About That Flaming Cat…

Mom and Dad, near the end.

A few days ago, I mentioned that one of our cats, Opie, singed his fur by walking too close to a candle. (Idiot.) What I didn’t mention was 1.) How pungent the smell of burned cat hair is. (We had to open the windows) and 2.) Why we had a candle lit in the middle of the afternoon. I mean, this America, and a person can light a candle whenever they goddamned please. But this candle had a particular purpose: It was a memorial candle, for my dad, who passed away on March 9.

We lit a 7-day shiva candle back in December when my husband’s great aunt, Sophie, who was Jewish, died, in accordance with Jewish practice. There was something very comforting about it—this quiet, visible reminder of a major transition. I am not Jewish, nor was my dad, but a lot of faiths and cultures light candles for the dead and have for centuries, either on the anniversary of their death or during mourning or in remembrance. So with all due respect and gratitude to those traditions, I hope it’s OK that I’m doing the same. (I’m a UU. Syncretism is what we do.)

And then the fucking cat walked too close to the candle, trying to get at a bag of balloons in a nearby, half-ajar drawer, because he has a plastic chewing problem. We didn’t actually realize he was burned until we noticed the smell. And then Elm went to investigate and saw that a large swath of fur on his left side was tinged dark brown on the tips, like a little cat ombre. I don’t think he even felt it.

But, yeah, so, my dad.

He was first diagnosed with colon cancer back in 2016, got a colectomy and did chemo.  But the cancer reappeared in his lungs in 2018. He was able to hold it off with chemo for almost two more years after that, but this past December he started having a lot of pain and nausea and other issues; he slept more and more, and his appetite shrank. In early February, they discovered that he had cancer in his bladder and ureters. In late February, his kidneys began to fail. On February 29 he began hospice care, at home, and I went up to Maine to help my mom take care of him.

It wasn’t pretty at first. He was in a lot of pain, and very anxious and agitated and delirious. Ultimately, we needed to keep him quite sedated, which was hard, because it meant he was sleeping more or less all the time. We gave him medications every 2-3 hours, including overnight. Either my brother or I slept on the couch next to the hospital bed we set up in the living room, and traded off medicine administration shifts with my mom.

The hospice nurses and aides who visited each day were truly wonderful. Neighbors and friends of my parents stopped by with food, and some played instruments or talked with my dad, though he couldn’t really acknowledge them. He seemed to hear sometimes, and would squeeze a hand or manage to get out a word or two.

During the day, I kept music playing for him— stuff he’d always liked: folk and traditional Irish, a little country, a lot of stuff from the 60s and 70s: The Beatles. John Denver. Peter Paul & Mary.  Brigadoon, Camelot, Man from La Mancha.  I  joked to my brother at one point that I was “DJ Death.” (Black humor is a must at such times.)

As difficult as it all was, I found it to be a very tender and healing time. My dad and I were always close,  but he was a complicated man who struggled with the demons of his past, and we had a complicated and sometimes painful relationship, particularly over the past year and a half. At the end, though, the hurt was overshadowed by the love, the good memories, the many gifts he gave me over the years. There was closure—at least for me.

We did our best to make things peaceful and painless for him. I think we did from a physical standpoint, mostly, but I don’t know if he ever really felt at peace. It all happened much sooner than he’d expected—than any of us expected. But it happened.

It happened at the strangest possible time.

While we waited by his side during those days, Super Tuesday happened (Remember Super Tuesday? Remember the primaries? Doesn’t it seem like ancient history?) and that was the last “normal” news I remember. Gradually, the coronavirus situation took over. The World Health Organization declared it a pandemic. The numbers were going up and up and the US was bracing itself.  My mom and brother and I, meanwhile, were in this strange, bubbled space, doing this elemental thing: Ushering a loved one out of the world.

And then he was gone. And….bam. The world was on fire.

I bought toilet paper and extra canned goods on the way home from Maine, where the shelves hadn’t been emptied yet. (And wine. I also bought wine.) There were basically only two days after my father’s death where I felt like I was actively grieving and sad, the way one would expect to be. Then school was canceled. I stopped going out except to walk, run, and buy food. I became, and still am, so preoccupied by it all—so focused on adjusting and coping and worrying and trying to provide some semblance of routine to the kids—that my dad’s death feels like just one more surreal thing in a time when EVERYTHING feels surreal.

I’ve said to many friends who have checked in on me that I don’t know if it’s a good or a bad thing, for him to have died at this moment in history, except to the degree that I suppose it’s good it happened before things got bad.

“For now, it’s just a thing,” said an old friend. And I think that about sums it up: It’s a thing.

My dad passed away two weeks ago. The grief emerges at unexpected moments, and sometimes makes my breath catch. It’s there when I talk to my mom on the phone, as I do nearly every day. It’s there when I wonder what he might make of all this, and how he and my mom—as a pair, not my mom alone—would be coping.  It’s there when I see Elm wearing a sweater I brought home from his closet. But much of the time, it’s drowned out by the tumult and enormity of the current crisis. I wonder if, when this crisis abates, the loss is going to hit me like a ton of bricks.

I wonder if other people who are experiencing losses and tragedies and life challenges unrelated to the pandemic are feeling the same way.

I’m trying to figure out if I can bring it back around to the cat here; something about him barely feeling the burning of the candle on his fur, and how it’s analagous to me barely feeling the fact that my father died. But I don’t think I can make it work.

Excuse me while I go chew a balloon.

xoxo

Jane