A few days after I sent my note about joy, the seasonal stuff we might be feeling, and soaking in the holiday vibe, my Christmas morning joy shifted to grief in the space of four hours.
My husband, Mark, me, and our most social cat, Pumpkin, who loved being a part of every gathering, were sitting on couches admiring the tree.
I had a sip of a mimosa, and we opened a couple of presents.
Pumpkin started to convulse. He’d never had a seizure before. Mark tried to calm him, and I called my sister. She was a vet tech at one point. Would he have another? Would he just be okay? “Take him to an ER, now,” she said calmly.
A few hours later, after having been attended to by wonderful doctors and nurses, we were faced with that moment that many of you reading will be familiar with. You feel sick. You question yourself leading up to this moment, “What did we miss?” You suggest alternative scenarios to the professionals, hoping they’ll hear something they hadn’t thought of.
“We can’t guarantee that any more tests will give us answers to his confounding symptoms, nor give him the quality of life we all want for our animal friends if we can figure out what this is,” said Dr. Rosenstein.
In the end, we said goodbye and carried the empty cat box through a gauntlet of other animal carers waiting anxiously as we had for a morsel of hope on this Christmas day.
Again, Mary Oliver comes to mind: “We shake with joy. We shake with grief. What a time these two have, housed as they are in the same body.”
There have been moments of joy looking at photos of him and reminiscing over the ten years we loved him.
Like the first day we met him. Mark was interviewing for a job, and we were walking the property. Pumpkin, one of the four cats in residence, came along and basically conducted his own interview—if we’d stop, he’d stand on his hind legs and push his head up to be patted. Testing us?
A charmingly needy boy.
That Christmas morning, before everything changed, he was exactly where he always wanted to be—with us, part of the moment, soaking it in, looking for head rubs.
I can hold it all: the mimosa, the tree lights, his presence and what came after.
Joy and grief. What a time these two have.
Happy New Year to you all,
GC
