Grief and grievance

We had to say goodbye to our beloved cat Pinchy this week after a long month of her not eating and slowly growing weaker. It's rough to see such a good friend suffering, and rougher still when there seems to be some hope for recovery. You could see in her eyes how exhausted she was at the end, but despite it all, she continued to purr and accept all the love we showered upon her. When she passed at home with the assistance of a very kind vet, I felt a sense of relief through my tears as her body finally relaxed and was at peace.

I'm a little sad that the last few hours I spent with Pinchy were the ones where I had the most sustained physical contact with her. Her fur was so soft, like the underside of an angel's wing, and while she had a squishy body that was built for loving squeezes and couch snuggles, she did not possess the disposition. Pinchy famously didn't want anything to do with anyone when we first met her at the Petco, but Eamon had fallen hard for her and insisted she come home with us in an episode that's now part of our family lore. Sequestered in his bedroom so that our other cat Cupcake could acclimate, I would lay on the floor and offer tiny finger pets at arm's length to the scared little kitten under his bed. Over time she became braver, allowing herself to be pet - at arm's length - purring away until she was satisfied or spooked. She eventually even graduated to sitting on your lap for a moment, so long as a blanket obscured any evidence of a human body. Having Cupcake turn into a little bit of a bully to her in their later years didn't help with Pinchy's skittishness, but there's no denying that she had a big heart and appreciated the love when she asked for it. She was a sweetheart who was unfortunately easily overwhelmed.

Grief kind of opens some unexpected doors, doesn't it? I'm sad about losing our cat, and the next thing you know I'm sitting on the front porch getting weepy to a video of They Might Be Giants covering "Tubthumping":

(A few years ago I started a running list of songs that make me weepy, and the addition of this one was... unexpected.)

The inescapable fact here is that both Pinchy and Cupcake are intimately enmeshed with Eamon's childhood and his imminent departure. We're fortunate that he's staying around for one more year to complete a Master's degree, but he's already interviewing with Bosch for a job that suits his interests, if not passions, and for which he's incredibly qualified. It has been a gift to see how his intellectual curiosity and hard work have created a polished, professional engineer, even as it's inevitable that this is what will carry him away on new adventures.

I have an unfortunate tendency to map and probably deflect my feelings about intimate matters onto more macro issues which I care about but over which I have little control. To be fair, the "things are coming to a close" vibe does seem to suit the world we currently live in, and grief would be a reasonable response.

I struggle with how reasonable I'm being in that feeling, though. I notched another trip around the sun last week, and I'm increasingly aware of not fully understanding from where my motivation for action and my judgment flow, whether I'm tapping an unproductive, undirected root of youthful (self-)righteousness, becoming a cranky old man bitter at a changing world, or doing the best I can to navigate a social setting that is becoming increasingly unmoored from any sense of the common good, or honestly, of reality. It's undoubtedly a mixture of the three, but absent the fury, the resentment, and the clarity of the respective wellsprings. This is not to say that I didn't have a great birthday - I had a blast surrounded by the people I love - but the intervening week has added a mournful tinge of the passing time, of the awareness of our societal bias towards youth and novelty, and of the fact that world does indeed kinda suck.

It's in that ambivalence where I find grief turn to grievance. Now is a time of monsters, and I think we are all justifiably angry at these monsters for our own injuries and on behalf of others. In my case, then come the reflexive recriminations - what do I have to be aggrieved about? It's so easy to indulge in disgust, to wallow in resentments that resemble giving a shit but only serve to make me feel worse.

And then the emotional bubble my anxiety creates collapses, and I'm again just sad about missing a lovable little chonky cat.

I'm fortunate to be loved and supported by good people, and all's good in the 'hood. I'm appreciative of the space to be able to process loss, in ways expected and unexpected. I'm grateful that even when times are crummy, and boy are they crummy, there are people all around me who fill me with hope and inspire me to dig deep and try new, scary things. Life's difficult, but we persist.

Thanks for reading this rambling bit of processing. Give your fuzz-butt friends some extra snuggles for Pinchy, and find some ways to make good trouble. To leave you with something lighter, how about some... "original art!" Sarah and I recently visited with some friends who took us on a fun little adult scavenger hunt. At one station, we were prompted to spend five minutes painting each other. Being us, we took fifteen, and I believe that the extra minutes spent speak for themselves. They will obviously be worth something some day, but they are Eamon's inheritance, so please pester him with your art broker's unacceptably low first offer.