Brown Butter Pear-Apple Pie

“People lose people [or pets] they love every day. My loss is no more important than anyone else’s. I just share it in an honest way because our cultures shuns death, as if dying weren’t part of living.” —Jennie Perillo

Grief is a strange beast. As my regular readers know, my sweet, insane, beautiful fourteen-year-old kitty passed away almost two months ago.  If you ask me how I’m doing, overall I have to say pretty much okay. We’re hanging in there. It’s true that there’s still a giant, Watson-shaped hole in our lives. We miss him. The house is too quiet, the sadness lingers in the background. But I have certainly transformed from the blubbering mess I was shortly after his passing into something that resembles a normal, functional adult human. I can talk about him without tearing up (usually). I can smile and laugh when we reminisce. We’ve displayed his ashes, after hiding them away for weeks, which has provided palpable healing. But, as I’ve learned, grief is not an emotion, it’s a process. It goes through its paces on its own schedule, like a broken bone healing in a cast. Grief does its own thing, and won’t be rushed by you or anyone. And I’m often thrown by the surprising and specific things I miss. 

I work from home, and not a day went by that Watson didn’t feel compelled to “help” me do my work. And if I may be totally frank with you, I found it annoying. If I was in my office writing or working on my computer, he had to stride in and interrupt with demands for attention. If I was in the kitchen cooking or baking, he had to follow me and stay underfoot, all the while clawing the lower cabinets and yelling for morsels of whatever human food I was preparing. I cannot count the number of times, over fourteen years, I scolded him to please, for the love of God and all the other deities, just go away. 

And now that he has, there’s a lonely, gaping hole in my work, and I don’t always know what to do with it. Or how to handle it. For as much as he legit got in my way, I now realize it was less of a distraction and more of a rhythm I had fully integrated into my daily routine. I find that I almost don’t know how to write or cook without him there being a pest. I don’t mean that literally, of course. I still understand the technique of creaming butter and sugar, or searing chicken thighs. But I’ve realized I’m having to relearn how to work in this completely new, eerily quiet environment I was never prepared for. Before he died, I rarely walked through the kitchen in a straight line. Instead, I was always sidestepping the cat, shouting, “Dammit Watson, move, you’re gonna trip me!” Now there’s no tripping hazard, and it’s like I have no idea how to just walk directly from Point A to Point B. I sit down to write and it’s like part of my brain won’t turn on until he waltzes into my office, meowing and purring at me. Except he doesn’t anymore. 

It’s grief, I know things will heal more with time. Such a strange process though. Things that served as distractions and irritants were the things you didn’t know you cherished so much, and relied on so heavily.

Mr. Wallace long ago nicknamed Watson “Least Decorative Cat Ever”. I always called him my little buddy. Usually it was said with affection, occasionally with a tad bit of exasperation. I just never knew how true those words really were.