People In Hell Want Icewater
a web.journal
newest shit
ancient shit
tell me shit
look at my farking
my podcast
my profile
about the title

get your own
read others
recommend me


Want to know when I post new stuff? Add your email here:

To rest


June 28, 2006 - 6:33 p.m.

She hated to get wet.

The rain stopped this morning, and the hill dried out just enough that I could lay Marnie to rest. I finished, laid a pink rose atop the stone on top of her grave, and went into the house. The thunder started again 20 minutes later.

The intensity of what I feel surprises me a little. I realized today that this is the first time I'm going through it alone. Melody was there with me when Boris died. I met Penny the day Tess died. And all those years with Nancy, we always both said goodbye to cats, together.

Suzanne isn't here. She'd like to be, but she's not. So it was up to me to talk to the other cats, let them sniff Marnie one last time and understand what had happened, and take her out to the hill to be next to Boris and Tess and just up from Harry and Data and Mao.

The crushing part is when I've laid them in the grave, always in a dark green terrycloth towel, and begin to fill the earth back in. I know the moment comes when the last little green spot of cloth disappears to the earth, and I know they're well and truly gone from me. It always hurts, hurts in ways I can never explain and that only a couple of other people have ever seen in me. I howled and cried just as I had last night when I found her, made little muddy spots where the tears fell into the dust on my arms. No one was there to hear it. Just me and the spirits of the cats who have gone before.

She was a great kitten, the last great kitten I'm ever likely to know. Sure, if a kitten shows up on my doorstep and needs me, I'll take care of it -- that's my job -- but I know that as I get older it'll be harder for me to give that core of myself to one kitten, knowing how much harder it'll be for me to lose them, or for them to lose me. Yes, I do have to start worrying about that... I am going to be 44, and my health is deteriorating the more I abuse it. A new kitten this summer could live until I'm in my sixties. Tess lived to be fifteen; Boris, twelve.

I was 35 when I met Marnie. I look at me in those pictures, and I look so young. I didn't have to color my hair, didn't have blood pressure medicine to avoid strokes and heart attacks, didn't feel like every joint in my was unfriendly to my very self. She was just tiny, little ears and a cone tail and absolutely no fear. She never feared anything... not the vacuum, not heights, not the shower, not other cats, not bugs or loud noises or being stepped on.

I don't know if I can give myself to a kitten again. I don't know if it would be fair. And after losing Harry and now Marnie, I don't know if I'd live through it. These were the worst two nights of my adult life. I can already feel depression sneaking in, sitting in the seat next to me and slowing me down, making me withdraw.

Sure, the drugs will control it, but I feel it there, and it will cost me. Time. Health. Trust. Sadness.

I will go through this fourteen more times, and then some day, someone else will lay me to rest next to all the stones out on the hill.


previous - next