Time heals all wounds

[lydy]

I feel better, today. Yesterday, I felt as if someone close to me had just died. I don't think I'm exaggerating. It feels the way it felt when Lilith, my 16 year old cat, died the April before last. So far, I haven't had any people I care about die on me, so I'm extrapolating, but Lilith was more of a person to me than some of my friends. Today, time has eroded that grief, it's a duller pain, less focused. Sometimes, I forget what it is that I feel so unhappy about. Time. Time's the way we fall into these disasters, you know. The wound heals over, and we ignore the scars.

Provigil continues to be a little jagged, and not entirely efficacious, but that's the way it is with drugs. Some days, I want to sing, "If I Only Had a Brain." Really, what I want are correctly balanced neurochemicals, but it doesn't scan.

Comments

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

I've only had one good friend die, two moderately close relatives, and a couple of acquaintences. The good friend felt like every pet I've ever had dying at the same time, every day for three months.

My understanding is that it gets easier with practice. I think it would have to; I can't imagine it getting worse.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

In the abstract, grief is a fascinating process. When I lost Lilith, I could almost feel it metabolize. It had many of the same characteristics of how a new psych drug affects me.

I actually adopted Lilith with a litter mate, Ember. Ember is easily the most neurotic cat I have ever known. When she was about two, she was diagnosed with Feline Leukemia. I had a special horror of the disease because I had lost an entire litter of kittens to it some years before. Em had occasional bouts where she would get very sick and have to be force-fed for a day or two. She'd recover, and be her sweetly bizarre self for a couple more years.

I think she was about 8 when she had another really bad bout. After force-feeding her for a week, she was still refusing to eat on her own. I stupidly followed my vet's advice, rather than taking advantage of the offer that the vet school offered me of placing an NG tube and letting me force-feed her at home. She hated being at the vet's, and it certainly contributed to her refusal to eat.

I didn't get the NG tube placed. She didn't get better. I had to have her put down, and to make the whole thing more horrible, the first dose wasn't enough. The vet had to leave the room and get a second syringe.

That is the only time I've ever felt like I could die of grief. For days I couldn't imagine how it was that I was still living, still breathing. I cried my eyes red and raw, something I'd read about in books, but had never experienced. The pain was physical as well as psychic. I felt guilty, of course. It also attached to all of the other griefs in my life, and was simply too huge to metabolize. Eventually, I ended up in therapy, which was a good thing.

When Little Cat died last year, it hurt enormously. But it was no where near as traumatic as losing Em. I was ... content with my choices. I felt as if I really had done the best I could amongst all the complicated medical choices I'd been offered. I had a supportive sweetie, which made a huge difference. And it was a single sorrow, I wasn't trying to grieve for my entire life all at once. So I guess that it got easier. Kind of.

But lord, I miss her. It still hurts. I'm not anxious to learn what it's like to lose a human being, thank you very much. Losing cats is hard enough.