Editor’s note: Today’s offering discusses death, including a description of the death of an animal.
Two things happened to me in December: I got my newest tattoo, and my partner’s cat died.
This is the story as I tell it now, because they are simple things, time-bound and straightforward. The rest of December stretches into day after day of one happening after another. Either two things happened, or too many things happened. Either this is a simple story, or it is hardly a story at all.
My tattoo, long awaited, happened on my birthday. I had set up the appointment months before, thinking that it would be a gift, of sorts. If pressed, I would have claimed the gift was for me, but that felt half-true, at best. Putting the caduceus on my arm felt significant in a way I wasn’t entirely sure of. Not a dedication, exactly, and not an oath, but significant. A sign that I could not fit words around.
Three days later, Z’ha’dum died. While he had been showing signs the vet dismissed as nothing for months, the end came in less than a day. Usually loud and demanding, he curled up quietly that morning and refused food and water. When we took him in this time, the vet found the cancer that had finally closed off his stomach from the rest of him.
He wasn’t my cat. A year ago I would tell you that I didn’t like cats, despite the small statue of Bast that has followed me through more than a decade of moves. But that was a year of tossing him off of inappropriate surfaces, cleaning his messes, scritching the place under his chin when he demanded attention. By the time we took him to the quiet room in the back of the veterinary clinic, he was a friend. He was the first friend I watched die.
I know he won’t be the last. 2021 was, for me, a year of diagnoses. Friends, acquaintances, strangers I had always meant to get to know better – they posted “cancer” on their Facebooks, or they called, or one day they simply stopped being there. As I tended Z’ha’s body – straightened him into a comfortable position, covered him with one of the towels the vet had left – I thought of all the ways I had seen people pass in the past year. Even a small friend deserved a clean and easy death, and people who cared to make sure his body was taken care of. I had not been able to provide that to all of my friends, but I could give it to this horrible goblin of a cat who I would miss very much.
We left his body there, with others who would care for it, and came home. Between the emergency room and the consultations with the vet, it was after midnight by the time I stood next to my altar. I was dry-eyed, dehydrated, exhausted, and feeling too stubborn to worry about sacrilege as I put quarters on Hermes’ altar: two coins, payment for the ferryman. I had no idea where the soul of a cat would go, and I was fairly sure it wasn’t any of my patron’s business, but I had exactly one contact I could call for this. Besides – taking the symbol of a psychopomp and tending a body in less than a week? It didn’t taste like coincidence.
Sometimes, when I sense the gods, they feel like people. What came over me as I turned my back on the altar was too big, formless, bright in a way that made me remember my childhood and the stories of the road to Damascus. I sat before I could fall, my legs weak, my hands shaking as I tried to remembered how to speak. I’m fine, I thought, more than said, to my concerned partner. I’m fine.
Caravaggio, The Conversion on the Way to Damascus, 1600, oil on canvas [Public domain, Wikimedia Commons]
That’s the part of the story that’s easy to tell. The rest frames it, quite literally, on either side. December was a long month, this year. The first two weeks of it were spent caregiving, tending my partner through a major surgery. In some ways it was a solitary time, as ze recuperated and we isolated to protect zir weakened immune system. A nice break before my birthday, I thought, and the holidays that would come after.
2021 was a year of learning and communicating my boundaries, of identifying who I am separate from the needs of those around me. Those weeks were the master class. Dedicating myself to another while staying in touch with my own needs has never been my strong suit, and I had underestimated the unique work that caregiving takes. Even my quick-healing and generous partner struck an urge in me to give up everything else in the face of zir pain. Identifying my own needs and meeting them took careful listening. They were good weeks, filled with the kind of learning that is unspoken in the spaces between household chores. By the end of them, returning to work, I was proud of myself for the balance I had managed, tending to us both. I was also very tired.
Then my birthday came, and we put Z’ha down. A week after that, my other partner brought home COVID from her work.
A drop of medicine being poured into a spoon against a black background [Pixabay]
Holidays have always been difficult for me. I write about it every year: my struggle to define new holiday traditions, my conflicted feelings about travel and family. This year, I had a plan that seemed to take all of it into account. I would have time to myself and time with my partners, time to celebrate and time to think about the oncoming year.
We locked down two days before Yule and the timing of my symptoms kept me in isolation until the day after New Year’s. It was just the two of us in a house we hadn’t expected to spend the holidays in. I pulled the box of Christmas decorations down right before the fatigue hit. We walked around it, closed, for two weeks before I could put it away again. We cooked each dish of Christmas dinner on a separate day and ate, lethargic, as we waited for our fevers to break. All of our plans dissolved and were replaced by another unexpected kind of work as our bodies forced themselves back into health. The worst days felt like isolation – like the only thing I knew I could manage was the next motion, the next breath.
In the moment, it seemed too neat to be meaningless. My head already filled with death, I played through scenarios of how the sickness might end, what our deaths might mean. I tried to think of it as an enforced hermitage, a reflective end to the year before the new one began. I tried to parallel it with my two weeks of caregiving as I struggled to do the most basic chores. Surely there was a lesson, here. I could force meaning out of this.
When I got some energy back, I sat down to tend my altars. The small chores of cleaning, sorting, and reorganizing took all of my attention. As I worked, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the tattoo had changed something, had somehow shown that I was serious enough to have some credit. Gods moved unexpectedly, their altars swelling and shifting locations. Daydreams flitted past, carrying the unformed seeds that held new ways of thinking about things. Through the fog that filled my brain, I lit a dozen candles.
Many candles in a darkened place [Pixabay]
There was no great revelation, as December passed into January. Writing this, I am still looking for a lesson in the details of the month, hoping that fact will finally give way to metaphor and make the numinous thing I sense real and solid. That is the sort of experience I cannot explain away, the bone impact of the divine. I prefer it to the other kind, where I accumulate small moments and tiny lessons until the weight of them makes me grow in a new way.
Perhaps, with enough perspective and time, this story will coalesce into something pithy and straightforward, the December that I – something. I do not know the word that should go there, but I know that a word is missing. At the moment, all I have is silence, and a place to move on from.
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