I don’t feel like writing right now. I haven’t for a while. I can’t keep letting it slide here, but really, there’s only one thing on my heart. Thus the dilemma. When you strive to write from the heart, and it feels exhausted, what then?
There are people who can do this. One best-selling writer claimed to have, on September 11, 2001, put on headphones and kept working as the towers burned and fell. I’m aware of another who didn’t miss a scheduled blog post a couple days after his wife suddenly died. I saw these neither as badges of honor nor anything to criticize. We all cope how we cope.
I won’t claim that this remotely compares with those episodes, but still, the ache is real, and deep. It’s been a rough three weeks or so. There are goodbyes and there are goodbyes, and this is one of the hard ones.
His name is Fionn (pronounced as if there weren’t an O, but it’s Gaelic, so silent letters are mandatory), a big, handsome Maine Coon cat. I’ve always called him my office manager. That’s the way Maine Coons are, typically. They like hanging out with their people. Gentle giants, they’re called, with temperaments more like dogs, and males often remain clowns their entire lives. This one stole hearts like a master thief. There’s a line about Maine Coons I like: “He’s not your baby, he’s your buddy.” I found it true enough that I came to dislike the term pet. Friend seemed more right.
We took him in 12½ years ago, but it’s only recently I’ve consciously realized that during that time, by virtue of what I do and where I do it, I’ve spent more time with Fionn than any other living being, even the woman I love.
At the time we took him in — a cool little story unto itself, full of fate, mystery, and a kiss of magic — he was estimated at being between 4 and 8. He’s had a wonderful run. But too much has gone progressively wrong. Some of it is manageable; some of it, as it turns out, isn’t.
My resolve has been to not deny, or distract myself, but to embrace all this and take it in … and as I do, lines I’ve written, old and new, come back to, well, not haunt, but affirm themselves in a new context.
My resolve has been to be and do what my friend needs. To be as fully present for this process as I can be, because, as I wrote for a piece coming out this fall:
“That’s what you do for those you love. You stay with them until the end. Because no one should have to go into the dark alone.”
Priorities realign. What matters changes. Things that might once have offended, don’t, not when you remember they’re acts of love. Not when you remember, as I found myself quoted on Facebook a few months ago:
“…everything we most enjoy doing is done a finite number of times, and, whether or not we realize it at the moment, one of them will be the last.”
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Days pass, time elapses, things change…
When I began this he was still with us. As I finish it, he is not.
The Brits have the best word for this feeling: gutted.
Once I wrote a story called “A Loaf of Bread, A Jug of Wine,” about the Frankenstein monster … the articulate character of the Mary Shelley original, not the bolt-necked mute of that first Universal Studios film. What the story really comes down to is whether or not Nomad, as he’s known in the story, has a soul. Here’s how he answers:
“I have a soul. I do. I can feel it, and I know that is what it is, because nothing else could ache so deeply. Though I may not have been born with a soul, I know that I have built one of my own over time. With every year I live … with every deed, with every sorrow and indignity and wound I suffer, with every humiliation and hour of loneliness … I know I build that soul a little more. These things that tear human hearts to pieces? These are my bricks, and my mortar.”
And so it is with writers.
We take whatever comes, living through the good and the bad, the joys and the trials, and they become a part of us, and when it’s time to let them out again, maybe we disguise them until no one else recognizes where they really came from or maybe we don’t change a thing…
But either way, the soul is bared.
Somewhere along the way I heard the process of writing described as cracking open the heart.
Today I have just a little deeper understanding of what’s inside, and something new to put there.
And why it’s the cracks that make us whole.
[Top photo by RTP (Really Terrible Photographer)]
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I can feel the connection you still have with the cat. This is real, and it’s part of writing. how, I don’t know. but it is.
Thanks, Helen. Real, yes … and it all connects for me, for sure.
As for the connection, the day after he died, I was lying in the floor, eyes closed, to concentrate on some audio I was listening to. Nothing new, it’s something I do sometimes. I thought I felt him pass by, the way he would when he’d wander in to join me and settle down near my shoulder. This, too, felt no less real.
Thanks for sharing such a heartfelt post. I’ve lost pets over the years and it’s always very sad.
I hope you find some comfort in knowing that Fionn loved you and lived a happy life with good owners.
Many thanks, Rachel. It was a tough one to get over, definitely, and a rocky start to the summer. But, on the flipside, it wasn’t long before we found a Maine Coon kitten, a rescue, who needed a home after a rocky start to his life. It’s proved to be a great match … and I like to think Fionn approves.