My cat Holly has been sick for two months when, one morning, her right hind leg stops working entirely. She drags it around the apartment knuckle-down, hiding her body behind things: the shower curtain, the armchair where I sometimes read at night, the space between my desk and the bedroom door.
When the vet says the words “blood clot” I think—of course. A couple of years before we got married, R and I had a cat who died this way. A black and white tuxedo cat named Gatsby we found curled in the bathroom, only three years old, in so much pain that he sunk his teeth into us when we wrapped him in a blanket on the way to the vet.
Holly must be in the same amount of pain, but she tries to crawl into my lap anyway. She can’t get comfortable and so she turns around and around, settling for only a minute before she’s up again. I momentarily mistake this for a sign that things are not so bad, that there is a pill that might fix her. What is actually true: she loved me in a way that anyone who’s not an animal person can’t comprehend. She slept, every night, curled in the small of my back or on the edge of my pillow next to my head. Some days she felt more like an extension of myself than a separate being. Because of this, her instinct to die in hiding is competing with her need for comfort.
When I realize the enormity of this particular Monday, I feel something out of place I can’t quite name; adrenaline spiking like elation. The thing I’ve been dreading for months has happened, and I’m still here.
The vet recommends a dose of Gabapentin a couple of hours before I bring her in to be put down, so I walk the ten blocks there and back as quickly as I can, blood pumping so fast I’m hyper-aware of every second that passes. Each one is a second closer to the end of our last two hours.
There’s a puddle of drool the size of a dinner plate under Holly’s head when I get home. This is right, this is what you need to do, I tell myself, the strange mania replaced with dread and a clawing panic. The liquid has a sickly sweet smell as I shoot it into the corner of her mouth. It lingers even after she swallows, a cloying interruption that’s hard to shake. She has enough fight left in her that she gives me her normal post-med glare. What if, some deep and selfish part of me thinks, you give her the medication and then don’t go to the vet. What if you just stay here, the two of you in this moment, permanently.
At first, I try to talk to her while the Gabapentin does its work. But I run out of ways to say I love you and you were so good and I don’t want to lapse into silence, because I can see from the way she curls closer to me, her breathing deeper, that the sound of my voice is helping. Or, maybe it’s helping me—slowing my heart rate as the medication slows hers.
For some reason, Holly becomes intent on jumping to the top of the pillows I’ve piled on the armchair to make room for her on the couch. She tries and fails to make the three-legged jump up once, and then she’s scrambling successfully to the top, a leggy five-pound calico princess and the pea.
I pick up the first book of poetry I see, Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky With Exit Wounds, and sit on the arm of the chair, back pressed against the wall, as close to her as I can manage.
And then I read.
I read for forty minutes straight, crying once and then steadying myself. Holly leans her head heavily against my hand so I have to do an awkward one-handed page flip, and time has once again slowed impossibly. I’m grateful for it.
It’s not until I walk back into the apartment with an empty carrier that I realize the impact of my loss, the horrible stillness of newly empty space. I’ve had Holly for thirteen years. It strikes me that I’ve never known adult life without her. She’s outlasted a marriage, multiple partners and jobs, and eight apartments.
And now she’s gone.
I am consumed by this tiny, specific grief, and also ashamed of it: the world is burning, literally. People are dying of a disease that our sorry excuse for a president could have abated, wildfires are burning up the west coast, and white supremacy is so entrenched in our country that it seems very possible Trump will be re-elected. People are mourning the loss of their partners, children, parents, grandparents. And yet I feel like the air has gone out of the room.
I re-read the first poem I’d flipped open to that Monday afternoon, wondering if it happened to be perfect or if it’s perfect because it’s the one that was there:
We saw it coming
but kept walking through the hole
in the garden. Because the leaves
were bright green & the fire
only a pink brushstroke
in the distance. It’s not
about the light—but how dark
it makes you depending
on where you stand.
The next line reads depending on where you stand/your name can sound like a full moon/shredded in a dead doe’s pelt, and so I’m suspicious, almost embarrassed by the sense of peace I feel when, two days later, J holds up a hand to stop me on the trail we’re biking. I pause a few seconds too late because I’ve been pedaling in search of the fire in my thighs and lungs that comes when I go a little too hard, a little too fast. The doe, impossibly big and close to us on the narrow trail, steps halfway into the forest and looks back once before disappearing.
It’s the kind of scene I’d never write into fiction because it’s too neat, too obvious.
I start to feel like myself again in the week that follows, for longer and longer each stretch, although that means sometimes Holly’s absence hits me in the chest when I least expect it. When that happens, I feel the same way I did getting the wind knocked out of me coming off a bucking horse as a kid, chest slammed into the gritty arena sand.
Eventually I realize the importance of such a tiny grief in the middle of this crisis of humanity: our ability to tie ourselves to animals is inherently bound up with our ability to feel all the way through unironically and unashamedly. Indigenous people have known this core truth for ages.
When every day is a fight not to slide into apathy, not to lay down from the exhaustion of it all, it’s a gift to be reminded that no points are awarded for seeing the bad things coming, for hardening ourselves to the ways of the world. The numbness that starts as a survival method is an injustice in and of itself, one that steals from those forced to adopt it the simplicity of a life lived on equal terms.
It takes compassion and a certain acceptance of nature to truly love an animal. In some small way, you must reckon with the insignificance of humankind in the face of everything else alive on our planet. That kind of compassion seen all the way through should come hand in hand with the incredibly basic, bare-minimum decency that means advocating for racial and socioeconomic equity, for taking real action against climate change, for putting people above profit. And even though it sometimes feels impossible to give in to the overwhelming gulf of grief, it’s a reminder that at the very least, we are still here.
On an Impossibly Small Loss
I am writing this with tears in my eyes. I feel your pain to my core. I know how that pain can be at times unbearable. Thank you for being such a loving and kind guardian to Holly. Your bond with her will be in your heart always.
Thank you for this piece. Our losses and grief in this moment are no less valid. They are a part of us, and we are a part of this larger fabric called humanity. We are connected.