Illustration by Andrew Mazariegos– Ovalle
I sat in a hotel bathroom, floor covered in water from the gap between shower glass and wall, 7,000 miles away from home as my cat, Tyson, died. It was 4:20 a.m. in Busan, Republic of Korea, and 2:20 p.m. in Michigan. He was 18 and a half years old. My family adopted him in September 2009. My whole body felt like a force was pressing on it when I got back into bed. My knees were sore from when I prayed, facing a glowing red LED cross outside my hotel window, to see him one more time earlier than that night. I would never see him again.
These details, the night/morning of his death, plagued me for weeks. I reconstructed the hours leading up to and following his euthanization with any pieces of information I could gather, any new angle that might change how those hours played out. I thought that if I could do it over again, he could come back. It simply wasn’t right that he had died. It was a dream.
Joan Didion documents similar feelings in “The Year of Magical Thinking,” her book chronicling the year following her husband’s death. She describes her obsessive recounting of events, linking everything to her husband’s eventual death as a “vortex.” I wrote all the vortexes I had found in the margins of my copies. I scribbled in all the paths that led me back to that bathroom in Busan and further from the memories of Tyson and my home. Reading her book and seeing myself in it started the end of my period of magical thinking; it started the beginning of acceptance.
I accept his death as part of his life, not the defining factor of my relationship with him moving forward. I love him outside of time and space, irrespective of his death. There is no hard line separating where my love and grief begin. Love continues not within but despite the grief.
Thumbing through my journal, I see the waves of grief. I write about my love for him and good memories on low-tide days. My memories are bright through the haze of time. I write of peaceful moments. The tide still knocks me down. On the days it does, I write pages about my guilt for not being by his side when he died. Images and physical sensations from the night/day of his death soak into each word. These writings are messy and incoherent at first glance. I bring up childhood memories with my cat, things I will never do with him again, and the ache of missing him. It always ended up back in Busan. That’s how I know I am in the vortex, the whirlpool of my grief. In this state, my mind focuses on his death, pulling all my other memories of him into the vortex, surrounding all my memories with the stench of death and distance.
No day goes by when I don’t think about Tyson. Pictures of him come up on my iPhone’s featured photo widget multiple times a week. Choosing not to focus on death when looking at him makes these photos pleasant, a reminder of days when he was healthier. Still, I find myself crying unexpectedly. A rogue memory, and I am in the vortex. Writing helps me out of it.
My grief is not love persisting, love in a trench coat, or any other iteration of a metaphor that conflates grief and mourning with love. Since the death of my cat in January, I have heard these adages time and time again. I do not find peace in treating grief as a continuation of my love and thinking, because (?) it made me linger more on his death and took away from celebrating his life. I refuse to define my love of my beloved cat, Tyson, by my grief and his death. Love can continue in a pure form after death, but it requires work.
