Recovery Day
The bill for borrowed spoons came due this week. Unlike every week for the past three months, I didn’t have the energy to file the paperwork to borrow additional spoons to pay the bill. In the long run, this is fine. I’m due a reset. What it means is that I’ve canceled a lot of things I meant to do and I’m spending significant amounts of time staring at walls or out windows. The things I do manage to accomplish are either very simple or very urgent. During all of my staring I’ve discovered that I’d like to gently write a State of Things post to orient myself as to where things are.
Our twenty-year-old cat died on Monday. We’ve seen it coming for years as she slowly declined in mobility, eye sight, and cognition. On Saturday she stopped eating and began to rapidly fail. Sunday night she was dying. Monday morning she was gone. It is odd to speak clinically about this experience: declining, failing, dying. Yet to speak more emotionally, to really explain how I experienced this passage, would be to relive my distress and possibly cause distress for some reading. So I retreat into the clinical, the bare facts, and I bury the lede under a discussion of energy and spoons. As if somehow I could shuffle this in, make it more routine, less impactful. Safer. Easier. But I don’t think death can ever be easy. Not when we really sit with it. The only way to make it easy is to not look. No judgement. I’ve chosen that path for myself before. I don’t think self protection is inherently wrong. This time I sat with my cat so she would not be alone.
Kikaa was a good kitty. I rescued her from under our deck. Then we had to give her back. Then she started coming back to visit. Finally she became officially ours. She was supposed to be outdoor only, but that lasted less than two months. She was fully integrated into our lives when I wrote about her being a gift cat. There are more stories, but mostly she was interwoven into the sorts of habits that don’t stick in the memory as stories. I can either write thousands of words about what she meant to our family or I can keep it very brief. For today I’m choosing brief. But know that this briefness covers a huge depth of significance. I can either spend all day trying to find the bottom (there isn’t one) or I can bridge the depth and continue onward to describe what else is happening in my life. Continue the process of disentangling what is now from what was last week.
Today is a pause. I finally have no urgencies to drive me forward. It is the day when I feel the sluggishness of my thinking after months of being sharp and on point. After a weekend of crisis care for family members (both human and not) who were going through big life experiences. I sit here spoonless letting words flow or not. (This post has had multiple long pauses in the writing). I am tired. Projects feel too heavy. Fortunately I know that if I grant myself rest and space, then energy and enthusiasm will return. Up there in the first paragraph I planned to list out things I’ve got going on and what efforts I plan to launch, but I’ve discovered that writing the list would require more focus than I want to spend today. So instead I’ll let this post drift gently to a stop.