Eulogy for My Cat

It’s been another long while since I’ve blogged on here. My last post was July 13th, which was a mere week before my cat, Neko, had to be put down. That’s when the drive to tap into my limbic system just fizzled out. The words weren’t there. The feelings were overrun by ways of keeping myself distracted–throwing myself into my job and throwing myself into my schoolwork.

If you’ve never felt the affection of a pet, it’s hard to understand the despair you undergo. I’ve lost loved ones, but considering I didn’t even see them yearly, their passing was nowhere near as devastating as losing my cat. And I can’t know what it’s like to lose a child. I’m not interested in ever having children, but I can tell you the loss of my cat has left a deep crevasse in my heart so unscalable that crampons and miles of rope won’t help.

Some people like to think the love of an animal is shallow. They only enjoy your presence because you feed them. That’s not the case at all.

When I moved out, I didn’t take Neko with me because I didn’t want to force her into an environment she would be unfamiliar with, so I left her with my parents. Yet, even though my mom had always fed her, her affections were tied to me whenever I visited. Her audible purring was enough to let me know that my presence made her happy.

She was never a lap cat, but she always loved to be near me. And I’ve been using the excuse for so long that I don’t have enough time to write the third book in The Stars Trilogy, when, in reality, it’s been hard to write it because she is no longer here. I wrote the first two books with her always at my side. She was a constant fixture in my writing life, and writing, frankly, is not the same without her.

I have started the third book, of course, 500 words a day at a time, but my writing life feels so empty because she is no longer here to purr by my side, to lay on my notes, to beg for pets when I’m just trying to type something. Even when I moved out and left her with my parents I cried for a week because I missed having her near me so badly. I missed waking up and she wasn’t there to greet me. Eventually I accepted her absence, as I knew she was much better off with my parents. But it’s been five months since we had to put her down because she may have had stomach cancer, and accepting that she’s gone is not any easier.

I still cry a few days a week at night when I’m in bed by myself because my husband comes to bed a little later. And I always tell myself that if something ever came along and said it’d grant any wish in exchange for my soul, I would wish to have her back and have her live forever so that even when I pass, she can go on to bring someone else joy, and she can go on to keep experiencing the world in a different way with each person she lives with. Even as I type this it’s hard to keep back the tears.

I’m so bitter that she died too soon. She was twelve, and while some may argue that’s plenty, there are many cats who live a few years longer than that and some into their twenties. In fact, not only did we put my cat down last year, we also had to put down our little dog who got to live to be sixteen. And while I grew up with that little dog and spent more time living with her than without, her death just could not affect me the way my cat’s did.

You can bond with an animal the same way you can bond with a person, and it is so, so incredibly painful when that bond is severed by an untimely death that is so cruel and unfair. I wish I could believe suffering was meaningful, but it’s absolutely meaningless. I don’t know to what extent that she suffered–only that she did.

I can tell you that the day my mom and I put her down was the worst day of my life. And I’ve been run through the gamut of things.

Her death was so painful because she fought the vet every step of the way. She hissed and growled and spat, and I couldn’t even hold her as she fell asleep and they delivered the final injection that put her down for good. I screamed and cried and apologized to her all the while and couldn’t believe the nightmare I was experiencing. I cried the whole day. I cried for weeks after. What kept me together was just being distracted.

This world can be such a cruel joke, giving us the ability to feel so deeply that we’re paralyzed when our minds experience something inconceivable. And her death was and will always be inconceivable because why did I have to lose her so soon? How come I didn’t get to see her death miles away like I did with our little dog who was able to die of old age? We had another dog, too, who got to die of old age. And if my mom reads this, hopefully she won’t mind me admitting that she told me she would have preferred our little dog to go before Neko–and it’s only because she was old and showing signs of old age and Neko arguably was not old and was certainly not showing signs of old age. If she did have stomach cancer, it’s a type of cancer even young cats can fall prey to.

She’s occasionally in my dreams. Mostly I dream that she appears out of nowhere, as if her death was just a game of hide and seek. In these dreams, I hold her close to me and cry tears of joy that she isn’t truly gone. And then I wake up with a feeling of emptiness knowing that will never come true.

I do have moments where I want another cat. My parents have two cats now named Gracie and Tessa. Gracie’s a cuddle bug, and Tessa’s still new and so is distant from everyone, except when her and Gracie play. So I’m much more familiar with Gracie than I am with Tessa, and even though Gracie melts like putty when you hold her, I realize that my affections for Neko will never be replaced. I visit my parent’s house and yearn for her to appear out of nowhere. She’d probably be angry and jealous that I’m holding another cat, but I think she’d eventually warm up to the idea of living with two other cats and would hopefully become close to them.

