thoughts, words, deeds

and so, now, I'm empty

I lost my 20 year old cat today to cancer. I'm heartbroken. She was with me through 2 rounds of cancer, my move to New Jersey and my head injury. We've been through a lot together.

The prompt is about losses in your life.

This is a difficult thing to think about. I mean, I've had little losses. Losing games or contests--which I don't like to do, by the way. I don't like how it feels to be in competition with someone else.

I lost places a lot as a child. We moved. we haven't moved in a while now, but when I was growing up, I lived in twenty-five different apartments and houses in my first twenty-five years in periods of no less than four weeks and no more than eight years. I don't know though. In some ways, that didn't feel like loss because each old friend lost with distance was the opportunity for new people and new friendships. It was change more than anything. But I still wonder about some of my old friends. I wouldn't even know how to look for them, now.

I can't think of loss without thinking about death. I've lost all of my grandparents and one nephew. They all were difficult--I remember losing Grandpa by inches as the Alzheimer's took bits of him away for the last few years of his life. I didn't go to his funeral. I was away at college. I went to his wife's funeral ten years later, and that was disturbing. I think I prefer celebrating life rather than viewing a person who is gone and small and so still. Too still. Caleb, my nephew was hardest. We lost him before he had the opportunity to live at all. It hits me hard, especially around his birthday and his death day five days later--both in April.

Right now, it's raining and my fingers are way too slow to capture my thoughts, and it's my niece's birthday (she's six today) and she's miles away and I'm not going to be seeing her and I'm feeling lonely for my nieces and nephews. It's difficult being so far away. Pictures of a baby climbing on his feet for the first time aren't the same as being there and laughing with him. I'm feeling that loss most of all, today.