too late?
You could have had the full blood test done in January, or at last year's physical.
    And then again maybe that wouldn't have found anything. Or maybe it would have found enough to know that he was already dying and probably only had a few months to live, and then we would have been suffering for months knowing this was coming. We wouldn't have been less upset in the end, would we?

It also could have just been a general vibe around the house today. Gytha didn't even touch her wet food today, and only nibbled at her dry food. Tim didn't seem to have much enthusiasm or energy. Everyone in our house just seemed kind of subdued.

I don't want to go back to work tomorrow, but I don't know just what I would do if I was home all day. I still have work to do, but it's supposed to be cloudy and rainy, and at least if I'm at work where I can't really see outside much it might not affect me. I'm a little worried about having to tell people and deal with people tomorrow and having to keep my shit together while I'm at work, but I'm also worried that if I was at home it would be like today again. Maybe work will be a good distraction and change of atmosphere. But maybe I'll be worried about Gytha so much that I'll be struggling not to cry or have a panic attack. It's probably not going to come to that, but I know myself and it's not impossible. Plus I ate more today than I have since Friday, and what I've eaten seems to be upsetting my stomach. So it feels like I'm going right back to work with the same physical problems that caused me to take Friday off in the first place. Four days off and I'm in even worse shape mentally and physically. Joy. I'm just so damn looking forward to tomorrow now.

Grief Triggers and Another Day of Living

I'm not very good at sleeping in anymore. Waking up around 4 a.m. on weekdays seems to have reset my clock. It's probably partly a side effect of gardening and/or of becoming more of a "responsible adult": once it starts to get light outside, I don't want to go back to sleep because there are things I could be/need to be doing. It is also often forced upon me by Gytha doing naughty things to wake me up, presumably so I will go ahead and get up to do the morning feeding "since I'm already up." Both cats' appetites tended to decrease as the weather gets warmer, so I had noticed in recent weeks that they weren't pestering me on those early weekend mornings, and I was really rather happy to be able to just stay in bed and fall back to sleep.

Gink was never really one to pester me to get up for feeding time, though. He was often sleeping at my feet and took my predawn stirring as a sign that it was time for him to come snuggle. I would roll over on my back, and that was when he would move up to drape himself over my chest, or to snuggle between my arm and my body, or sometimes get up in my face and rub his chin against mine.

These early morning hours are one of the hard times for me right now.

I figured there would be certain times that would trigger the grieving pains, and I was right. Yesterday afternoon when I realized I hadn't fed Gytha her wet food yet, my heart started beating a little faster and my stomach tightened a little. I was trying to be very casual and matter-of-fact about it as I apologized to her for not realizing it was late, but when I took a single bowl from the dish drainer my chest squeezed a bit more and as I measured out the laxative powder that gets mixed with the wet food my hand shook just a tiny bit as I realized I was doing just the one dose now.

My physical reaction wasn't as strong when I did Gytha's evening dry food feeding, but that doesn't involve any prep time, so it was over much faster. I still haven't removed Gink's dry food bowl, and I saw her eating out of it yesterday afternoon. That gave me a little pang, but also made me kind of happy at the same time. They both often ate out of all four bowls interchangeably, and I had forgotten about that in my morose concerns about "his" bowls. Her not seeing it as "his" food bowl was reassuring in a way.

Still, I do think I need to change how their...her feeding area is set up. It was designed to fit four different bowls for two cats. Now the empty side will be a constant reminder of what's missing, and I don't want to have to deal with that. I want to reduce any triggers that I can, because there are many that I cannot.

Like bedtime, which is (so far) thankfully not as bad as the early mornings. Last night I was tired out from working in the garden all afternoon (and not having slept well the night before), so I had a brief moment when I looked at the edge of the bed where he sometimes laid by my side while I read or did crossword puzzles. I was relieved to not feel any pain at the thought. Gytha also settled in between the pillows more easily last night, which I realize now was a great help. Friday night she was very, very demanding of attention when we went to bed and kept sitting up and looking at the bedroom doorway as if she was expecting Gink to come in for their nightly routine of negotiating sleeping spots. Even after I'd turned out the lights I could see her checking the door and waiting in the dark. Very, very hard for me.

