On December 2nd, I logged in to work as usual, did about half an hour of my usual Monday catch up routine, and then got a message from my then-new-manager, asking me to join a conference call. I held out hope until about 15 seconds into the meeting that this was about the project that I'd been trying to get resources to get off the ground, but instead I was laid off.
Backing up a bit to catch everyone up...
A friend passed away, suddenly (or at least it appeared suddenly to those of us who she'd kept in the dark about the cancer coming back), and tragically.
She was a person I greatly admired, envied even, but whose open-heartedness and open-handedness with her resources made it impossible to do anything other than love her back. It's strange to think it, but I only knew her twelve years (ONLY??!? my brain is going... ONLY?!?) which is far fewer than most of her friends.
The message came on a normal Tuesday mid-October while I was boiling pasta for lunch. I thought at first it was some sort of tasteless joke - no, no, she'd been in remission. I would've known if she was sick, much less dying. She was at the event last week wasn't sh... no she hadn't been. Oh shit. This was real. Hours or days. Come say your goodbyes.
I messaged Martin and choked down my lunch, weeping in shock. I messaged my team I was taking the rest of the day off, I messaged my lead that my friend was dying and I was going to say goodbye.
Walking into the ICU was so surreal - familiar from my December 2020 adventure, but also no longer crammed full due to COVID crowding. But so unfamiliar on foot (rather than gurney), and with tears in my eyes.
How were we supposed to know where to find her? Somehow we managed to tailgate someone in, and the nurse just.. pointed. It occurs to me now that they must be somewhat familiar with the gathering cloud of pre-grievers, and know not to make it any harder than it has to be.
We walked in. There she was, swollen and sedated, looking nothing like the bold, vibrant, excitable person I knew - my friend - and I could see that death was nearby. I don't know how. I hate seeing it. It scares and unnerves me and I become instinctive and irrational.
I took her hand, warm and alive, and spoke my truths to her through my tears. And we stood there and then sat there for awhile, holding her hand and trying to let it seep in that this was her, this was how she was doing, this was ending.
After awhile her family came back in, and we gave up our spots to them.
I was told there was a waiting room, but I had no idea how I was supposed to find it.
I shouldn't have worried.
A few short steps down the hall I looked in to the first waiting room, to find it full of people with colorful hair and tattoos and rock/metal aesthetics, and I knew Her People Had Gathered. And among the awe of an all-call being answered across the country, that Her People Must Attend, I felt the familiar pangs of being an outsider.
I was so honored to have been called at all, to have been let into the knowledge before it was too late, to get to say goodbye. But I still felt myself on the outside of twenty- and thirty-year friendships, felt awkward and unsure. As more people arrived and the room filled up, I felt I had no right to be there, taking up space that those thirty-year friends might need, and so we departed.
That night I tossed and turned, thinking of her partner's quiet calm and strength as he gently shuffled people in and out of her room. If she didn't wake up, would he have to make the call for her? I could only imagine in the three years since her diagnosis, they'd had time to discuss it. I hope they had. I tried not to think about it too much.
I finally got off my ass and got my trust and will printed, so we can notarize it.
The call came the next evening. The only bright spot was the nexus of love and support that coalesced around her, and that she'd been conscious enough to make her wishes known. Her partner did not have to make the call. She passed peacefully in the arms of her community.
We were asked not to vaguebook about it until an official announcement could be made. We tried - but for those of us who know the Odd Salon crew, the signs were there plain as day. We had a wake. The announcement went out. But I've felt emotionally constipated for weeks now, like I need to hide how I feel about it. Like I don't have the right to my own grief. Like writing this down is going to get me in trouble somehow.
But I'm grieving so much these last 24 hours, it feels like this just sort of... fell out... along with everything else.
I am still immensely grateful for the antidepressants. I am holding it together really well, like even to the point where I look at myself from afar and go "huh, she's doing pretty well" even while there's an endless churn of fear and pattern-finding and worry going on inside.
