Ophelia

My partner and I do not have any human children yet, but we do have little ones whom we call our "furry children," or, in other words, our cats.

One of our cats, Ophelia, has had chronic illness for the past year, and early Friday morning she took a turn for the worse. After a half hour seizure--the one and only she had ever had--we took her to the vet and made the painful decision to put her down.

I can't and don't want to get into the details of her last hours because they are too painful, too raw to recall. And in a way, I cannot shake those images from my mind. They replay themselves over and over again, and I don't know if it's because my mind is trying to process what happened, or if I'm trying to torture myself.

Death is a strange thing to wrap one's mind around. It takes its course whether we yield to it or not. Looking on as she seized, comforting her, talking to her--that was all we could do.  We kept asking, When will this stop? At the vet's office, we held her, talked to her, kissed her, but we knew that wasn't her anymore. There wasn't anything to do except to say Okay, we can let her go.

This feels like a tidal wave--knocking into me, at times drowning me, sucking me in, and rearranging everything as it once was. I see her toys, at times I think I hear her, I watch her little sister smell and search for her, my arms want to grab and hold her, but there's nothing.

I know healing is on the horizon, but at the moment it's devastating. I want to go back in time and stay there with her, petting her, listening to the rhythm of her purr.

Hmm. Okay.

Surveying the Damage

Spring break, in some ways, has been a magical time for me. I've been able to do the things I presume "normal" people do, like make dinner, grocery shop, open mail, pay bills, and sleep. On top of that, I've been able to get my face in the sun, and wow, what a difference it's made. I keep saying over and over again, I feel human again! Day by day I've felt my armor slip away, and this has left me more exposed. This exposure has allowed me to really feel my emotions . . . or recognize the lack thereof. Ironically, the more exposed I am, the more human I feel, the more I realize how un-human I've become.

In the midst of this "happiness," I realize I'm not happy--not totally happy, anyway. I can't be. I'm waiting for the next layoff, the next crisis, the next fill-in-the-blank. Not only am I not happy, I'm not anything. I've become this machine that just operates--functions--fulfills the daily quota. I teach my lessons, I grade my papers, I discipline, I go home, I get up, and I do it all over again. This is a childhood coping mechanism I learned around the age of ten or eleven, and this is what I did to survive. I put my head down and got the job done. The emotions around me were irrelevant. Sure, maybe I felt melancholy or outraged or terrified, but at the end of the day, feeling wasn't going to get me out of my situation. Work--movement--was going to propel me forward. While this coping mechanism gets me through my day, it works a little too well. When I go home, when it's safe to feel and to be exposed, I can't. So this is what I've become--an overworked, overused childhood coping mechanism . . . a shell of a human being.

As I approach my mid-30s, I see my life more for what it is rather than for what I hope it to be. I see what I've accomplished and what I haven't. I'm not ashamed to say, This is it? This is what I am? I thought I'd be more, do more. In my 20s I thought I was special. I guess we all think that as we emerge from our universities, diploma in hand. I thought I somehow possessed the answer, as if there was one answer to anything, and as if I somehow was the only one who held this answer. I don't have an answer to anything, and I don't care about finding one. I just want to be happy. I just want to feel peace. I want to detach from my career, not from myself.