A Last Thought on This Grief

I have this one last post in me regarding my grief over Zami. And then I need to move on, as it will otherwise likely be the same feeling cycled over and over again. The house is still quiet.

Mara, our tuxedo, the last-cat-standing, won’t invade Zami’s claimed spaces. I see her eyeing them, and then her little head darts around like she is trying to spy out where Zmi has hidden herself away this time, waiting to pounce on her.

It was always a trap and Mara learned that well.

So the house is quiet and at the same time, nothing has changed. Nothing at all. Zami slept twenty-three hours a day. So the silence and stillness are not new, but the void is.

We all have energy. Our energetic bodies take up space in the home. You always feel it when a partner goes on a trip or the kids are at Grandma and Grandpa’s. Sometimes it’s a needed reprieve. But every day that void exists and the loved one doesn’t come home and that void just sits and stares at you…it begins to taunt you, to hold you in a place in time that has passed and longer exists.

You need to stay there because your heart is still trying to figure out what it has lost. You also need to leave it behind because you are losing precious time of living the life before you.

There’s a difference I feel keenly right now, between the grief over suddenly-losing Luna and Bella at ten years versus losing Zami at twenty-two. If I think about the veterinary technician telling us that we had to put Luna down “now” a chasm opens in my gut and I want to vomit.

I had the same reaction when I walked in the front door and my partner was holding the note that said Zami passed while we were gone. I fell to the floor as best I could being crippled. Raw grief tore it's way out of me and I let it.

The house is quiet and there is a void but…I do not feel cheated in this grief. I am hurt I wasn’t there. I am hurt she was alone when she died. But she would have preferred it that way. For the last five years, every year we got with her was a blessing. No, I do not feel cheated. But I do not feel good. And that is grief’s normal mask.

Everything feels kind of wrong. It should. It will. And then that will feel normal and that void won’t be a void. It will just be space.

I’m glad pregnant and sick Zami found her way to that barn door in the middle of a horrid winter in Western New York. I am glad she wouldn’t take no for an answer when we were trying to look at the grey cats. I am glad she liked living with us. I am glad for the twenty years she spent with us, under five different roofs. I am glad for these years.

My heart will make room, when it is ready, for more lives that need a loving home. But for now it will be three of us, holding each other through the grief and sitting in the not-quite-rightness together.