I went to our favorite adventure-themed bar on election night because they had an all-night happy hour. It helped to be with people, even though I felt somewhat pathetic being a decade older than all of them (at least a decade, possibly two RIP). I got to talk theatrical effects with the designer which was SO incredibly pleasant after wondering for all this time.
But the display in the corner kept ticking up for Trump, and the nausea that had plagued me all day didn't play super well with lots of cocktails, so eventually I walked myself home. Bereft of a food plan, and still feeling nauseated, I made popcorn. And as I sat down to eat it at the table, I opened my phone and saw that they'd called it.
I sobbed. I grieve. I feel that I've seen the death of a nation. I feel that I've seen this before.
In January 2017 I wrote, in the other place
And then it's Yeats chasing Niemöller, ["First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out Because I was not a Socialist...", and the world is] turning and turning in a widening gyre.
The most recent message in my inbox is an invitation from Martin to Luna's vet appointment on Thursday afternoon. How things change, how quickly they change.
It's been over a year since I posted, and I feel like I owe updates, but this comes first.
In September of 2022, we came home from Burning Man to a message from the cat sitter "haha, I guess she's on hunger strike" and Luna not eating. We rushed to the vet, who looked at her moving and noted how much pain she was in. We'd later figure out that the cat sitter had put the lids on the garbage cans in our rental, making a perfect staircase for a bored, lonely kitty in a big apartment all alone. But the vet also said "leukemia" and named some eye watering prices for diagnostic tests. I should remind folks that I had gotten laid off two weeks prior, and that the contractor working on our home had also raised his rates retroactively by close to $200k. We adopted a "wait and see" stance because there simply wasn't money, and with new pain meds she bounced back. An x-ray six months later showed no change in the suspicious lump, and we thought, okay, maybe it wasn't that.
But she'd started sneezing, and coughing, and her nose had been running...
This is too painful to recount in this much detail, so let me just say that each time we went in for the sneezing, we got her antibiotic treatment as palliative care, to make her "comfortable for what time she had left". Each time, she also bounced back to her hold self, though she never completely stopped sneezing, not even when I figured out how to mix her antibiotics with churu so she actually got them down. Her eyesight declined. Sometimes she would make alarming noises like crunching cartilage while she ate, and she splattered her food around. She changed what foods she'd accept every few weeks. We adapted.
Something changed right after New Years. She was having trouble getting into the litterbox. We put a chunk of wood in front of it as a step. Her sneezing increased again, and now it was red tinged. She started to lose weight faster. I left for my first team work offsite into the bitterest week of cold in Toronto in some time, and barely slept the few days I was gone because I had nightmares she'd passed while I was far from home, wondering where I was. I started looking for someone who could paint her portrait.
When I got back, we went back to the vet. Another round of antibiotics, and she bounced back again. We had our January Salon, and she came to say hello to everyone. February came and went. In early March she became withdrawn, her fur spiky, and she started missing the litterbox when she went, or going outside, or in other random places. We went through several different litterboxes to no effect. Back we went.
The vet noted that she was so dehydrated that it was hard to tell what was going on, and we learned how to give subcutaneous fluids. Again, she bounced back nearly to her old self but slower, and her meows creakier. She came upstairs to wake us at 7:15 every morning, she demanded her milk, demanded tap water, followed us around and napped nearby. But she was slowing, and at some point we noticed that while the fluids were definitely perking her up, her belly was swelling. At some point she lost her balance and fell, and from then on stopped getting up on things she could fall off of, and jumping down from anything high up. We put her cat heating blanket on the floor.
After two weeks I couldn't stand it, and I called the vet on Wednesday and had a long talk where he talked about possibly draining the fluids to make her more comfortable. We went back to the vet on Thursday.
But we didn't go back to the same vet, we went back to Luna's favorite old vet, who'd just come back from maternity leave. After more than a year away, she was shocked at Luna's condition, and made it clear that draining Luna's belly wasn't an option, and that the humane thing was to think about letting her go. She was worried Luna would "hit a wall" soon. She offered euthanasia that day, in office, or any other day as we chose.
