“For though I tried to explain to Tas, that day
When you closed your eyes — though I told him about
Stars and twilight, and how autumn leaves must fall,
I could not make myself understand.”
–CT Pierson “For Flint, by Tanis Half-Elven”
It’s been two weeks now. I’ve started numerous times to try to write up a post that would do justice to stuff, but words just fail me.
It’s been two weeks since that awful morning that we took Chloe in, and…
Had to say goodbye.
After a horrible week-plus of things much more detailed than I’m going to go into right now, it came down to “that” time. The time I’d feared numerous times before but thankfully hadn’t come…until, August 18, it DID.
I could write of so many memories over the years that I have. Like one of those “montage” scenes in a movie. I can “see” the memories. Her kicking me outta the chair, her climbing onto the footstool, her startling me under the work desk, her flopping over to play with the fishing pole rope, her wrestling with Sarahcat, her wrestling with Ziggy, her hissing at Ziggy, her hissing at me, that time on the bed when she got the name “angry-cuddler.” All those times her nudging me awake to lift the sheet and let her under to snuggle against me, all those times waking up to her laying on my arm or curled in at my shoulder and neck.
Chloe came into my life in August 2011. And left in August 2023. After several August “incidents” in the past few years. After so many “health scares” and such.
And while this post doesn’t BEGIN to do justice to my thoughts, my feelings, to the enormity of what this loss means (especially when it sinks in, which I’ve thus far been able to stave off)…
I force myself to write this and post this to break that “ice,” so to speak.
Because I’m probably holding myself back, and the longer I go NOT posting ANYthing, the more it’s gonna build and eat at me and all that.
There will be repetition. There’ll be repeated thoughts and phrasing and such, the ideas…because despite my best efforts, the thoughts have been many, and I have to get something OUT.
I’d just started the comics blog when we lost Christy; but the blog was simply a shell to house reviews to post to facebook. When I lost Kayla, it was such a shock and I posted to facebook and vented to friends and…”only” had the comics blog and wasn’t sharing personal stuff yet. When I lost Ziggy I was several years further into blogging and more open to sharing, had a story on the brain, AND still had BOTH parents and didn’t yet have the anxiety and fear for the pets that I’ve had since.
Consciously, I know what’s happened and all that; but I haven’t let it sink in yet.
To the world she may have just been a cat. But she was a huge chunk of MY world, for 12 years–more than a quarter of my life–and there’s so much more, so much deeper I could go into, that I’m just not up for even searching for the words right now.
My Chloe is gone, and I couldn’t save her any more than I could Dad, and I’m still here and nothing I can do can ever change that.
Stars and twilight. And autumn leaves must fall.
The Life of Walt 