Scarlet

I meant to get to this earlier. Scarlet died just before Christmas and felt like I had so much to say about it. Yet each time I thought about sitting down to write, my grief would slam into me like a tsunami and I knew it was still too early. It’s weirdly shameful to grieve so hard for a cat. Other cat lovers know my pain, but it’s not universal in the way losing a parent, or friend is. I know, because I have lost both. I have known all sorts of grief and as much as I tell myself it’s not true, there is a hierarchy and some unwritten rules for how long it’s ok to say; I am in pieces because I held my beloved cat while she died with such dignity that I loved her even more because of it. A couple of weeks?

I only found respite by doing something that required my full attention. Coming home from swimming, I’d expect her to greet me at the door and when she didn’t and I remembered all over again that she was lying in the back garden, in a hole deep enough for foxes not to bother, pain would hit me full in the face again. She had been sick for so long. Nursing her, cleaning up, working out exactly what was wrong, tweaking food and medication and wondering if, hoping against hope that she would be well enough to come with us to the canaries. It was exhausting and yet, it bound us closer. Without me she would have been dead long ago. But the responsibility of keeping her alive and later, of deciding when she should die, it made a husk of me. By the time I had realised how utterly pointless her vet was, it was too late to change tack and find a new one, because she was beyond repair. Maybe nobody could have done anything differently. Sometimes terrible things just happen.

The vet who we found to give her a dignified send off was compassionate and thoughtful. It was the first time in the whole process from diagnosis to death that I felt held by someone else. Scarlet, now painfully thin, walked over to him right away to say hello.

She had not left the house for a week or so, save for one morning when she went into the hallway and miaowed. When I opened the door it was sunny, but bitterly cold. She stepped out just long enough to feel the breeze in her fur and then back in again to the underfloor heating, peeping out from there to see what was going on. So I fetched her bed and a cashmere cardigan and she sat in the sun, wrapped against the cold like an old lady with a blanket over her lap, blinking at the world going about its business. After she was gone, I held that cardigan to my face for a long time, hoping to catch a trace of her in it.

‘She wants to smell your shoes’ I told him - not needing to think about what she might want with his shoes, I just knew. ‘Have you been in the fields?’. The scent of dog walking and mud and pollen I expect. Vet stuff.

When she was gone I whirled about removing all the detritus of cat ownership. Tearfully donating the enormous amount of food we had accrued and sobbing unchecked as I left her flight case, felted cat cave and timed feeders for some other cat lover at the dump. In the days and weeks that followed, along with a sense of relief that the worry was over, I felt guilt that I was in any way relieved. I also felt a huge wave of ennui. I regretted hastily cleansing the house of her presence, because being reminded was too painful. I wanted to be reminded, to bring her closer through the pain of missing her. I regretted saying no when the vet asked if I wanted a fur clipping. A fur clipping? How weird and gross I thought to myself, in the still eye of the grief tornado, unaware that I was about to be torn to shreds and would treasure even a small tuft of her fur later. I found some a few days afterwards on a blanket in a cupboard where she sometimes slept, mercifully untouched by my ferocious death admin. I gathered it up, made a little ball and held it to my lips, remembering how it felt to rest them on the top of her head between her ears and the way she always smelled good, even at the end.

When the stressful preparations for departure to the canaries were done, house (mostly) painted, tidied, ordered, packed and all legal boxes ticked, we flew away from winter and towards the sunshine. New scene, new me! It’s true I was beyond delighted to be here. I am delighted. We’ve talked about doing this for years and now here we are, doing it. We heap our plates with sweet summer vegetables and Ibérico pork, zoom around town on our bikes and swim in the turquoise lagoons of El Cotillo. Yet on the bus home from Puerto del Rosario, watching the desert landscape through a dust encrusted window, I couldn’t stop my mind wandering back to Scarlet, wrapped in her favourite blanket in the cold soil of our back garden in Bridport and realised that my face was wet with tears again.

Other long forgotten grief started to resurface. My dear mother in law taken by lung cancer misdiagnosed as asthma, one of my swim group found in her armchair, knitting in her lap, a long ago friend who fell (or leapt) from a cliff near where I live. My lovely grandfather, left to die on the bedroom floor by his wife with undiagnosed dementia. It was as though these griefs sensed a shift in the terrain that allowed them to bubble up to the surface. Grief is not linear. It is like Japanese knotweed.

So I’m finding ways to replace the rug that has been pulled out from beneath me. I’m baking bread, finding ways around my joke oven, different flours and mañana attitude about anything I have ordered in an herbolareo. It will arrive, or it won’t and the process of problem solving that provides, gives me a much appreciated dopamine hit. We’ve joined Spanish classes and although I’m only A2, I can always find ways to communicate that don’t rely on perfect conjugations. Not speaking a language well doesn’t stop me from reaching out. However, it takes a long, long time to make real friends, people you can actually rely on. It takes even longer before you can have off days and be snarky. I miss my friends back home, even while I am in paradise. Even when I’m cross and down, I know they love me. Grief is such a lonely time and the only way through it for me is to force myself up and out. Once I’m with people I’m distracted enough that sorrow is a distant niggle, sand in my shoes.

If you’ve got this far, I’m guessing its because you know what it is to grieve. We are united in our knowledge of how painful loss can be. We know that whatever the world says, losing a pet can be as eviscerating as losing a relative, because grief is about the depth of your feeling, not gender or age or species. When someone says, ‘ah they had a good innings’, they might not understand that absence can be worse because that person or pet were around for a long time. Just because they were old or ill, you don’t miss them less. Yes we are glad that their suffering has ended. But we miss them just the same.

Rest in peace Scarlet. To me you were one of a kind. x x x