Things Forever Lost

A word or two about grief.

I'm not functioning too highly today. My father died the day before yesterday and I heard about it yesterday, and "Facebooking" or blogging aren't high priorities for me right now. But when things like this happen I do tend to write about them, as much to examine as to express my feelings. Perhaps more so. So this...

I’m not really here, not really participating in my on-line life; I just want to post a couple of things to Facebook and then get on with my grief. Not so much grief for my father…he had thoroughly excised me from his life to the point where I now feel that excessive grief on my part would be an unwelcome intrusion. More grief for what might have been, certainly: I had entertained a fantasy in which he finally came to know the person I was (I think I knew him well enough, though) but that will never happen now and I’m really not ready to grieve over that. No, I have an entirely different grief now.

This morning I got up around 8:00 AM and fed the cat. This is not an easy thing, because he hadn’t been eating well lately, but this morning he ate some canned chicken (white meat) and drank some beef broth, and I saw him drinking his water. He meowed and purred for me, which he hadn’t done in a while. Over all, he seemed better than he had for the last few days and I was happy enough with his condition that I wasn’t concerned by having to spend a few hours in town getting the new truck insured and licensed.

I stopped to pick up insulin and blood test strips, as I had been out for a few days, and stopped on the way home to make an appointment for my cat with the veterinarian. (You can do all these things when you have wheels.) I was able to get him an appointment for today, so I rushed home to pick up my cat.

All too late. My cat had died, I would guess about an hour after I left the house this morning.

So why am I grieving so deeply over a cat and not so much for my father?

I think that each person is only capable of grieving for themselves. I think that grief comes from how we ourselves feel about who or what we’ve lost, and from how we related to that thing or person. Or pet.

I loved my cat. I loved how he’d snuggle up to me on chilly nights, how he’d sleep on my shoulder (and he wasn’t a small cat by any means), how he used to like to take a walk outside with me (even though in recent years I couldn’t manage more than a walk around the house), and a thousand quirks and habits that together made an animal that I truly felt was my friend.

I loved my father. But I never liked him much. We never agreed, never got along, never saw eye-to-eye. For fifty years I silently bore his wrath, his displeasure, his contumely, and in time I came to believe that such was my role in the family, and that I deserved no better. To this day I can hear him telling me how useless I was, and me a boy of twelve or so believing himself unfit for the kind of rewarding life that others seemed to claim as a right. But I loved my father. It has never occurred to me to ask why…I loved my father and that’s an end of it.

My cat was never judgmental, never abusive, never used me as an excuse for his own shortcomings. My father did all of these.

It would be very wrong for me to say that I do not grieve for my father, that I do not mourn his passing. Mostly, I mourn for the opportunities that both of us lost, the gone opportunities to finally share experiences as father and son, if not as friends. But when I mourn for my cat, as I have mourned for other lost pets over the years, I mourn for the loss of what we shared. This also applies to the loss of my brother, and my mother, and all of the other people (and pets) who have mattered to me but who have passed.

One last thing. My father, wracked by cancer and in pain from other conditions, choose to end his own life. I suppose he had every right to make that choice for himself, but he also made a choice for me; he chose to deny me even the possibility of reconciliation. I’m not saying that he didn’t have every right to make that choice, but I could wish that he had considered me at the end, even just a little.

Michael Starke Rosecrans,

the eldest son of William Starke Rosecrans