Even before Sylvester loss I had been thinking of how grief responses can be connective or disconnective. And how connective responses are so needed, to counter the feelings of seperation that are inherent in grief already.
With that in mind, when Sylvester was finally diagnosed with a terminal disease, I inducted myself into the grieving pet parents club, and started inviting people to share their experiences of losing pets and any advice they had for me. It connected me to people I never thought I would feel connected to, and it was (yet) another lesson in how you never know what you might have in common with another human being.
Now that I've lost Sylvester, I don't have to invite people to share their grief. I simply say that I've lost him and I can see it in their eyes.
***
Vanessa was validating how I've actually been grieving for months now, in the liminal space between life and death. While I gave up on anticipatory grief a week after the diagnosis, preferring instead to dwell in the present with Sylvester, there was actual loss occurring before my eyes - the bonding routines we lost when his sense of smell disappeared, the activities he stopped engaging in as he declined further. I never knew when some cherished action (like him kneading me or him laying on me) would be his last. In fact, the missing information that my brain most wants to fill in is the "lasts" that occurred before his diagnosis, when I assumed he was sick in a recoverable way. I want most desperately to know that I properly cherished those "lasts", because I had spent those months of illness distraught and intentionally/unintentionally distracted in an attempt to manage the distress. I know more broadly that I cherished everything with him (as evidenced through photos), but that period of not being present is what I regret most.
I had assumed this entire time that this being a graduated loss was something to be grateful for - that it wasn't a sudden loss. I had some measure of control, even as decisions were fraught with worry and pressure. Processing with Vanessa made me realize that while sudden loss involves an extreme loss of control, sufferers are spared this liminal space. Each are painful in different ways.
I think about how I had been resentful of those that had years or even a decade plus more than I did with their pets, but maybe I wouldn't want that pain of learning how to live differently after such a long time.
There's just no way of comparing grief.
***
Vanessa and I also reflected on the somatic nature of grief, how it's stored in the body in different places and released at different times in different ways. And I had to share how I experienced pangs in the right side of my lower abdomen, in the exact place where an ovarian cyst had burst back in June 2019 and caused me extreme pain - pain I had not experienced again since it subsided later that June.
I had experienced a lot of pain since, in my right back/hip area, which never fully subsided but became increasingly well-managed through different rounds of physical therapy. In fact, my journey through physical therapy brought me to understand that the ovarian pain and the chronic back/hip pain were connected - the extreme pain of the first led my body to overwork certain muscles/ligaments and underuse other muscles/ligaments in an attempt to minimize pain. In other words, physical coping mechanisms work in much the same way as emotional ones - by trying to minimize one problem you end up creating other ones.
After Sylvester was diagnosed, I could no longer summon the energy to do my daily physical therapy exercises, and so the back/hip pain has returned. But still, it wasn't until he passed that I felt pangs of the ovarian pain from four and a half years ago, which was also weeks before I first met him in July 2019. I don't know what this means, but given that the ovarian pain was brought on from all the stress I internalized at work, I'm using it as a reminder that I mustn't internalize now.
***
There were many reasons why I picked December 12 as Sylvester's euthanasia date: it was the end of a moon cycle; 12/12 seemed a grieving counterpoint to the wish-upon-a-star nature of 11:11; I had the days leading up to it free to spend in quality time with him. But the chief reason was that it was the date that my foster parent certification expired. I thought it was fitting that I would cease being a parent in both these ways at the same time.
While my Sylvester parenting journey has been undescribably joyful and rewarding, I cannot say the same about my foster parenting journey - which never took off despite my investment of two-going-on-three years of my life in both physical work (filling out forms, taking classes) and emotional work (waiting in limbo, learning all the ways in which the system fails children/families). I contemplated quitting sooner, but stuck it out because I wanted the possibility of some return on investment. Ultimately, because I would have had to put more work in to keep my certification, I opted against doing any more work when there hasn't been any return.
When I think about what all of that was for - I think back to how I was living some of the worst of the chronic pain in 2021, and the pain had sapped so much of my energy I had given up on thinking it could be better (again, another way in which physical pain mimics emotional pain). Ultimately I put my foot down to say that I couldn't live with that level of pain and something needed to change, because I couldn't envision having that level of pain and also take care of a child at the same time.
Maybe the whole point was that the prospect of fostering a child gave me a reason to stop living in pain.
***
While I have done my best in accepting and not denying each step of this journey, I did not (and still do not) want to accept that our connection ends with death. I've heard enough about how energy is neither created or destroyed to feel that there is both a scientific and spiritual basis for how connections continue.
In fact, Sylvester's decline has been intertwined in my developing spiritual sense, and it was around the time of his diagnosis that I attended a virtual conference for intuitives. One talk highlighted a woman who spoke about Akashic records, but I was more fascinated by the book she paged through at one point, called Animal Spirit Guides. She was offering free consultations, so I arranged to meet with her and used our session to ask about me and Sylvester's relationship, since I have at different points wondered if we knew each other in past lives.
As she closed her eyes and contemplated my question, she was brought to tears and shared that he and I have known each other for a long time as dancers through the cosmos. She said that he was there watching over me when I was a baby. She then pulled a card out of her new oracle deck that happened to be the cat card, with an image of a cat curled around the moon.
I bought the oracle deck and read the meaning behind the card, which is to let go of codependence and embrace interdependence. I took it to mean that I should not be dependent on Sylvester's physical form; that his spirit lives on.
***
Maybe the point of it all - Sylvester's death, letting go of codependence, giving up on fostering, being reminded of my ovarian and related pain and how I healed, no longer comparing griefs, seeing my pain reflected in others' eyes - maybe it's all to free me in ways I have yet to believe.