I just wish I had more years with her. I thought one day I would be able to take her with me once my husband and I moved somewhere that accepted pets, but now that can never happen.

I’d like to be both more emotionally and financially available before considering adopting a kitty–and I’d want two so that they’re not alone when my husband and I are at work.

There’s no magic way of coping with the death of a pet. Being distracted was the best thing for me. I honestly didn’t think I’d be able to survive at work, but it’s the one thing that kept me going. I know if I didn’t have work to go to, I would have initially spent my time alone at home crying all day. I didn’t even think I’d have the emotional faculties to survive anatomy and physiology, but I’m so driven to achieve my purpose in life that I don’t think there is anything in this world that can stop me.

When there are moments when I can’t stand how horrible it is that she’s no longer here, I try to remind myself that I’ve got a lot of love in me to give to many a deserving cat out there. So I just have to keep chipping away at the obstacles in life in order to provide the best life for my future hypothetical cats. If there’s an expensive surgery that can mean the difference between saving its life or having to put it down, I want to have the means to be able to pay for that.

Before the vet claimed Neko may have had cancer, I thought she just hadn’t started eating yet because the antibiotics hadn’t fully cleared an undiagnosed infection from her system. Or she was just so stressed about being force fed that she couldn’t bring herself to voluntarily eat. I was willing, at that very moment, to dip into my savings and pay for her to have a feeding tube (the most expensive option) if it meant giving her the chance she deserved. I was not going to have her put down just because she wouldn’t eat. It wouldn’t have been fair to her. It would have just been too cruel. But whatever she was going through was far crueler.

It saddens me deeply when I think about how I couldn’t have ever possibly understood to what extent she felt the pain and misery of whatever illness she was infected with. It saddens me whenever I think about how scrawny she was on her very last day, how she had no energy, and how she barely meowed, even when I called her name. She was a normally chatty cat who loved to meow and purr and jump and run, and she wasn’t any of those things on her final day. It saddens me even more to think of what she must have been thinking as the vet held her down and stuck needles in her.

She hated the vet. Always did. She was a tyrant whenever we brought her, and the vet would have to wear gloves and need the help of a vet tech. So it was no surprise she reacted horribly when being put down. But it doesn’t make it sting any less. It just makes everything worse because she must have felt deeply betrayed.

If there’s an afterlife, and if there’s one for animals, I hope she knows how deeply remorseful I am that I couldn’t do anything for her. I hope she knows just how much I loved and still love her. I hope she knows that I wanted to do everything possible to save her, but at the end, there was nothing that could.

Mostly, I just want her to know that she was one of the best things that could have ever happened to me. If it hadn’t been for a boy breaking my heart when I was a freshman in high school, my parents likely would not have adopted her. Then I would have missed out on so much by not having her in my life. And who knows what choices I would have made in life had I not had the influence of an affectionate cat? Because I know her love has made me a better person, and I want to keep existing in this world with her love influencing how I live my life.

I am who I am today because she influenced a part of me very deeply, just as there are many positive people in my life who have influenced me and guided all the decisions I’ve ever made.

And I promise to keep living with her positively influencing me.

Blog Hop: Joey Paul

This was actually supposed to go out yesterday, but I got so caught up in everything. So…welcome Joey Paul!

Bio: Joey is 32, disabled, an indie author and part time student in her last year towards an honours degree in Health and Social Care. She loves to write and is at the moment working on her eleventh and twelfth books, as well as preparing her seventh book for publication. She started writing when she was medically retired from her job at the age of 19. Her first book was released in 2005 and after a brief time away, her second one was released in 2011. In addition to writing books, she also enjoys reading them and can often be found resting in bed with a good book, a cat and an ukulele.

Attached is a photo of me and below are my links
Blog: http://www.joeypaulonline.com/
FB: https://www.facebook.com/BugBooks
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5779310.Joey_Paul
Twitter: https://twitter.com/MsJoeyBug
Amazon Page: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Joey-Paul/e/B007FXH8LE/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1

 

An Existential Tragedy

Yesterday my mom brought our dog of seventeen years to the vet and had him put down. The major reason he was put down is that he wasn’t eating. He hadn’t eaten for a week. Not only that, but he was basically blind and confused and likely dealing with a mind that was deteriorating. It was a sudden decision–he hadn’t eaten that morning. But it was heartbreaking to hear that that would be the last day he was going to remain alive.

