Compost Studios

Losing our family cat, Amy, to cancer this week had me re-visiting the whole grieving process emotionally and intellectually. In my adult life, I've buried my sister, my parents, my father-in-law, two cats, and two dogs. It’s been quite a while since I lost a pet, and I was stunned by the depth of my grief and the physical sensation of it—the lump in my throat, the pain in my chest, the white-out feeling of exhaustion, the surreal sensation of time standing still or accelerating.

This week I cried until I couldn’t cry anymore. I let my shoulders shake and the sobs wrack my body. I grieved with an emotional abandon I seldom let myself experience. And when I collapsed into bed last night knowing Amy was gone, I felt as if my insides had been scoured clean. No, there wasn’t an end to sadness but there was peace, a lightening of spirit, a clean place to start living a changed life the next day.

It seems it is so much easier to grieve for a pet than it is for a person. From the first realization that something was wrong up until her last moments with us, I was unstinting with my emotion. I keened and cried, I walked around pale-faced and red-eyed without self-consciousness.

I sat with Amy for hours. I made her comfortable. I memorized her face. And I said everything I felt compelled to say, everything I wanted her to know about how much I loved her, how much I would miss her, how it hurt to see her hurting, how I’d do whatever I could to make things better.

Why is it so much harder to say the same things to the people we love? Why is it when serious illness claims a family member and we know death is inevitable or imminent, we swallow our words, put a lid on our emotions, and try so hard to keep our sh*t together? Do human relationships have to be so complicated or do we make them that way?

When someone we love is dying, a part of us wants to hold them in our arms and put loving words in their ears—but we can’t. We want to spill our tears onto their bedsides, but we don’t. We want to tell them what they’ve meant to us but our words disappear like tears in the shower. We fear burdening and exhausting our loved ones with our emotions and grief, and so we’re quiet.

We do the “right” things. We show up at the hospital or the home. We do what needs to be done. We try to express so much with so little. We hide a thousand unspoken words in small gestures and small talk. We want our presence and acts of kindness to say it all—and they DO say a lot. But do they say enough?

Maybe, just maybe, it would be better for the ones we’re losing and better for us if we could be freer expressing our love, concern, and loss in the moment rather than burying it like an artifact to be unearthed and analyzed later. Maybe if we really tried, we could overcome our reserve and be a bit more honest with ourselves and those we're closest to. Maybe if we succeed, then our swirling pain and emotions would be like sand that scours us clean, making room for good memories, a shining place to stow joy.

January 25, 2007