coping with grief – Lee Duigon

Heart On Sand Photos and Images | Shutterstock

We never got around to disposing of our cat’s litter boxes. They’re clean: I cleaned them after she died, because we thought we’d get another cat.. That was our summer. Then I got sick. Couldn’t get a new cat.

Anyway, a day or two ago we noticed something peculiar in the one litter box. It was a perfectly sculpted heart, about the size of an open hand. We don’t know how long it’s been there. Nor how it got there.

I can’t express how deeply we miss our cats. Robbie was the last of them. Our household is disordered, and I have all sorts of medical procedures waiting down the road for me. I can’t keep track of them.

All I know is, somehow a perfectly formed Valentine heart has appeared in our cat’s litter box.

robbie picture

As you can imagine, we’re watching our surviving cat, Robbie, very closely. Maybe even too much so.

Patty has been very worried about the cat not drinking, getting constipated, not eating, etc. You’d swear these animals understand English. A few minutes after this conversation, Robbie was in the litter-box pooping, then she ate a whole can of Mediterranean Harvest, and within seconds of Patty stepping out, she took a nice long drink of water. “There! See? I’ll be all right!”

But we have to allow for some vagaries of behavior on her part. She lost Peep, too. She’s taken to lying on an old T-shirt I laid on the floor for Peep. We can be sure she’s not shrugging off her sister’s death–and she can certainly see how upset we are. Being a cat, she can probably sense it in more ways than we humans can imagine.

A death in the family is always hard to bear. Always! It always makes me wonder what’s going to happen next. I’m trying to work my way through it, keep busy… yeesh, I could use a laugh! Maybe I’ll go outside and laugh at the weather.