I wasn’t close to him–not anymore, anyway–not since my cat Neko came into my life. I’m not going to lie and say I feel bad for drifting away from him, because I don’t. It was mostly his ungodly body odor that kept me at bay, but I never once wished we didn’t have him anymore. He was close to my mom, and that was good enough for me. I still paid attention to him, but most of my attention has gone to my cat, as she is attached to me and I attached to her, and we practically demand each other’s attention.

Unfortunately, I myself don’t have any picture of my dog. But he was a cocker spaniel/beagle mix.

But it was so hard just knowing he would no longer simply be at 5:30 PM. I was a sobbing wreck yesterday, even though I kept all of my feelings to myself. I’m trying so hard not to sob as I write this, in fact. In spite of no longer being as close as I once was to that little dog, he still left paw prints on my heart, prints that will remain until I die because the heart is a muscle strengthened by the good things in life, and he was one of those good things.

To be honest though, I’d been waiting for him to die simply because his life has been so hard for the past two years. He just stayed in bed…all the time. It’s tragic that death is the only solution to release him from his suffering. It’s what suicidal people feel. It’s what I felt at one point. And that’s the tragedy of existence, that at some point in our lives we’re going to want to die, either because of some crippling disease or because old age has become so painful that there is no current solution to make it otherwise. At the same time, life is still so very precious. It’s so precious that sometimes we just have to let it go.

I don’t know if there is an after for a dog. I don’t know if there’s an after for people. I’m also not going to say there isn’t because I don’t know. I just don’t know. What gets me most though is when people like to tell us that those who die are in a better place. Why can’t our current reality be that better place? Why don’t we make our current reality that better place?

I suppose I’m just troubled. Death is a strange concept to me, a concept I will honestly never understand. It was so weird looking at the deceased body of my dog and touching him and still feeling that lingering warmth. One moment he was alive and the next gone. It doesn’t make sense to me, but there it is. I will never understand death, and that’s all there is to it. I don’t deal well with death. I guess that’s just who I am.

However, I think the biggest tragedy of existence is that we form bonds with things we know are going to die. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green talked about how we leave scars of existence on each person. Some of us leave deeper scars than others. Some of us try to leave the shallowest scars we can, but most of us don’t think about what it means to bond with another person and animal –and I suppose that’s a good thing because it means we’re thinking about the here and now.

I think a lot. I think too much. Sometimes I think about what it’s going to mean when my cat dies, what it means when anybody I love dies. Other times, I try not to think about it. But yesterday I knew that my cat had left the deepest scars possible because she hasn’t just left paw prints on my heart, but in my heart and my blood and all around me. I feel like that when she dies, I won’t be able to function for a bit because she’s not just a pet to me–she’s a practical friend who has been there through my best and worst and has not once ever hated me for anything I’ve done to her that could have been hurtful. She is so forgiving.

But I suppose I should just accept that death is the most nonsensical thing in the world to me. Science can explain it, but the emotions can’t grasp it.

The Importance of Social Media Interaction

Interact with my cat?

I have read just about everywhere that with Twitter you should just follow everyone who seems even remotely interesting or has the potential to be interested in what you say. You should follow them, then use any of the various Twitter programs out there to unfollow those who don’t follow you within three days. I know I blog about social media a lot, but I can’t stress enough how futile blind following is. It’s like blind querying: Agents tell you not to blindly send out queries. They tell you to carefully select your markets and send letters to those. I feel Twitter, and any other social media, should be the same way. So I don’t blindly follow writers or readers on Twitter. I carefully consider them and their Tweets. If they don’t pose questions or interesting discussion and only spam links, what is the purpose of following them? They’re so wrapped up in their own link spamming that they’re not going to notice me.

Social media is about social interaction. If you find you are not interacting with your followers or your followers aren’t interacting with you, what is the point?

I see authors link spamming their e-books all the time on Twitter. I go to check out their Amazon rankings, only to find that their link spamming is not at all helping their sales. It’s because they’re not treating their followers as people. They’re treating them as commodities to buy their products, and thus killing the human element to this social media thing.

Yesterday I joined a community on Facebook of writers who post their author pages and receive likes in return. I received 36 likes from this page. My hope is that we’re all not simply liking to like but are going to actually interact with these pages that we liked. Or else what is the point if we’re just going to ignore these authors’ postings? I didn’t simply like to like. I liked authors’ pages who engaged well with the fan base and who had books I might be interested in checking out. It doesn’t do me a bit of good to have 85 likes but not a one of them pays attention to what I write. It doesn’t do anyone any good to have thousands of followers but no engagement from them.

