The Big Man Joined The Band

Grief is a horrible thing, isn’t it?

It has no respect for whats going on in the world. It has no respect for anyone else’s feelings or perspective. It only cares about what it can do to you. Right now. In this moment.

I should be used to this feeling. Growing up, I had a lot of pets, and they all went the way of…well, all pets. I’m thinking of my first cat, Mowgli, who poisoned himself by drinking bleach that had fallen from a shelf and cracked open. I’m thinking of Rani, who was so loveably stupid, he lay down in a sunny spot on a hot day and died of heat stroke. I’m thinking of Wellington, the kitten who died mere weeks into being ‘mine’ when his liver failed. And I’m thinking of Darnit, the tabby from the same litter as Wellington, who became my best friend trough my difficult teens and early twenties.

I’m also thinking of the two Chinese hamsters who, perhaps influenced by all the violent movies I was watching, attacked and killed each other.

So I should be used to this.

It’s part of the deal. You invite a pet into your family, you give them all the love you can, and you know the tradeoff is a day when you have to make a horrible decision.

But something felt different about Biggie and Scooter.

I’ll never know what caused the change in me. I’ll never really know if there was a change. In my teens and twenties I found my way into fun habits involving drugs and alcohol. And I don’t have a good enough handle on who I was then to know if I was doing it to mask the same feelings I came to understand a lot better in my thirties. It could be that I’ve always had anxiety problems, and found ways to cover them. At the same time, earlier in this decade I was working for a shitty company who treated me really badly, and around that time I started to struggle with my emotions, and stress, and all the fun things that come with it. Did I always have these problems, and simply get better at owning them as I got older? Or did a bad experience change the way I’m wired?

Biggie and Scooter came into our lives around the period I was starting to struggle. Quite quickly we learned their different personalities. They were both affectionate, but in different ways. Scooter can be wary around you at first, but once she trusts you, she likes to be fussed. Biggie was a big bundle of neurosis and very easily startled, but he would let me pick him up and hold him, and he liked to show affection when he thought we weren’t looking. Mostly at 3AM when he would jump on us to get comfortable on the duvet.

It wasn’t long after they came to live with is that Biggie -only three or four months old at the time- was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy. A problem with the walls of his heart. It presents at first as a heart murmur, and is common in older cats, but having it show up in a kitten so young meant the vets couldn’t really give us much to go on. How long would Biggie live? Impossible to say.

From here, the cats became, an outlet for my own failure to deal with anxiety. I didn’t know it at the time. But I would worry about them, in a way I’d never worried about pets. I’ve always loved my animals. All of them. But I never stressed about them. But I would lie awake at night thinking of all the worst case scenarios involving these two. And, in particular, Biggie.

I’m sure it helped that I, too, was born with a heart murmur. A trivial detail. Something I’d forgotten about completely. Until I was going through a slow low-level nervous breakdown and had a kitten, this fluffy, loveable, loyal little thing, who was totally dependent on our care, had the same thing I’d been born with.

Over time I recognised things for what they were. I could see I was transferring a certain level of my own issues onto the cats. Keeping them safe, warm, and happy helped to keep me safe, warm, and happy. Until the time I was older, and wiser, and started getting a handle on my own emotions and brain, and could take some of the pressure off.

But there was always a certain bond there. Biggie was always a little piece of me. We both had the tendency to be a little grumpy sometimes. We both had a mercurial streak. We were both unconditionally loyal, and preferred to show our affection in small, quiet, moments.

We didn’t know how long we’d have Biggie with us. Turns out, just shy of 8 years. He passed away yesterday two weeks after his eighth birthday. In retrospect, I think there’s a certain logic to the timing. We found out recently that cats are classed as senior when they turn eight. Insurance companies refuse to take them on at that age. And, of course, senior is the time in life when cardiomyopathy becomes common in cats. So for a wee trooper who’s been carrying that condition since birth, I guess this is the point when he couldn’t handle the worsening symptoms.

I lost a number of pets while I was growing up. But this was the first time I had to be an adult and be part of the decision. This was the first time I got to be in the room when the dose was given, holding my cat, fussing him, and telling him we loved him.

There are small personal dramas playing out around the world right now due to lockdowns. Families not getting to see each other. Loved ones passing away alone. In the grand scheme, I can’t expect many to feel all that bad for our own little piece of drama. Unable to be in the building with out cat while he was treated. Freezing outside, in a car park, for two hours because we don’t have a car to wait in, but everywhere else was closed. And none of that really matters to me today. The part that will take a lot longer to walk off is that the vets - completely understandably- could only allow one of us to be in with Biggie for his final moments. Making that choice, and then having to deal with what came next, will always be my memory of this lockdown.

My friend Franz Nicolay wrote a line in a song that goes, ‘life never labels the last time you do something.’ And life doesn’t label the last morning you put down your cats food, or sit with him on the sofa, or watch him make biscuits as he settles onto his red blanket.

And we have Scooter to think of now. They were born brother and sister, from the same litter. They’ve never been apart. Scooter has never, aside from the afternoon and evening when they were each being neutered, been on her own. And we can’t explain to her why she now is. That’s a thing we’ll figure out over the coming days.

But I was wrong. At the beginning. I said grief is a horrible thing. It isn’t. As hard as it can be to accept it, grief is a gift. The pain - and then the deep sadness that follows- is all part of loving someone. And as many of us grieve at the moment, in the middle of all of our mini dramas that make up this epic pandemic lockdown, we need to embrace that sadness. The sadness means someone was part of your life, and means they’re still part of your life. The conversation with them continues. And grief is the reminder of that.

All pets are part of your family. Some pets become your friends, too. I’m going to miss my wee friend.

But I can also see, even as I type this, that he has left plenty of his white and orange hairs lying around to remind me of him everyday. In those small, private, doses that he preferred to dish out his affections.