One of the most distressing triggers is the spare bedroom. For at least the last six months, if not more like a year, Gink had taken to sleeping on the twin bed in that room. I joked when my Dad came to visit recently that he was stealing "Gink's bed." In a way, this makes bedtime easier in general, because it wasn't unusual for Gink to go back to his own bed after a little cuddle time or during the night. Him not being in the bed with me when I go to sleep or when I wake up during the night is not a completely foreign feeling. But walking past that room and seeing the empty bed has been causing my insides to clench. It is ten times worse right now because we hurriedly shoved half of the contents of another room into the spare bedroom Monday night and Tuesday afternoon to make room for "new" chairs we're babysitting for some friends. That kind of clutter gnaws at me to begin with, and with all that mess and the painful Gink associations all rammed into one tiny place in such a short time, the room exudes unhappiness, especially in the dark. And you can't go anywhere on the second floor without walking by that door. I can deal with it if it is day time, the lights are on, and I'm working on getting rid of the mess. Focused, purposeful energy cancels out the negative stuff. So that's part of what I want to get taken care of this weekend. I thought about closing the door, but that just bottles up the bad aura and makes it seem even more menacing.

Night and darkness in general have become harder for me. I suddenly find it hard to be in any dark room at all, and even dim lighting depresses me. I was so relieved that the sun ended up being at least partially out for much of the day yesterday. But as night fell, I realized my relative calm was starting to dissipate. And today and tomorrow are supposed to be mostly cloudy. So far this morning has been the kind of dull, gray morning I dislike anyway. If the sun doesn't come out at all, today may be a struggle.

Then there are the noises and the visual misperceptions. Ours is an old house, and wood creaking isn't anything strange. But the attic steps creaked yesterday while I was in the spare bedroom (where the door to the attic is) and they keep creaking today, and it reminds me of cats going up and down those stairs. At night I'll hear a random noise from one of the other bedrooms and, though it isn't even the kind of noise the cats would make, it reminds me of Gink. At least two or three times yesterday I caught something out of the corner of my eye and thought it looked like a black and white cat shape. Each time everything clenched inside for a split second. Actually, I almost had a mini panic attack at one point because I was seeing something at a distance that was triggering a mental image of Gink, and it took me a few seconds to figure out what I was actually seeing. For those few seconds I was getting incredibly upset that I couldn't figure out what it was, and I was struggling to stay calm so I could see the real thing instead and stop seeing Gink. That was a tiny bit intense.

I also can't get away from the litterboxes. The upstairs one in particular is a trigger for me, since it has a lot of Gink associations of all types. He had been rather lackadaisical about peeing for a couple of years, just jumping in the box and going without looking, which was often right up against the edge and sometimes over it. Because of his "outside the box" issues, I had to move the upstairs box out of the closet and into the bathroom and get a new super large box with high sides. That's the one Gink used most and had used the day he died. I seriously didn't want to clean up his last pee clumps. I avoided cleaning it all day yesterday until right before bedtime, and even then I almost couldn't finish it. I'm not sure Gytha needs such a large box, and the old smaller ones are still in the basement. But just thinking about all of this is making my chest hurt. Just cleaning the litter box is going to be difficult for awhile no matter what I do, and I don't want to make too many changes in Gytha's environment too fast.

Dealing with Gytha has been slightly distressing. She doesn't seem to miss Gink exactly, but she's been needing more attention and cuddling. Having to pay attention to her is a consolation that I still have my little girl and that she needs me even more right now. She needs me to reassure her of my love for her, and I need to focus on taking care of what I still have, of reminding myself that the rest of my heart is still there and needs attention. But she's also a constant reminder of what I've lost. We didn't have two separate cats. Regardless of whether or not they cared about one another, in my mind they were a pair. The dynamic has suddenly changed significantly. We are now cat parents of an "only cat." I've never had an "only cat." Gytha has never been an "only cat." This will take some getting used to for all of us.