We declined, we wept, we went home with the HHHHHM checklist - which we ran and decided she was fine. Mostly fine. Okay, she was pretty fine, right? That evening Luna lost control of her bowels entirely, twice, and was croaky and withdrawn. We realized she couldn't get upstairs to go to the litterbox, and had been exclusively using the downstairs pee pads. So we started taking her upstairs with us when we went to the bathroom. She was devouring whole cans of food in one sitting, and wandering aimlessly between her favorite blanket, her secret water bowl, and her food dish. When we brought her up on our laps, she'd sit for awhile, then twitch her hind end, and jump down to sit nearby. But she still purred at us and demanded pets and food and love, and we thought - she's not ready. Not ready yet. Maybe she could last out the week I was about to be gone - more work travel - and we'd decide when I got back.
But her belly continued to swell, even though we'd stopped giving fluids, and she'd started to slow down and withdraw again. The vet's words came back to us, that this wasn't going to get better, it was only going to get worse rang in our ears as we watched her waddle painfully back and forth, panting. We fretted about how she'd take me leaving for the week, since she was prone to missing me and withdrawing more. And then I realized that when the vet said "hit a wall" she was not speaking metaphorically, but euphemistically. Because the end-state of the fluid build up was not dozing off and not waking up, but rupture and collapse and pain and terror. We both agreed we would want to spare her that pain.
On Friday evening we filled out a form to request a home euthanasia vet visit at noon.
The last 24 hours have been painful and surreal. We ate pizza, unable to focus enough to cook for ourselves. We thought of all the good times, and all the things we'd miss. And we thought of all of the things we were already missing - her demanding to play with her feather toy, her chasing greenies down the stairs, asking for tap water (the counter was too high for her to comfortably jump down from now), following us upstairs. We even missed the 7am wake up calls.
Neither of us slept well. At 6am I woke to the last lashings of the rain. Tried to get back to sleep, but couldn't stop thinking about "we only have six more hours". We got up, we tried to have a normal weekday breakfast - giving Luna her portion of the steamed milk, giving her my overnight oats bowl. A sunbeam appeared and I took her outside to have a drink of the rainwater from one of her favorite plant saucers. The rain started again, stopped again, and the sun came out. We pulled her up on the couch and rolled her over on her favorite blanket, belly to the sun, and she napped quietly between us as she read. I lit some candles. I opened my altar. At noon on the dot, the vet arrived with a black bag and a basket with a pretty floral lining.
The vet was very kind, and professional, and was everything we needed. She went over Luna's history, her tentative diagnosis, saw her condition and said that we'd clearly done a whole lot for her (gesturing to the rubber-backed bathmats I'd scattered around when I realized she was having trouble walking on the hardwood floors), and we clearly loved her very much. She said we were giving her a great gift, letting her go before she was completely worn down and miserable. She explained what was going to happen, and left us some time with Luna sitting quietly on her blanket, so we could say goodbye while she was still with us, but no longer in pain. She put a rose quartz heart on her as she transitioned, which she gave to us. She helped us take a paw print, carefully moved Luna into the basket and arranged her so she looked like she was comfortably sleeping, and left a booklet on pet grief and a whole box of tissues.
Entirely relaxed and at peace I could see the sweet, sassy little cat I'd first met when Martin and I started dating. She was so beautiful and soft, even at rest.
I still cannot fully believe that she's gone.
We stumbled out to feed ourselves and walk in the break in the rain. When we opened the front door on our return I had a heart wrenching moment realizing that she'd never meow to greet us and demand to be picked up and snuggled by her returning family. The grief is coming in fits and starts.
As I sat writing this the skies opened up, and the sun came out, and a huge double rainbow arced across the sky. They say that pets that pass go across the rainbow bridge.
I think she made it.
