On saying goodbye
"I didn't know grief felt so much like fear."
Dear neighbor,
I wasn't looking for Phoebe. In fact, I was only asked to watch her for a week. It was 2007. She was a mere 6-8 weeks old and the oddest looking kitten I’d ever seen. She was a muted calico with big ears and large, yellowish eyes. Her foster mom named her “Whizzy” because of her exceptional sprinting abilities. Legend has it, on those wild suburban streets, she was the most difficult kitten of the litter to catch because she bolted before you could move a muscle. I quickly fell in love with her big energy that quickly collapsed into long, luxurious naps in the windowsill, and her unusual markings that looked like a toddler painted her fur, accidentally splattering her nose and paw pads with dark speckles. She was my sweet oddball, so I named her after Phoebe Buffay of Friends.
Phoebe turned me into a teenage Cat Lady before it was a moniker that people took pride in. A year after calling her mine, I traveled to San Francisco to look at colleges with my mom and immediately melted onto a bench in a pool of tears. It was too far from Phoebe, from our home in Wisconsin. While I always imagined myself in California, I happily settled on a state school just ninety minutes from Pheebs. After college, I moved to New York and she remained with my parents until our family cat, her best fur friend, died at the age of twenty-one. One month later, Phoebe was on a plane with me to Brooklyn, where we would stay for the next five years before driving down to Savannah last summer.
Living through the pandemic in New York made me even more grateful for her ever calming existence. I was very much alone, newly sober, and bored as hell. During that time, I accumulated several hundred photos of Phoebe sleeping. We started a new morning routine, which involved me drinking coffee on a chair that received optimal morning sunlight, her purring loudly in my cross-legged lap— occasionally tossing her head back to encourage more scratches. This was a routine I upheld nearly every single day, and she grew to expect this quiet lap time with mom. It was the most delightful way to wake up, and it gave me a renewed love for slow mornings, and for her. Each new apartment offered a new sunny spot for Phoebe and I to start our days. When I moved again last month, I bought a comfy chair just for our special morning routine.
Phoebe also slept in my bed every night, her feet propped against my arm as her fluffy body curled into itself. She chased cockroaches in my pre-war Brooklyn apartment, and proudly brought me one in the middle of the night when I first moved to Savannah. She used to tower over Brooklyn from the bright window of our sixth floor apartment, looking down from our warm home as people hustled through the snow. She insisted on exploring the hallways outside our apartment, and I happily supervised these jaunts. Her favorite toy was the laser pointer, which she preferred to chase on rugs (I suspect she liked the traction). She liked drinking out of glass cups, mine in particular. Her purr was joyfully thunderous. The older and skinnier she got, the more you could see those purrs vibrate in her chest. She was raised by my parent’s siamese cats, so she was also a talker. Best of all, she loved being as close to me as possible.
I used to joke that we would die together; that she was some bionic cat who would outlive everyone. When she reached seniority, the vets always told me that she was one of the healthiest cats they’d ever seen for her age. Our annual check-ups always left me feeling more and more confident that she would be with me forever. Deep down I knew this wasn’t true, but, even as she got into her teens, I kept hearing She’s so young for her age! Those compliments came to an end about three years ago when she developed asthma, and then when she had a lump on her back leg that needed to be removed and tested, and then when her low-grade heart murmur turned into congestive heart failure, and then, finally, when signs of cancer developed in her throat.
Last week, after her third trip to the emergency vet in three months (the second in only a week) for labored breathing, several attempts to alter and perfect her medication cocktail, rapid weight loss, and zero avenues that promised improvement, I had to fight all of my impulses and say goodbye. The vets told me I was keeping her alive for just weeks, perhaps days at a time. I was keeping her alive for me, while her body kept saying I can’t. She was sixteen, the same age I was when she came into my life.
I’m in an immense amount of pain. I feel a dark, massive hole in my heart. Even though the vets assured me otherwise, I have guilt that I didn’t do more. I also have the heavy fear of never seeing her again, never scratching her chin again, or getting woken by her gentle paw poking my face at 5am. And with all of that, I have so much emptiness.
This grief will likely be something I live with forever, or so I’ve been told. Phoebe was my baby, which I’m sure makes many parents of human children roll their eyes. But, as a childless woman, she was my baby. The love I felt for her was so pure, endless, and huge. It was bigger than the entire world. Pet parents often struggle to talk about how important our animals are, how deeply they impact our lives, the lessons they teach us about unconditional love, and the unimaginable burden we must carry as the arbiter of life or death. But I’m here to say it’s all very, very real. I’m convinced the bond we create with our pets is, by nature, spiritual. This is why their sudden absence is so gutting.
I don’t have a clean, optimistic way of writing about goodbyes, because I’m still very much trying to do it. Even though I held her in my arms as the veterinarian carefully administered the euthanasia, cried over her lifeless body and pet her over and over, telling her how much I love her and how sorry I was, I’m still saying goodbye. I’m still reconciling with the fact that I won’t hear, see, or hold her again. A fact that crashes vicious waves of sorrow into me every hour.
Her ashes will be returned to me this week. I’m far from healing, if that’s even a possible destination. All I can do is let myself feel the sadness. I can remind myself how lucky we were to experience a life together. How lucky I was to love someone so much that the pain of losing them is this heavy.
Warmly,
CF