So I don’t understand why social media moguls encourage follow spamming. I am very selective about who I follow. I primarily follow people now based on their websites–which mostly occurs from WordPress. I am wary about following people with an enormous follower base because these people usually interact so little with the followers I wonder why they even have a Twitter or a FB or any type of social media in the first place. These people may seem popular at first glance, but a look at their Amazon ranking begs otherwise.

I suppose follower spam is encouraged because you might get lucky and find lots of people who are suddenly interested in what you’re posting. But it’s not working for me to do that. I find those I interact with are interested in me far more than those I try to interact with but won’t interact with me in return.

 

The Dancing Writer’s Chamber

My messy writing desk…and my cat.

I primarily write at this messy desk you see to the left. But I’ll on occasion write in my bed when my body isn’t feeling up to supporting itself on a chair. Every Saturday I’ll probably be writing at Panera Bread, and I’d like to start writing outside when the weather permits. But mostly, that disorganized desk is where I do everything.

I’ve never been an organized person. I try to be, but it all falls apart. But, hey, my messiness has worked for 22 years of my life. I am an organized mess.

So where I write isn’t anything special. I might even write at work sometimes, if lulls permit.

How long do I tend to write? I try to write a chapter a day, so this could be anywhere from an hour to an hour and a half, or shorter, depending on the chapter. If I’m really in the mood and I don’t have anything else planned, I’ll do more than one chapter. The most I’ve ever written in a day–besides being manic–was 8,000, and I was on a serious roll.

Tomorrow I plan to write in Stolentime, one chapter, because I have so much stuff to do tomorrow: get my pin number to register for classes at my uni, start designing a t-shirt I will use to promote my book, blog, social media to keep widening my audience, make stuff for the giveaway, and then of course ballet. I wouldn’t be The Dancing Writer without ballet, although I am going to have to start getting on to my boss about giving me my Monday nights. Ah, well, the summer intensive will be here soon, and I will be having that considering I’ll likely be paying for the entire thing ahead of time.

In any case, where do you all tend to write? How long do you write? Do you have word count goals?

All Writers Must Rest

I definitely do this for my cat.

Tomorrow I’m taking a break from blogging and social media in general. I’ll probably write an epilogue for When Stars Die, but that is as work-y as things will get. I’m also going to finish a gothic-ish design of When Stars Die’s MC Amelia that I’d love to have on a shirt. The drawing itself sucks, but the paint will totally make it come alive. I’m also hoping to receive a certain item that I can use for a new, better cover design for When Stars Die.

So I’m not exactly taking a break, but I do need one from social media because it can be hectic and trying. Plus, I have 80 followers, so I’ve earned a rest from it. In any case, any kind of art is therapeutic for me and not really work like social media is.

All of us as writers need to rest once in a while and get away from things that start to feel like work to us. Social media is one such thing for me. I don’t want to burn out on it, so I’m disconnecting myself entirely tomorrow. Instead of doing social media during lulls at my job, I’ll be reading or writing. I need to finish a certain book anyway so I can do a review of it and put it here.

Burnout in our line of work is common. Burnout happened to me last summer. It wasn’t just the depression that made me not want to write–it was total burnout. I obsessively write and edit for a long period of time, then go for half a year not doing any kind of writing because I’m so drained from it. My dad is always warning me even our passions can drain us, and he has never lied to me. He’s too right.

Now that I have a contract, it is crucial I don’t experience burnout, so I’m going to allow myself rest. It’s even more imperative considering I’m dealing with fibromyalgia and just got over a bipolar depressive episode. I’m doing my best to learn to not obsess over things. My therapist is helping me too through weekly goals. Not obsessing is one of them. I do find myself obsessing with stats on my website, so I’m pulling myself away and am going to try to train my brain not to worry about stats and just blog and read others’ blogs when I come back Saturday.

I used to be so fast with my life, so set on the future and reaching my goals as fast as possible. If I have learned anything from fibro and depression is that it is okay to slow life down and save the future for another time. So I am slowing down, breathing in, breathing out, and am going to relax with some art tomorrow with no worries about social media: e-mails, my website, blogging, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, ect. We all know social media is important, but we all know how draining and trying it can be.

Slow down. Take a break when you feel your nerves becoming frazzled. It’s okay. We’re human and we’re not meant to go, go, go! I’ll see you all Saturday!