I haven’t posted for a really long time.
The truth is, there’s a lot going on in my life right now, and I haven’t felt comfortable writing about it. This is partly because the changes I’m going through are very personal - but it’s also because they concern a part of my story that isn’t just all about me, and so I don’t really feel like it’s entirely my story to tell.
Anyway, I moved out on my own last month, and now I live in a one bedroom apartment way across town from the house that I used to share with my wife. In the last few weeks I’ve had a lot of different thoughts I could share about all the new sights and sounds (and smells) of my new home, as well as all the various experiences of living on my own for the first time in almost fourteen years. However, it has been very, very hard to take that first step of confessing that not everything is right in my world in ways that I’m not really ready to talk about. And without filling in some kind of transitional chapter, I’m not really sure that anything else I could write about my life would really make much sense.
So, if I want to continue to write about anything meaningful in my life in the future, I guess this is my attempt to fess up about where I am now.
….
For many years my wife and I had a sweet little white cat that gave us both something to pet, to tease, to love and to take care of. The cat passed away a few years ago after a fairly long life and a mercifully short illness.
When she got really sick at the end our cat went and hid deep under the bushes at the back of our house. After we found her we checked on her every hour or two all that day and late into the night to try to bring her some comfort, but we could tell there wasn’t much we could do. She was just old and her time had come. When I checked on her again the next morning she had already passed away, and later that day we buried her off of a little dirt trail in a wild area of the river parkway near our house.
When a dog gets sick, it will whimper and call out its distress to the rest of its pack - but at its core a cat is a solitary creature, and when it’s not well its instinct is to hide from the enemies that might harm it while it is recovering.
Or maybe our cat hid away when from us when it was dying so as not to cause danger or distress to those that it cared about - who can say? However it may be, when things are really rough in my life I sometimes wish I were a little more like a dog and little less like a cat.
