For the past two weeks I’ve been intensely struggling with Mika’s death. Long story short, she was my baby. I raised her from a tiny kitten. I considered her a daughter and not a pet. She was an inside/outside cat. She was a hunter. Sometimes she would go away all day, but she always came back at night. And then one night in October, she didn’t come back. We launched a search for her, put fliers up all over our town and in every mailbox in our area. We offered a $500 cash reward. We got lots of calls but nothing panned out. On the 7th day, we got a call from the deli up the street. She had been hit by a car. He had her body in a box, behind the store.  She was only two-years-old.

Since October, I tend to break down about once a week. It can happen anytime, but a lot of times it happens while I’m driving. It usually hits me from nowhere. The hot feeling surges through my body, then the tears come. Hot tears, eyes burn, sinuses burn. It’s a grief-fire. It’s debilitating. I pull myself out of it because I feel I don’t have another choice.

I’ve been coping with it. When it happened, after the initial grief, when I could form coherent sentences again, I started to rationalize it. I know all about the 5 Stages of Grief and believe that the Kübler-Ross Model is as accurate as the English language can get to sensibly describe loss. I also know all about overcoming negative, irrational thoughts. I’ve survived deep depression, anxiety, and suicidal periods. And, of course, I didn’t just survive it, I overcame it. I teach people how they can overcome it, too.

Logically, I know what I need to do ~ Acceptance :: Forgiveness :: Love & Gratitude ~ Physically, emotionally, and spiritually, however, I am hitting a wall. This is the first time that something has affected me this way, where I feel completely incapable of healing. I feel hopeless, like this is it, it will not get better. For the past two weeks, I’ve been breaking down every day, multiple times a day. Yesterday I cried on my way home from work and then I cried my eyes out again before bed.

I experience all of the emotions that I know to be useless and unnecessary. But I can’t seem to help it.

I experience guilt. Mika & Bella (our dog) got fleas before this happened. We don’t know how. The house was always clean. It’s possible that they came from the neighbor’s dog or another dog that Bella was around. It’s also possible that Mika had made friends with neighborhood cats. She was always outside and there are plenty of them around. We treated them with flea medicine, etc. but they were difficult to get rid of. I think about it and consider myself a failure. Like I let her down, like maybe if she didn’t get fleas, none of this would have happened.

I experience the most useless thoughts of all — the “what ifs.” What if we didn’t let her out before we left that day? What if I had insisted on her coming inside? What if it hadn’t rained? What if I had gone out searching for her that night instead of waiting until the morning? And on and on it goes…

I feel guilty because she was “a cat.” I feel guilty because I’ve cried more over her death than I ever cried over my grandmother’s death. But I talked to a good friend who lost her dog recently. She is an even bigger animal lover than me. She said, “Dena, I cried more when I lost my dog than when I lost my mother.” That put things into perspective a little bit. Most importantly it makes me realize that I am not alone in this.

My fiance lost his father when he was fifteen years old. When we first met a little more than four years ago, he couldn’t talk about his father or his father’s death without losing it. Slowly over time though he began to open up. In the beginning it was so difficult because he had never talked about it before. But after awhile (I mean years) it got easier. Sometimes we consciously, together, decided to push him to talk about it even when it hurt. Now, he can talk about his father and his father’s death with relative ease.

Last night, as I was losing it about Mika (yet again), he just listened to me and let me talk/cry. Then he told me that my losing Mika is like him losing his father. He told me to remember how he was about it when we first met, when he couldn’t talk about it — and then to think about how he is now. He said that I will get there, too.   I just have to talk about it and cry about it as much as I need to.

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I have a few thoughts to close this.

First, this is one that I’ve held onto like a life raft during many of my darkest hours: Haec olim meminisse ivvabit. (Latin: Time heals all things.)

Second, this is an excerpt from Tender is the Night, by F. Scott Fitzgerald: One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still.

Last, is a little story, I don’t know yet if it’s about hope. When we went to get Mika she was relatively peaceful except for the fact that her eyes were open. There was only a little bit of blood coming from her mouth. We took her home. We wrapped her in a blanket. It was a green blanket that had an Irish blessing on it. It read: May the road rise up to meet you. May the wind always be at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face, and rains fall soft upon your fields. And until we meet again, May God hold you in the palm of His hand.

We didn’t wrap her in that because of the blessing, we wrapped her in that because it was the first blanket that I found. We buried her at the top of our yard in one her favourite spots. Matthew put stones around the place where her body was below the dirt. Over the weekend I stopped to visit her while I was walking Bella. I noticed that there is a soft, green, leafy plant growing up from where her body rests beneath the soil.

Right now, I can’t tell this story without crying, but maybe someday I’ll be able to.