Content note: this post discusses pet loss, grief more generally, and briefly mentions the 2024 US elections.
When 2024 started, I was in possession of a tentative sense of optimism. I’d started working with an Occupational Therapist. I’d just completed Don’t Die December, including the creation and sharing of all the certificates. I had a trip to Brighton booked for early February. I held this optimism as lightly as you’d hold a bubble, hands metaphorically trembling under its fragility.
The trip to Brighton was marred by tonsillitis so severe I struggled to swallow ice cream, but I wrought all the enjoyment I could out of it nonetheless. Much as I remember begging some GP miles away to take my tonsils out, face sweating against my phone even by the sea, in February, I also remember attending the Hello Kitty café, painting rocks my partner and I found on the beach, laughing and putting the world to rights while we drank in our AirBnB, and much more. I was proud of myself, and I was starting to believe that the world held a lot of good, including a lot of good that I could access, joy I could have, hope I could hold onto.
And then my cat, a three-year-old black-and-white boy we’d nicknamed Dicko, died.
I will spare you the details, partially to spare myself (some of) the flashbacks. The important part is that there was a window of maybe 24 hours in which it looked like he would make it. It would be a long recovery, but he would maybe make it.
Then they found another issue, and it was clear that he would not.
To say that the bubble in my stretched metaphor popped is an understatement. It exploded, and I felt like the hope dripping uselessly through my fingers was caustic. It terrified me to think that perhaps hope was just an especially painful way of being incorrect, and to know that it could still seduce me again. Wanting things was out of the question, for a short while.
My fiancée nudged me out of this hole partly by suggesting that one day, when it hurt less, we could get another cat. This was an insufficient but harmless way to lick the wounds our grief had left. Our “mistake”, I maintain, was looking at real cats online, cats that needed real homes in real life. In what felt like no time at all, we had fallen in love with a pair, two siblings named Mai and Tai who each lacked an eye as a result of cat flu. They were only eight months old, but they’d spent half their life in a shelter, waiting to find a home. Maybe even hoping for one.
We met them at the shelter, and it was probably decided in the moment the member of staff asked if we’d like to see any other cats. My fiancée and I exchanged a look – trepidatious, excited, hopeful – and said no, we’d just like to see the paperwork for taking Mai and Tai home. They felt like they were destined to be our cats – but I’d like to briefly interrupt myself to mention that I don’t regard this as proof that “everything happens for a reason” and that the universe robbed us of Dicko so that we could meet two cats in need. It was not a blessing in disguise that Dicko died, it was a tragedy that I insisted on using to motivate me in looking after Mai and Tai. If you bounce back after a tragedy, even if really good things happen in your life, I don’t want you to feel like the universe is throwing you a bone as a reward for enduring shit no human should endure, when you could instead be taking credit for your refusal to lie down and die.
Back to Mai and Tai. Obviously they didn’t heal everything, but they helped. They hid under the bed for a long, long time when they first came home, and every day involved hoping for a little more courage from them and then being rewarded, their tiny heads poking out or even allowing me to run a tentative hand along their backs. They couldn’t make me write, but they were their own poetry. As painfully on-the-nose as it is, when Dicko died, we stopped leaving the curtains open in the living room, because we stopped having a little guy to let in and out. When Mai and Tai came home, despite being indoor cats, we had to open the curtains because they wanted to watch the world outside. I literally hadn’t noticed the lack of sunlight until they brought it back into my life.
I don’t think I’ve ever grieved a single loss on its own. I so rarely let the floodgates open within myself that when they finally burst, I have to grieve and re-grieve things that happened years ago, whether I’d planned for that or not. For months I ached with grief over family members I can’t safely be around, role models I’d never had, time I had wasted and feelings like safety and contentment that I should’ve found years ago, should never have been robbed of to begin with. The turning point maybe began around my birthday, in late July, when I decided that my Birthday Resolution was to lean into discomfort: hold the white-hot pain of my grief, try new things, book my fucking cervical smear. And I’ve been doing it.
October saw me go abroad for the first time since I was 8 and it truly shifted the way I saw my relationship to the world. The planet felt bigger in the sense that it was richer, more intricate, more varied, but smaller in the sense that it was more accessible to me. Not even the US election could take all the wind out of my sails, although it did lead to me concluding that the USA is not accessible to me right now.
Other things happened, obviously. It feels like it’s been a wildly eventful year, but hope has been a theme running through it like a vein. I feel like I’m starting to make my peace with hope, even as I reckon with the reflexiveness of hoping I stop fearing hope. In a vent shared only with my journal I wrote, “It feels like my life has been dominated by fear, and/or the pursuit of escaping it.” Maybe in 2025, I can replace some of that fear with hope. They often feel like two sides of the same coin, and sometimes it feels like it’s one of those trick coins weighted in favour of one side. Still, I’ve been running from fear for a very long time, and I’d like to run towards something. I’m not 100% sure what yet – success, fulfilment, maybe saving the world? – but I’m excited to find out.
If you want to celebrate your own survival at the end of a tumultuous year, I’m selling ‘I completed Don’t Die December 2024’ merch and donating some of the profits to UK suicide prevention charity Samaritans.