Part of the reason I kind of wish she didn't need me so much right now is that my instinct is to draw away from interaction with others when I'm upset. This is not necessarily the best thing for me to do, since I know that being alone often makes any mental or emotional problem I'm dealing with worse for me. It allows me to ruminate and dwell, which is another reason why those early morning hours are so tough. Those were already times when I would lie in bed and think until I either fell asleep again or gave in and got up. Yesterday morning I woke up around 4 and had to get up and play on the computer for awhile before I could get back to sleep for another hour or so. At least this morning I slept in until about 5:30. But I needed to have another good cry, and it's even harder to breathe with a crying snot nose when you're lying down. So I decided it was a better idea to get up and write all those thoughts down instead. There aren't many people in my daily life that I can really "do" things with, and much of my social interaction is online. But even if no one reads this, I've always used writing as a way of trying to move things from inside to outside of my own head in order to give both the thoughts and my brain more open space. It serves as both a way for me to communicate with my own self, and maybe to share those thoughts with other people.

The one person I do have in my daily life (besides Gytha) is Tim, and he's the ultimate comfort. I'm definitely happier and calmer when Tim & I are together than when I'm sitting alone. We're both grieving for Gink, but together we can carry on our normal routines and that helps me feel more like things are "normal." Even though our version of "normal" tends to be sitting in the same room working on separate laptops, it's nothing like sitting alone in a room working on a laptop.

So, what's helping me so far is to keep busy and to stick to doing things I know I like to do. I'm happier and calmer when I'm working outside in the garden, which is an immense relief. Friday night I was looking outside at all my plants and didn't really care. The idea that the loss of Gink would steal happiness from other areas of my life was even more heartbreaking. But as soon as the sun peeked out Saturday morning I felt compelled to go outside, and as I walked around looking at all my plants my energy level started rising and my heart started feeling lighter.

Presumably I'll be fine when I'm back at work, although I'm wondering if I'll end up needing to take a half day or two off. I'm a little worried about Gytha. Being completely alone all day every day is different than doing your own thing in a house where another living being is doing its own thing. It occurred to me that Gink had the house to himself for a few days when Radioactive Gytha was in the hospital having her thyroid treatment, and I don't remember him behaving all that differently. Maybe some of Gytha's reactions right now are to our grief more than her own. But we're making sure she knows that when we leave we're coming back. We're probably going to go see a movie today or tomorrow, and we're going to make sure we both leave the house at some point on both days to try to prepare her for being alone all day after that. We're supposed to go to Dad's for Father's Day weekend, and I don't want to leave her. Even though we'd be gone for less than a day and a half, at this point I can't bear the thought of leaving her alone overnight.

I'm really glad the windows can be open now, partly because it gives Gytha something to do (birdwatching, nature study, etc.) and partly because I feel sort of claustrophobic being in the house. I also don't want to go up to the 3rd floor, probably because of that sense of oppression. It is where I found Gink hiding Friday morning, laying in the dirty, hidden space behind the door that separates the finished part of the attic from the unfinished room. But that's not really why it bothers me. He spent most of his time up there this winter when he was sick, so the couch up there is half covered in his fur. Which is part of why I really need to clean up there, but also not really why I don't want to go up there. It's rather dark, but there are lights. It's kind of small, but not terribly so. And I need to start taking crap up there to clear out the spare bedroom. But I don't want to go up there.

Maybe I will once I get done with this, get dressed, eat a little bit, get myself started on working through another day. Throwing things away and cleaning seems to be vital to my healing process as well as a good way to stay busy and something I wanted to be doing with my weekends anyway. So I really need to get myself working up on the third floor. Maybe music will help. There isn't much for me to do in the garden today. Not much on the internet or the rest of the world is of much interest to me right now. I have ingredients for a recipe that I was going to make on the grill, but I don't really care all that much about food right now, and I'm not sure the rain will make grilling feasible this weekend. I feel like maybe going for a walk even though it's still looking utterly dreary outside. Anything would be better than sitting around worrying that the tightness in my chest and gut will return. Crying again this morning felt helpful for my insides (not so much the "outside" with the puffy eyes, aching face, gums, jaw, ...), but a certain kind of numbness seems preferable as a general rule. I don't know if this is a form of the "denial stage" you hear so much about. I don't care about stages. I'm just going to deal with whatever I have to however I can.

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.