It’s been ten months since my beloved cat Junebug died. I’ve spent the time vacillating between one stage of grief and another, much of it designed, however unconsciously, to avoid having to actually grieve my loss. There’s simply nothing worse than facing the horrible truth that you will never see your loved one again. All the platitudes (“She’s not suffering anymore.”) and all the religious comments (“She’s with God now.”) mean nothing, and don’t assuage my sorrow in the least. When you have loved that deeply, that freely, there is nothing anyone can say to make one feel better.
That last is true mainly because one doesn’t actually want to feel better. One wants to go back to that time when things were fine, and one’s beloved was right there at one’s side. Yes, I know that that’s impossible, and so does every other person struggling with the loss of a loved one. That’s what makes the New Normal so dreadful, so depressing.
I’ve had to face the New Normal several times before. Always with animals, and rarely with any prior warning. Indeed, I would take my pet to the veterinarian believing that whatever was wrong with them would be fixable. Doctors aren’t magicians, of course, but there are so many treatments for so many illnesses that it was always easy to assume that some sort of remedy existed. They don’t, always. I’ve found that out the hard way. And when I came face to face with the possibility that my pet was suffering, the choice was obvious, and immediate. My policy with pets has always been that they not suffer in any way. If an unfixable ailment is causing anything of the sort, then I immediately have the animal put down, and I concern myself with the enormity of the loss afterward. Usually, the drive home, with an empty carrier, finds the tears coming and the sobs wracking my body. It’s not a safe way to drive a car.
The New Normal begins immediately, when I become aware that I don’t need as many food bowls for the cats’ dinners, and continues into the evening when I realize that someone is missing from the sofa, from the bed, from everything. I can live with that for a day or two, but at some point, the realization hits me that life, and the order in which it’s lived, have been irreparably altered. It’s then that I find myself doing something – anything – to keep my mind occupied. Cleaning house, turning up the music, walking, shopping, all of these things serve me well as distractions during the day. Unfortunately, the nighttime is always fraught.
I happen to be a well-medicated bi-polar person. Having said that, you should know that there is no medicine on earth that can quiet the manic mind completely. We learn tricks, things designed to help us focus on the task at hand, and the medicines do their part to assist this. But no medicine is perfect, and at no time of day is that more evident than nighttime, that time when you climb into bed and try to fall asleep. It is then that the mania moves front and center in my consciousness.
I imagine that the average person’s last minutes awake at night might consist of a mental review of the day, or some facet you have forgotten, so you make a mental note to address the issue the next day – that sort of thing. The manic mind does the same, only it throws twenty or thirty things at you, in rapid succession. It goes something like this: I forgot to put air in the bike tyres; I shouldn’t have told the hubs to go screw himself; I need to run to Sainsbury’s tomorrow; I should go see Bit this week, I haven’t ridden him enough lately; I need to schedule that doctor appointment; we’re almost out of cat food; I wonder if I could talk the hubs into letting me buy that memory-gel saddle pad; etc, etc. You get the idea. And it keeps going like that until the nighttime medications take over and knock me out.
All that noise is frankly exhausting, and when one of my beloved pets dies, I get twenty or thirty more random thoughts about that pet: I didn’t spend enough time with her; the doctor never actually diagnosed her; those ashes came back from the crematory much too soon; surely there was something else I could’ve tried; did she know how much I loved her? And other, equally agonizing thoughts. Ten months later, I’m still haunted by them.
My post-Junebug New Normal consists of trying to live life with blinders on. That way, I can’t see what’s not there. I can’t see the fact that she’s not lying next to my pillow at night. I can’t see that she’ll never visit me in the loo again, meowing her usual request to be picked up and set on my lap. I can’t see those silly poses she often found herself in. My favorite one was when she would hide behind a curtain, with just her front paws peeking out, as though she didn’t realize that those paws were giving her presence away. But of course, I’m not really fooling myself, and my heart remains heavy.
What to do about this state of affairs? There’s nothing I can do. Little by little, the pain will ease some. It takes time, more time than I want it to take. Trying to adjust to a life without that one being who made your world complete is a process you never imagined you’d have to go through, never imagined it because that’s not how the brain works. The brain filters out the unpleasant realities of life, making the moment you realize that the end is here and you have no choice but to face it almost impossible to bear. I look at the framed photo of Junebug that’s sitting on my desk, and I still think, How is this even possible? Wasn’t there supposed to be some sort of exception for me and mine? Was it really necessary to take her from me?
I hate this New Normal.