But, at the time these things were happening, all I could think when dealing with press was that I was afraid of repeating the same things too often and sounding like a robot, yet also afraid of deviating from my stock answers and sounding like a moron.
I know how I sound in writing all this. How awful it must have been for you, to receive the heartfelt love and sympathy of so many people! It wasn’t awful at all, of course. It was astounding, amazing, miraculous enough to convince even the most hard-hearted cynic of the generosity and infinite kindness people were capable of.
Every time somebody wrote to say that they felt as if Homer had been their own cat—that they’d cried upon hearing the news as if they’d lost one of their own—my own heart throbbed in sympathy. I knew—I knew—exactly how that felt. When I saw all the donations that had been made in Homer’s name and thought of the lives that would be saved because of them, my heart swelled with gratitude. When I received all the beautiful things people made and sent to us, I was thankful until I thought my heart would burst with it.
And that was the problem—there was too much to feel and not enough me to feel it all. My life already felt strange and unlike my own life simply because Homer was no longer in it. But now, when I woke up, I would spend a good couple of hours walking around in a daze, not knowing how to pick up the thread of the day, where I should start, who I should call, which emails and inquiries and Facebook posts I was supposed to respond to.
Once my days had flowed along a natural, effortless rhythm that I didn’t have to think about. Now I spent a half-hour each morning trying to decide when to take a shower. Did it make more sense to do a little work, then shower, and then get back to work again? Or would it be more logical and efficient to shower immediately, before I did anything else? Half the time I ended up not showering at all. Better to avoid the question altogether, I’d sagely conclude, rather than come up with the wrong answer.
I eventually realized that Laurence had seamlessly taken over most of the essential tasks that kept our lives running. It was Laurence who now fed Clayton and Fanny on their regular schedule. He also cleaned their litter-box, trimmed their claws, and fished their toys out from under the couch. Laurence prepared our meals and made sure I ate, kept us stocked with toilet paper and trash bags and toothpaste, wrote out checks for bills and made sure they were mailed on time.
All the gratitude, all the love, all the sorrow for the pain of others that I felt, overloaded me until all I felt was overwhelmed—overwhelmed and anxious, slipping further behind each day on all the thank-yous and acknowledgments I owed people, which continued to accumulate in new batches by the hour.
Somewhere, underneath this giant mound of stuff that had amassed atop me, was my grief for Homer. I had written about it, blogged about it, emailed Homer’s mourners about it. But sometime in the midst of all that, at some point after we’d scattered his ashes and there was no physical, tangible task left for me to do, I’d lost my ability to feel it.
What I needed was to cry. I hadn’t cried at all since that first wild convulsion of loss on the afternoon of the night when Homer had gone to sleep for the last time. Now I needed to shed the gentler tears of letting go. I had to get back to my grief in order to heal from it and move on.
But I couldn’t. I couldn’t find it. I didn’t remember ever having felt as tired as I did now. I was too exhausted even to look.
MY OWN LIFE had been turned inside out, but as far as I could tell Clayton and Fanny were as happy as they’d ever been. They still ate big meals and napped together in sunbeams, still chased crinkle balls and the laser pointer’s ever-elusive red dot with the same joyous abandon. When I piled all the sympathy cards and letters we’d received into the middle of the living room rug—hoping to create some semblance of order from them—Clayton would dive right into the middle of the pile, burrowing into and under it as if he were a child in a ball tank.
It was a few weeks later, in late September, when I noticed one evening that Clayton was having trouble with his litter-box, hopping in and out of it more frequently than was usual. When I checked, however, he didn’t seem to be producing anything. I assumed that he was a little blocked, and I added some olive oil to his moist food for an evening meal. He gobbled the whole thing down with his typical enthusiasm, which I found reassuring.
Later that night, however, it was a different story. Clayton was in and out of his litter-box every few minutes now, his pupils hugely dilated. When he wasn’t in the litter-box, he paced back and forth across the living room in an odd fashion, crouching first in one random spot, then another.
I had been planning to take him to his regular vet the next morning if the problem persisted. But he seemed so very uncomfortable—and was acting in so very unusual a way—that I didn’t want to make him wait another eight hours for relief. If it had been Homer, who’d hated the vet with a furious passion, I might have taken a more wait-and-see attitude. But Clayton didn’t mind doctors, and even though it was 11:00 and our animal clinic was closed for the night, I thought, Better safe than sorry. So, bundling him into his carrier, and waiting for Laurence to grab a jacket so he could accompany us as far as the sidewalk and see us safely into a cab, I headed for the 24-hour emergency animal hospital on West Fifteenth Street.
The last time I’d been in a cab ferrying a cat to an emergency room had been with Homer, and that had clearly been a life-or-death situation. It didn’t feel like that this time, though. I still believed the problem was constipation—albeit clearly a severe case—because, in my range of experience with cat maladies, I hadn’t yet encountered anything else that seemed to match these symptoms. Vashti’s CRF had caused her to be constipated from time to time, and Clayton’s behavior now wasn’t completely dissimilar to what hers had been then.
Vashti’s physical inverse, Fanny, may have been sleek and
slender, but Clayton was mushy in the middle. He was a bit of a food hound, and had a habit—one we couldn’t break—of finishing his own meals and then tackling Fanny’s. Fanny was always obliging enough to allow him to do so. She was a healthy weight, according to her doctor, and even when I’d secretly put down some extra food for her when Clayton wasn’t looking, she didn’t seem particularly interested. So I assumed now that Clayton had eaten too much of something that didn’t agree with him, and my heart ached with sympathy for his obvious discomfort. I reached my hand through the top of his cloth carrier to stroke his head reassuringly. Poor kitty, I crooned. Poor Clayton. But I also murmured, with a kind of rough affection, Maybe now you’ll learn your lesson, and let poor Fanny eat her meals in peace.
The emergency animal hospital on West Fifteenth was the polar opposite of our regular clinic—a cavernous, fluorescent-lit waiting area studded with row after row of hard-backed chairs. It was close to midnight, and the only other person in the enormous space was a man with a huge German Shepherd, who’d just finished being sick all over the spotless linoleum floor. Another man in a blue orderly’s uniform hurried over with a mop and push-bucket, while the man with the dog patted his flank in a soothing way, helping him into an exam room in the back. The woman at the check-in desk took Clayton’s name, the reason for our visit, and my credit card information with brisk efficiency. We didn’t have to wait more than a few minutes before a doctor approached and summoned us into an exam room of our own.