Retrospective: Pippin and Mourning

Fair Warning: This post was painful to write and it probably is to read, too. 

Yesterday, Sept 26, was the two year anniversary of the day I woke up and found everything had changed while I slept, and I didn't even get to hold him while he went gentle into that good night. I know it was a gentle passing because of the way his body was lying when I saw him seconds after I woke up ... because I was looking for him like I did every morning.

I still remember that horrible moment. Like it just happened. The vivid realization. Seeing him and realizing it was a body and he wasn't there anymore. A pain so all encompassing I wanted to scream but it seemed too melodramatic and he wouldn't have wanted that. So I just held the pain in and it's still there.

Still hurting.

Two years later, it doesn't hurt the same. It's more like a constant dull ache. Always I think of him, in everything I see and do. When my loved and lovely boys do something, and I think, "Pippin used to do that" or "that's not something Pippin used to do." When I drive in my car, especially on interstate, I look over and I don't see Pippin sitting calmly in the passenger seat, and it hurts.

The memories of him are fading, and that hurts too, because only my mom and myself knew Pippin the way he really was, when he wasn't apprehensive or nervous. And the more the memories fade the more he's really gone, and the worse it hurts, and yet the more the memories fade the less it hurts because I don't remember the feelings as intensely.

Which is all very confusing and I don't like confusing things, especially when they're my own emotions.

I've built myself another life, with Colby and Apricot and Thimble, by sheer determination. I've tried to live in the present, to appreciate them and their relationships with me and with each other. I've tried to, in the parlance of popular therapy talk, "move on." What rational reason is there to hold on to the pain?

And still, I feel like it's all a dream. It started out a nightmare and now it's not that bad but it's still a dream. It's not real. Nothing around me is real. Nothing quite matters because one morning, I'll wake up, and everything will be back to normal. Just me and Pippin.

Again with the confusing: I don't know if I even want to wake up. I like my three boys. I like having multiple cats and all the interactions and affections and fun times we share. And that hurts and feels like I'm betraying Pippin's memory.

So if I like this life I've built ... if I love my boys and I do, far more than I realize, I think ... why do I still get this sensation sometimes that it's all a dream?

I don't remember much about my cat companion before Pippin: Pizza. I do remember that I had this same dream-like life sensation after he died, and it lasted for about five years, and I feel like I wasted those five years with Pippin because I wasn't quite here.

And now I'm not quite here again.

Emotions are very difficult and confusing and complex, and I do wish they would submit to logic and rationality.

Friday night I realized what that night was, that two years ago on that night was the last time I saw Pippin alive. I tried to put that aside. When you look at it logically, anniversaries are stupid. What makes that day any more special? Just because the planet I'm living on went around its sun twice? That doesn't make sense.

And yet somehow it does matter, and I felt all hurting and dream like and the boys noticed and didn't like it; each of them trying to draw me out and make me pay attention to them and not to whatever was making me so sad and distant. Apricot kept bumping my leg, hand, or head, whatever he could get at. Colby followed me around looking pitiful (ie, pick me up!) and Thimble kept doing minor misbehaviors because he's unfortunately discovered that I get distracted from what I was doing or thinking by having to go correct him, and sometimes he does things just to get that to happen.

I guess grief really is a process, and it takes a very long time. Maybe it'll never go away completely, the pain, I mean, and I'll just make it part of my self the way I do other, more physical, pain. And maybe that's not a bad thing. If I always miss him, just not overwhelmingly, then ... well, I don't know if I can finish that thought in a way that makes any sense.

But it feels like it can be okay. One day. In the future.

Not now.