Crying

I think I've mentioned in another post somewhere that I am not a crier. I'll cry out of frustration on occasion and out of grief on occasion. My relationship to crying is really weird. Because it is a physical manifestation of emotion, or at least the most obvious one, I feel like it's what I should do to express the sadness I feel. So when I'm crying about Gordon, I feel like I'm doing the right thing, though I wish I could stop crying. When I'm not crying about Gordon, I feel like I'm not honoring him or that I'm somehow "getting over" him or that I'm once again learning how to obscure my emotions - putting the emptiness and grief wherever I put all the other sources of emptiness and grief so that I can get-on-with-my-life. Busy busy. There are things to be done, books to be read, forms to be filled, papers to be written, emails to be answered.

My dreams betray me. I think I've mentioned that in another blog post too. Last night I dreamt about Gordon. In the dream, he'd died, just as in life. But I kept seeing him in the dream and I kept saying in the dream, I still see him and I miss him and I was crying and crying. I didn't cry as much yesterday and lo and behold, my dreams did the crying for me. Of course, I woke up and cried and it felt terrible and wonderful. I know the grief will subside and that loss will go somewhere in my body, where all the other grief and loss lives. I will bury it so completely that I will only be able to access it in the depths of my subconscious where I will cry in the dream or scream in anger in the dream so that I can keep it together in the real-life.

The Love of a Cat

I have been crying and crying about the loss of my dear Gordon. A strange thought occurred to me - would he mourn my passing? But that's not why I'm writing. I'm writing to remember him and to think about what this grief is; this grief that feels unbearable. I have been given books that philosophically and theoretically expound on the human/animal connection. I've not wanted to read them. My relationship with animals is one that gets me out of my head. This is a great comfort for someone who is already in her head. But this love, this palpable, consuming love that I felt for him. He was such an entity in the most profound way possible to me.

Gordon, unlike my other cats, always felt precarious to me. He was the cat that escaped out the window weeks after getting him from the Humane Society. Still fresh from my grief over the cat that used to get out but I could count on coming home - until that cat came home with Feline Leukemia and got really sick - I worried about Gordon's not coming home or coming home sick. That night, I went to the Kinkos, made hundreds of Missing Cat posters procured for free given my wellspring of tears, and proceeded to plaster the neighborhood. Gordon came back that morning no worse for the wear.

He got out again a day or two before I was to turn in my master's thesis. He exploited a tiny crack in the window and slithered his way out. I again canvassed the neighborhood, hiring a little girl who lived across the alley, and stared out the window through my tears all day until his little head emerged from under the steps in a neighbor's back yard. I called to the little girl to grab him and we were once again reunited.

He almost got out once again when I lived in a basement apartment in Bolton Hill. I remember I was sleeping and I heard Tilly going mad jumping up to the window and down again - Tilly, unlike her brother, does NOT enjoy even having access to the outdoors, nervous as she is. I look up at the window over my bed, saw Gordon give me a double-take, and grabbed him back inside. Strangely, that's the day Pinkerton was the one who actually made the escape only to be found a couple doors down waiting to be let back into the wrong basement.

My last scare came in the house on, oddly enough, Gordon St. It was there he surely had his most harrowing escape. We had a series of break-ins at that house and had a new alarm system to remember to trip when going in and out of the house. My roommate Jeff, remembering to put the alarm on while halfway out the door, kept the door open while he was doing this and missed the little black cat escape. Again, I stayed up all night waiting for him, first with Neale and then with Mike. He returned about 3 am, shit stained and definitely frightened. He'd encountered something in the woods that surrounded our house though that really did not quench his thirst for escape.

All of this is to say that I've always worried about losing him somehow. I began to let him explore the outdoors when we lived in San Francisco. He would wander around the yard, eating grass and sniffing, and it was my job to make sure he didn't go under the house or slide through the cracks of the neighbors' fences. When we lived on Powers St., he would sit for hours on his leash and enjoy the backyard. I could never let him loose though. Too much traffic and too many feral cats.

But what I really remember about him, what I really held onto, was our bond. I swear that cat could see into my soul. I would call him into the bedroom to read with me and he'd perk up, make a little Gordon sound, and run into the bedroom. He'd trounce on my reading materials with that purr (that beautiful purr). After he'd settle down, he'd hold my hand - I swear to god - and we'd hang out. I would look into his face and there was nothing but perfection.

Gordon liked any excuse for an outing so we'd do laundry together and he, with his crooked little back legs and his meow that would squeak at the end (I wish I had that on tape), would run down the hall with me. Going back up the stairs, he'd dart to the landing and flop over and I'd rub his belly.

Gordon would sleep right on top of me at night. He wouldn't do this every night but he is the only of my cats that would sleep on me or sit on my lap. He wouldn't always do it and he wasn't an annoyingly clingy cat, but it was so wonderful to be around him. We felt like a team.

Gordon LOVED to steal my gloves, though he didn't do this later in his life. I would buy him his own gloves to play with but he liked the ones that were worn, the ones that smelled like his people. He also loved to chase earplugs. EARPLUGS. He remained active and playful until three weeks before he died. His demeanor was so goddam affable that it was only in his fainting and weight loss rather than in his energy levels and blood stream, that the disease could be found. In looking back, it took a long time for the cancer to take him, as he began showing symptoms in May. Nobody could figure out what was wrong with him. I knew he was dying and everyone told me I was paranoid. Not in a mean way but in a you-love-your-cat-too-much way.

Colon cancer is the said to be the worst nightmare of a pet owner as it is difficult to detect until it is too late. Further, his cancer was called adenocarcinoma, the most aggressive of the malignancies. Despite expensive and painful surgery, Gordon was gone less than 3 months after his diagnosis.

The thing about the relationship with a cat is in its dailiness, its in the momentness. That means it's not the memories I will miss. For me, this isn't a relationship with memories. Rather, it's a relationship that I cherished in its structure of feeling and pure joy. Gordon filled a house with Gordon-ness. There will never be a relationship like that particular relationship in my life again and that is a pain that is very difficult to endure, at least in its early sting.